From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 13:21:46 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:21:46 +0100
Subject: [THS] Ray McGovern: Mullen Wary of Israeli Attack on Iran
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309132050.04a51888@spamarrest.com>


Mullen Wary of Israeli Attack on Iran
http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2010/03/07/mullen-wary-of-israeli-attack-on-
iran/

Posted By Ray McGovern On March 7, 2010 @ 11:00 pm

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came home with sweaty
palms from his mid-February visit to Israel. He has been worrying aloud that Israel
will mousetrap the U.S. into war with Iran.

This is of particular concern because Mullen has had considerable experience in
putting the brakes on such Israeli plans in the past. This time, he appears convinced
that the Israeli leaders did not take his warnings seriously ? notwithstanding the
unusually strong language he put into play.

Upon arrival in Jerusalem on Feb. 14, Mullen wasted no time in making clear why he
had come. He insisted publicly that an attack on Iran would be "a big, big, big
problem for all of us, and I worry a great deal about the unintended consequences."

At a Pentagon press conference on Feb. 22 Mullen drove home the same point ? with
some of the same language. After reciting the usual boilerplate about Iran being "on
the path to achieve nuclear weaponization" and about its "desire to dominate its
neighbors," he included this in his prepared remarks:

"I worry a lot about the unintended consequences of any sort of military action. For
now, the diplomatic and the economic levers of international power are and ought to
be the levers first pulled. Indeed, I would hope they are always and consistently
pulled. No strike, however effective, will be, in and of itself, decisive."

In answer to a question about the "efficacy" of military strikes on Iran?s nuclear
program, Mullen said such strikes "would delay it for one to three years."
Underscoring the point, he added that this is what he meant "about a military strike
not being decisive."

No Glib Talk About War

Unlike younger generals such as David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, Adm. Mullen
served in the Vietnam War. It seems likely that this experience prompted this
gratuitous philosophical aside at the press conference: "I would remind everyone of
an essential truth: War is bloody and uneven. It?s messy and ugly and incredibly
wasteful, but that doesn?t mean it isn?t worth the cost."

Although the immediate context for the remark was Afghanistan, Mullen has
underscored time and time again that war with Iran would be a far larger disaster.
Those with a modicum of familiarity with the military, strategic, and economic equities
at stake know he is right.

Firing "Fox"

Recall that one of Mullen?s Vietnam veteran contemporaries, Adm. William "Fox"
Fallon was cashiered as CENTCOM commander in March 2008 for saying things like
war with Iran ?isn?t going to happen on my watch." Fallon openly encouraged
negotiations with Iran as the only sensible approach, and he harshly criticized the
"constant drum beat" for war.

Fallon?s attitude appears to be shared by the more politically cautious ? and less
rhetorically blunt ? Mullen, as the same war-with-Iran drumbeat reaches a new
crescendo today. Fallon abhorred the thought of being on the receiving end of an
order inspired by the likes of then-Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy National
Security Adviser Elliott Abrams to send American troops into what would surely be ?
as Mullen would describe it ? a "bloody, uneven, messy, ugly and incredibly wasteful"
war.

How strong the pressure was within the Bush administration to attack Iran ? and/or
to give Israel "a green light" to go first ? can be read between the lines of a Feb. 14
exchange between ABC News? This Week host Jonathan Karl and former Vice
President Cheney.

Karl: "How close did the Bush administration come to taking military action against
Iran?"

Cheney: "Some of that I can?t talk about, obviously, still. I?m sure it?s still classified.
We clearly never made the decision ? we never crossed over that line of saying, ?Now
we?re going to mount a military operation to deal with the problem.? 
?

Karl: "David Sanger of the New York Times says that the Israelis came to you ? came
to the administration in the final months and asked for certain things, bunker-buster
bombs, air-to-air refueling capability, over-flight rights, and that basically the
administration dithered, did not give the Israelis a response. Was that a mistake?"

Cheney: "I can?t get into it still. I?m sure a lot of those discussions are still very
sensitive."

Karl: "Let me ask you: Did you advocate a harder line, including in the military area,
in those final months?"

Cheney: "Usually."

Karl: "And with respect to Iran?"

Cheney: "Well, I made public statements to the effect that I felt very strongly that we
had to have the military option, that it had to be on the table, that it had to be a
meaningful option, and that we might well have to resort to military force in order to
deal with the threat that Iran represented. 
 [But] we never got to the point where
the president had to make a decision one way or the other."

Renewed Pressures

Clearly, those pressures have again grown during the first 13 months of the Obama
administration. Today, it appears that Mullen has replaced Fallon as the principal
military obstacle to exercising the war option against Iran.

From his recent demeanor, as well as his many statements since he became the
country?s most senior officer in October 2007, it is apparent that Mullen does not
believe that a "preventive war" against Iran would be worth the horrendous cost.

Washington rhetoric, echoed by the stenographers of the Fawning Corporate Media
(FCM) over the past eight years, has brought a veneer of respectability to the
international crime of aggressive war, as long as it is launched or sanctioned by the
United States. With nodding approval from the FCM, Bush and Cheney sold the
notion that such attacks can be justified to "prevent" some future hypothetical threat
to the United States or its allies. This provided a thin, fig-leaf rationale for invading
Iraq seven years ago this month.

The Obama administration has not fully backed away from such thinking.

While in Qatar on Feb. 14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed concern over
what she called "accumulating evidence" of an Iranian attempt to pursue a nuclear
weapon, not because it "directly threaten[s] the United States, but [because] it
directly threatens a lot of our friends" ? read Israel.

Mullen, for his part, seems acutely aware that the Constitution he has sworn to
defend makes no provision for the kind of war he might be sucked into in order to
defend Israel. When he studied at the Naval Academy, his professors were still
teaching that the Constitution?s Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) establishes
that treaties ratified by the Senate become the "supreme law of the land."

It would be, pure and simple, a flagrant violation of a supreme law of the land, the
Senate-ratified United Nations Charter, for the United States to join in an unprovoked
assault on Iran without the approval of the UN Security Council, which surely would
not go along ? just as it did not go along on attacking Iraq.

Moreover, Adm. Mullen appears to be one of the few Americans aware that there is
no mutual defense treaty between the United States and Israel and, thus, the U.S.
has no legal obligation to jump to Israel?s defense if it ignites war with Iran. In other
words, in a strictly juridical sense, Israel is not our "ally."

Sorry, you can?t create an ally by just repeating the word over and over.

Now you may scoff. "Everyone knows," you will say, that political realities in America
dictate that the U.S. military must defend Israel no matter who started a conflict.

Still, there was a time ? after the 1967 Israeli-Arab war when Israel first occupied the
Palestinian territories ? that the U.S. did take soundings regarding the possibility of a
mutual defense treaty, in the expectation that this might introduce more calm into
the area by giving the Israelis a greater sense of security.

But the Israelis turned the overture down cold. Such treaties, you see, require
internationally recognized boundaries and Israel did not want any part of parting with
the territories it had just seized militarily.

Besides, mutual defense treaties usually impose on both parties an obligation to
inform the other if one decides to attack a third country. Israel wanted no part of
that either.

This virtually unknown background helps to explain why the lack of a treaty of mutual
defense is more than a picayune academic point.

Why Is Mullen Worried?

If Adm. Mullen is an old hand at reining in the Israelis, why is he so visibly worried at
present? He is used to reading the riot act to the Israelis. What could be so different
now?

Last time, in mid-2008, Cheney and Abrams were arguing for an aggressive military
posture toward Iran but lost the argument to Mullen and his senior commanders,
who ? in the final days of the Bush administration ? won the backing of the
president.

When former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seemed intent on starting hostilities with
Iran before Bush and Cheney left office, Bush ordered Adm. Mullen to Israel to tell
the Israelis, in no uncertain terms, don?t do it. Mullen gladly rose to the occasion;
actually, he outdid himself.

We learned from the Israeli press that Mullen went so far as to warn the Israelis not
to even think about another incident at sea like the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty
on June 8, 1967, which left 34 American crew killed and more than 170 wounded.
With Bush?s full support, Mullen told the Israelis to disabuse themselves of the notion
that U.S. military support would be knee-jerk automatic if Israel somehow provoked
open hostilities with Iran.

Never before had a senior U.S. official braced Israel so blatantly about the Liberty
incident, which was covered up unconscionably by Lyndon B. Johnson?s
administration, the Congress, and by the Navy itself.

The lesson the Israelis took away from the Liberty incident was that they could get
away with murder, literally, and walk free because of political realities in the United
States. Never again, said Mullen. He could not have raised a more neuralgic issue.

So, once more, what?s different about today? How to account for Mullen?s decision to
keep expressing his worries about "unintended consequences"?

I believe the admiral fears that things are about to spin out of control. Whether there
will be war does not depend on Mullen ? or even Obama. It depends mostly on
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And Mullen does well to be worried.

Netanyahu?s Impression of Obama

It is altogether likely that Netanyahu has concluded that Barack Obama is ? in the
vernacular ? a wuss. Why, for example, does the president keep sending an endless
procession of the most senior U.S. officials to Tel Aviv to plead with their Israeli
counterparts, Please, pretty please, don?t start a war with Iran?

Loose-cannon Vice President Joe Biden arrives on Monday, hopefully with clearer
instructions than when he blithely told ABC on July 4, 2009, that Israel is a "sovereign
nation" and thus "entitled" to launch a military strike on Iran, adding that
Washington would make no effort to dissuade the Israeli government.

Will Biden be able to keep his foot out of his mouth this time, or will his four decades
of experience in the Senate ? learning how to position himself politically with respect
to Israel ? again reassert itself?

It is a safe bet that Netanyahu is wryly amused at such obsequious buffoonery. But
his impression of Obama?s backbone ? or lack thereof ? is key. The Israeli prime
minister must be drawing some lessons from Obama?s aversion to leveraging the $3
billion a year the U.S. gives to Israel. Why doesn?t Obama simply pick up the phone
and warn me himself?, Netanyahu might well be thinking.

Is Obama so deathly afraid of the powerful Likud Lobby that he cannot bring himself
to call? Is the president afraid his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, might listen in, and
then leak the conversation to neoconservative pundits like the Washington Post?s
Dana Milbank?

Benjamin Netanyahu has had ample time to size up our president. Their initial
encounter in May 2009 reminded me very much of the disastrous meeting in Vienna
between another young American president and Nikita Khrushchev in early June
1961. The Soviets took the measure of President John Kennedy, and one result was
the Cuban missile crisis, bringing the world as close as it has ever come, before or
since, to nuclear destruction.

The Israeli prime minister has found it possible to thumb his nose at Obama?s
repeated pleas for a halt in construction of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied
territories ? without consequence. Moreover, Netanyahu has watched Obama cave in
time after time ? on domestic as well as international issues.

Netanyahu styles himself as sitting in the catbird?s seat of the relationship, largely
because of the Likud Lobby?s unparalleled influence with U.S. lawmakers and opinion
makers ? not to mention the entr?e the Israelis enjoy to the chief executive himself
by having one of their staunchest allies, Rahm Emanuel, in position as White House
chief of staff. In the intelligence business, we might call that an "agent of influence."

Emanuel?s father, Benjamin Emanuel, was born in Jerusalem and served in the
Irgun, the pre-independence Zionist guerrilla organization. During the 1991 Persian
Gulf War, Rahm Emanuel, then in his early 30s, traveled to Israel as a civilian
volunteer to work with the Israeli Defense Forces. He served in one of the IDF?s
northern bases.

Mullen?s Worries

Netanyahu is supremely confident of the solidity of his position with the movers and
shakers in Congress, Washington opinion-makers, and even within the Obama
administration. And he gives off signs of being singularly underwhelmed by the
president.

These factors enhance the possibility Netanyahu will opt for the kind of provocation
that would confront Obama with a Hobson?s choice regarding whether to join an
Israeli attack on Iran.

And so Mullen continues to worry ? not only about "unintended consequences," but
about intended consequences, as well. The most immediate of these could involve
mousetrapping Obama into committing U.S. forces to war provoked with Iran.

And for those fond of saying that "everything is on the table," be advised that this
would go in spades in this context.

Very little seems outlandish these days. Remember Seymour Hersh?s report about
Cheney?s office conjuring up plots as to how best to trigger a war with Iran?

"The one that interested me [Hersh] the most was why don?t we build ? we in our
shipyard ? build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy SEALs on
them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of
Hormuz, start a shoot-up."

In other words, another Tonkin Gulf-type incident, like the one that President
Johnson used to justify a massive escalation in Vietnam.

A modern-day Gulf of Tonkin-like incident in the Strait of Hormuz could be even more
problematic, given the waterway?s vital role as a supply route for oil tankers necessary
for maintaining the world?s economy.

The navigable part of the Strait of Hormuz is narrow, and things often go bump in
the night without even trying. For example:

"DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) ? On the evening of January 8, 2007, a U.S.
nuclear-powered submarine collided with a Japanese oil tanker in the Strait of
Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world?s oil supplies travel, officials said. The
collision between the USS Newport News and the Japanese-flagged motor vessel
Mogamigawa occurred at approximately 10:15 in the evening (local time) in the Strait
of Hormuz while the submarine was transiting submerged."

AP, March 20, 2009: "The USS Hartford nuclear submarine and the amphibious USS
New Orleans collided in the waters between Iran and the Arabian peninsula today.
Fifteen sailors were slightly injured aboard the Hartford 
 the New Orleans suffered
a ruptured fuel tank, spilling 25,000 gallons of diesel
. The ships were on routine
security patrols in a busy shipping route."

Think back also to the bizarre accounts of the incident involving swarming Iranian
motorboats and U.S. Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Jan. 6, 2008.

Preventing Preventive War

The Persian Gulf would be an ideal locale for Israel to mount a provocation eliciting
Iranian retaliation that could, in turn, lead to a full-scale Israeli attack on Iran?s
nuclear-related sites. Painfully aware of that possible scenario, Adm. Mullen noted at
a July 2, 2008, press conference that military-to-military dialogue could "add to a
better understanding" between the U.S. and Iran.

If Mullen?s worries are to be taken as genuine (and I believe they are), it would
behoove him to resurrect that idea and formally propose such dialogue to the
Iranians. He is the U.S. government?s senior military officer and should not let himself
be stymied by neoconservative partisans more interested in regime change in Tehran
than in working out a modus vivendi and reduction of tension.

The following two modest proposals could go a long way toward avoiding an armed
confrontation with Iran ? whether accidental, or provoked by those who may actually
wish to precipitate hostilities and involve the U.S.

1. Establish a direct communications link between top military officials in Washington
and Tehran, in order to reduce the danger of accident, miscalculation, or covert
attack.

2. Launch immediate negotiations by top Iranian and American naval officers to
conclude an incidents-at-sea protocol.

A communications link has historically proven its merit during times of high tension.
The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 underscored the need for instantaneous
communications at senior levels, and a ?hot line? between Washington and Moscow
was established the following year. That direct link played a crucial role, for example,
in preventing the spread of war in the Middle East during the Six-Day War in early
June 1967.

Another useful precedent is the ?Incidents-at-sea? agreement between the U.S. and
the Soviet Union signed in Moscow in May 1972. That period was another time of
considerable tension between the two countries, including several inadvertent naval
encounters that could well have escalated. The agreement sharply reduced the
likelihood of such incidents.

It might be difficult for American and Iranian leaders alike to oppose measures that
make such good sense. Press reports show that top U.S. commanders in the Persian
Gulf have favored such steps. And, as indicated above, Adm. Mullen has already
appealed for military-to-military dialogue.

In the present circumstances, it has become increasingly urgent to discuss seriously
how our two countries might avoid a conflict started by accident, miscalculation, or
provocation. Neither the U.S. nor Iran can afford to allow an avoidable incident at
sea to spin out of control.

With a modicum of mutual trust, these commonsense actions might be able to win
wide and prompt acceptance by both governments.




From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 13:26:04 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:26:04 +0100
Subject: [THS] DEA Exposes Drug Baron: Thomas Jeefferson
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309132412.041f3e90@spamarrest.com>

http://www.alternet.org/story/145872/how_the_dea_scrubbed_thomas_jefferson%27s_monticello_poppy_garden_from_public_memory?page=entire

 By  Jim Hogshire

How the DEA Scrubbed Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Poppy Garden from Public
Memory

Visitors to Monticello don't learn how Jefferson cultivated poppies, and his personal
opium use may as well never have happened.

March 3, 2010  |

Photo Credit: Creative Commons


The following is an excerpt from Jim Hogshire's "Opium for the Masses: Harvesting
Nature's Best Pain Medication" (Feral House, 2009).

Thomas Jefferson was a drug criminal. But he managed to escape the terrible sword
of justice by dying a century before the DEA was created. In 1987 agents from the
Drug Enforcement Agency showed up at Monticello, Jefferson's famous estate.

Jefferson had planted opium poppies in his medicinal garden, and opium poppies are
now deemed illegal. Now, the trouble was the folks at the Monticello Foundation,
which preserves and maintains the historic site, were discovered flagrantly continuing
Jefferson's crimes. The agents were blunt: The poppies had to be immediately
uprooted and destroyed or else they were going to start making arrests, and
Monticello Foundation personnel would perhaps face lengthy stretches in prison.

The story sounds stupid now, but it scared the hell out of the people at Monticello,
who immediately started yanking the forbidden plants. A DEA man noticed the store
was selling packets of "Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Poppies." The seeds had to go,
too. While poppy seeds might be legal, it is never legal to plant them. Not for any
reason.

Employees even gathered the store's souvenir T-shirts  --  with silkscreened photos of
Monticello poppies on the chest  --  and burned them. Nobody told them to do this,
but, under the circumstances, no one dared risk the threat.

Jefferson's poppies are gone without a trace now. Nobody said much at the time, nor
are they saying much now. Visitors to Monticello don't learn how the Founding Father
cultivated poppies for their opium. His personal opium use and poppy cultivation may
as well never have happened.

The American War on Drugs started with opium and it continues today. Deception is
key to this kind of social control, along with the usual threats of mayhem. Ever since
the passage of the Harrison Act made opium America's first "illicit substance" in 1914,
propaganda has proven itself most effective in the war on poppies. This has not been
done so much by eradicating the poppy plant from the nation's soil as by eradicating
the poppy from the nation's mind.

Prosecutions for crimes involving opium or opium poppies are rare. But that has less
to do with the frequency of poppy crimes and everything to do with suppressing
information about the opium poppy. A public trial might inadvertently publicize
forbidden information at odds with the common spin about poppies and opium. This
might pique interest in the taboo subject and, worse, undermine faith in the
government.

The U.S. government strategy to create and enforce deliberate ignorance about
opium, opium poppies, and everything connected with them has proven remarkably
effective. The Monticello campaign exemplifies an effective tactic. The poppies were
swiftly removed, and sotto voce threats ensured no one would talk about it afterward.
Today, visitors to Monticello learn nothing about opium poppy cultivation or why
Jefferson cultivated it in his garden.

Disinformation about poppies has been spread far and wide. Some of it is subtle, like
when the New York Times talks about people growing "heroin poppies." Some
misinformation is so bald-faced as to stun the listener into silence, as when a DEA
agent tells a reporter that the process of getting opium from opium poppies is so
complex and dangerous that "I don't even think a person with a Ph.D. could do it.

This enforced ignorance reduces the chances of anyone even accidentally discovering
the truth about poppies. Poring through back issues of pharmaceutical industry news
from Tasmania might yield a mother load of cutting edge poppy science  --  from
genetically altered poppies that ooze double-strength opium to state-of-the-art
machines designed to manufacture "poppy straw concentrate." Tasmania's output
meets roughly a third of the world's narcotic requirement. But how many people
know that Tasmania is the home of the world's largest and most modern opium
industry?

Opium and opium poppy ignorance is augmented by widespread false beliefs, chief
among them that it is extremely difficult for opium poppies to grow anywhere in the
United States. Opium poppies surely require exotic climates or special climatic
conditions, don't they? They're found on remote mountainsides in the Golden
Triangle and Afghanistan, where growing them is a secret art known only to a few
indigenous people who jealously guard the seeds from hostile competitors.

These beliefs are all widely held, but entirely untrue. Opium poppies, in fact, grow
nearly everywhere but the North and South Poles. The second prong of the strategy
is the copious propaganda that demonizes opium, opium poppies and opiates. At
times this demonization has been brazenly racist, catering to the xenophobic
American mind at the beginning of the twentieth century. Later propaganda linked
opium with the despised German "Hun" who ate babies and (as was reported) had
been mixing narcotics into children's candy and women's face powder in a diabolical
plot to weaken the nation from the inside. Later, Germans were replaced by
communists, who also shipped narcotics to America's youth to weaken and enslave
us. This was the authoritative word from Harry Anslinger, the infamous first
Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Another example of false history is the mythical "soldier's disease" or "army disease"
that supposedly plagued the land after the Civil War. According to the story, opium
and morphine were used so extensively during the war as a painkiller for wounded
soldiers (especially amputees) that the inevitable result was opium and morphine
addiction. As a result, crowds of broken-down men roamed the countryside, ramming
themselves full of holes with their crude syringes, having been turned into dope
slaves by the good intentions of doctors.

This perfect example of anti-drug propaganda sounds plausible enough that few ever
question it. And it has endured long after researchers discovered that this mythical
legend was purely invention.

There is no documentation of any mass opiate addiction after the Civil War. The term
"soldier's disease" or its variants did not appear in literature until decades later. Yet
the story fits the officially approved stereotype by portraying opium and morphine as
so powerful and addictive that they could rob anyone's soul.

If you knew that opium poppies do not grow in the U.S., you would not recognize an
opium poppy even if you were staring directly at it. So, the idea of making opium tea
from a bunch of dried decorative flowers purchased at K-Mart is ridiculous -- absurd,
really. If it were that easy, wouldn't everyone be doing it?

Perhaps. But the establishment prefers to not test it. The idea of an individual having
control over one's own life, especially regarding pain relief, is far too democratic to be
embraced by tyrants.

The government and its allies in the narco-military complex have gone to great
lengths to set things up as they are, and not allow a shift in control would affect licit
or illicit sales of narcotics, poppy seeds, and any products derived from Papaver
somniferum. In a market the size of America, nothing is too insignificant to generate
huge sums of money. And the opium poppy is hardly insignificant.

Jim Hogshire is the author of many books, including most recently, "Opium for the
Masses: Harvesting Nature's Best Pain Medication"; (Feral House, 2009).


From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 14:00:37 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:00:37 +0100
Subject: [THS] Donald Rumsfeld Torture Lawsuit Allowed To Proceed
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309140021.04c41a48@spamarrest.com>


Donald Rumsfeld Torture Lawsuit Clears Hurdle, Allowed To Proceed
MIKE ROBINSON

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/06/donald-rumsfeld-torture-l_n_488793.html
CHICAGO--A federal judge refused Friday to dismiss a
civil lawsuit accusing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of responsibility for
the alleged torture by U.S. forces of two Americans who worked for an Iraqi
contracting firm.

U.S. District Judge Wayne R. Andersen's ruling did not say the two contractors had
proven their claims, including that they
were tortured after reporting alleged illegal activities by their company. But it did say
they had alleged enough specific mistreatment to warrant hearing evidence of
exactly what happened.

Andersen said his decision "represents a recognition that federal officials may not
strip citizens of well settled constitutional protections against mistreatment simply
because they are located in a tumultuous foreign setting."

Andersen did throw out two of the lawsuit's three counts but gave former contractors
Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel the green light to go forward with a third count
alleging they were unconstitutionally tortured under procedures personally approved
by Rumsfeld.

In Washington, Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said by telephone only
that the department, which is representing Rumsfeld in the suit, "is reviewing the
court's decision."

Vance and Ertel were described by their attorney, Mike Kanovitz of Chicago, as being
in their early thirties. He said the two Americans went to Iraq in the fall of 2005 to
work for the Iraqi-owned contracting firm of Shield Group Security.

The suit filed in 2006 alleges that while working for the company they saw fellow
employees making payments to "certain Iraqi sheikhs" and dealing in armaments in a
way they believed would not be approved by the U.S. military.

According to the suit, Vance contacted an FBI official in Chicago with his suspicions
and the two men eventually shared their concerns with three U.S. Embassy officials
in Baghdad.

The suit said their actions provoked suspicion at the company and on April 14, 2006,
fellow employees confiscated the identity cards that allowed them to enter the safe
area known as the Green Zone.
Story continues below

The two men said they locked themselves in a room, called the Embassy for help and
were extricated by "United States forces" who took them to the Embassy where they
were taken into custody.

They were taken to two military camps in the Baghdad vicinity in the weeks that
followed, the suit said. It said Ertel was released after a month and Vance after two
months.

While in custody, they were subjected to sleep deprivation, long hours of
interrogation, blasting music, threats, hunger and a practice known as "walling" in
which subjects are blindfolded and walked into walls, according to the suit.

The suit describes such practices as forms of torture and alleges Rumsfeld personally
took part in determining such methods were acceptable for use by the military in
Iraq.

The two men are seeking unspecified damages. The next hearing is set for March 25.



From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 17:13:21 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:13:21 +0100
Subject: [THS] Paul J. Balles: The World`s Sickest Warrior State
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309171114.04819f18@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24931.htm

The World's Sickest Warrior State

By Paul J. Balles

March 08, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Living through five or six major wars
has hardened me to what I thought were the extremes of inhuman cruelty and
brutality.

Two things made those extremes almost bearable: the brutality always revealed - at
least according to the media coverage - the viciousness of the enemy. It was
therefore quite understandable when our "brave men and women" pulverized the
enemy.

Films of Japanese torturing captive Americans somehow justified holding over 7,000
Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II; and only a small
percentage of Americans found the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
unreasonably vengeful at best, at worst, depraved.

The media giants in America portrayed the North Koreans as barbaric beasts with
their captives, quite unlike their southern counterpoints - our allies during the Korean
War. No one ever felt the need to explain how the South Koreans were a civilized
breed while the North Koreans were absolute savages, at least according to the
official line.

In Vietnam, our warriors justifiably (or so the media made us believe) dropped
napalm on the North Vietnamese who had the gall to hide in villages and tunnels to
ravage our invaders. At least it was accepted practice until some rogue
photojournalist filmed a young girl screaming down a Vietnamese road in flames.

One of our lieutenants also got caught commanding his troops to open fire on an
entire village of civilians - women and children. We had obviously - to some - gone
too far. If those few torturous incidents hadn't been filmed, we might have carried on
and won the war in Vietnam (or so the thinking goes) with our napalm and wanton
village massacres.

Then, when the Iraqi troops ran (literally) fleeing Kuwait in 1991, our bloodthirsty
aviators annihilated them on the road north, bombing their retreat to "melted glass"
(as one Lockheed acquaintance put it). That feast for hungry slaughterers received
little attention. The bombers and strafers felt no guilt after Saddam's troops had
blown up Kuwait's oil wells.

The nagging memory of non-avenged defeat in Vietnam somehow allowed members
of the clergy to ignore the devastating inhuman cost to children in Iraq during 10
years of sanctions. Only a few humanitarians among academics spoke out. Congress
completely ignored it. The public didn't care. Why should they? Our leaders spoke of
everything but the brutality of our enforcers.

We have now reached a stage where our extreme horrors of brutality and cruelty
have exceeded our past records. We no longer have the rationale of moral
righteousness of the earlier wars.

There were no excuses for Abu-Ghraib, but our interest in that inhuman travesty
dried up and blew away. We have little concern about our violations of human rights
in Guantanamo. We care less about ill-treatment of Arabs and Arab Americans in the
USA.

But the most extremes - the real horrors - of this war come with the primitive killer
mentality developed in our youth. I've now seen a half dozen documentary films and
read eyewitness accounts that reveal troops or pilots gloating over the massacres of
civilians who just happened to be available targets.

Without doubt, the US has not only become the world's major power, it has become
the world's sickest warrior state. Neither conscience nor empathy for others defines
the qualities of the sociopath.

It's past time for humanitarians to reject the double standards set by warmongers
and supported by arms-makers and the mainstream media. The clergy needs to stop
preaching sanctimonious sermons. Finally, educators should adopt and teach a zero
tolerance policy for self-righteous warriors.

And yes, those who would dismiss my criticism as vitriolic should join a chorus with a
conscience.

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has
lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see
http://www.pballes.com .


From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 17:17:07 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:17:07 +0100
Subject: [THS] The Untouchable Budget
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309171413.0481a1a8@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24936.htm

The Untouchable Budget

Defense Department, Inc.

By SAUL LANDAU and NELSON P. VALDES

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and
are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the
sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not
a way of life
.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

    --Dwight Eisenhower, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953


March 08, 2010 "Counterpunch" -- President Obama called his $3.8-trillion budget a
big step in restoring America?s economic health. Last year he promoted TARP, the
Troubled Assets Relief Program to bail out the financial sector at a mere $700 billion.
Anyone ? even billionaire bankers -- can make mistakes that wreak ruin on the rest of
us!

Obama also declared as ?untouchable? the Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion (including
hidden costs in other government branches), which dwarfs the rescue package for
the financial oligarchs. Both payouts, however, used the same logic: Congress taking
from the have-nots and giving it to the have-mores. Indeed, the economic, political
and military potentates depend on the federal budget to transfer taxpayer resources
to them.

This evolving military-industrial complex, a partnership of interlocking government
and corporate networks, has used public wealth to enrich itself.  The manufacturing
part of this complex rarely produces anything people live in, wear, or eat. Despite
National Rifle Association claims, armaments do not meet civilian needs.  In fact,
there exists a dramatic gulf between a healthy economy and a social order based on
military spending.  During the very period (1998-2008) when the US economy?s share
of global output dropped from 32 to 23%, the Defense budget doubled. (Loren
Thompson, ?QDR Can?t Solve Three Biggest Defense Challenges, Lexington Institute,
January 28, 2010)

The Defense Department?s eschewal of economic reality finds its counterpart in its
disinterest in accountability.  The dramatic admission of this statement of priorities
came from Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who admitted publicly that
that DOD could not find $2.3 trillion.  The money is still missing.  (?The War on
Waste: Defense Department Cannot Account for 25% of Funds - $2.3 Trillion, CBS
Evening News, January 29, 2002)

Future Defense chiefs won?t face such embarrassment. On May 8, 2009 the GAO
informed the House Subcommittee on Government Management that six executive
agencies can prohibit audits and investigations by the Inspector General -- Defense,
Treasury, Federal Reserve Board, Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the
Postal Service and the CIA?s infamous and classified ?Black budgets.? Accountability
has now taken remote second place to ?national security.?

Security, however, must include employment, and military industries do create jobs.
They also get tax breaks from states competing for their business. But even without
tax breaks, many defense corporations choose the patriotic option of overseas tax
havens.  A December 2008 GAO report, for example, disclosed that 83% of the
largest publicly traded US corporations, doing business for the federal government,
sought tax refuge via their foreign subsidiaries.

The bottom-line savvy CFO?s of these companies do not, however, skimp on super-
salaried lobbyists. War profiteering, they know, fits hand-in-glove with secured profits
from ?defense? contracts! Such practices win bi-partisan support and keep well oiled
Washington?s ubiquitous revolving doors.

So what?s new? US deficits approach $1.6 trillion per year, and Washington still looks
to China and Japan to buy its paper albeit the US already owes them almost as much
as this year?s deficit. The US government will pay $250 billion of annual debt interest.

Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have already sucked up $1 trillion. ?Experts? expect
these ?defensive engagements? to cost an additional $250 billion this year; Obama?s
surge of 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan will raise the budget by $30+ billion,
slightly more than Germany spends on its annual defense.

Is spending public money Washington?s real ?defense?? Unemployment remains
officially around 10%, the economy has yet to recover, but the Pentagon prospers.
Its budget equals about half of total world military spending.  Ironically, with all its
money, DOD still faces a serious manpower shortage. The empire dares not institute
another unpopular draft ? bad Vietnam War protest memories. Hence, it relies on the
poor and on migrants seeking citizenship.

Military service offers poor youngsters possible upward mobility. But not enough of
them feel desperate enough to serve. So, the Pentagon hires mercenaries ? oops,
contractors -- who cost more initially but don?t get counted when wounded or dead,
and don?t run up future veterans? costs.  The Pentagon hopes to meet labor shortage
challenges through robotics, drones and computers -- machines with no ghosts.

The military also depends on ?worst case scenario? dreamers, bad news Mandarins
who fantasize threats to the empire. 19th century utopians imagined a peaceful
industrialized and rational world. The new dystopians create future overseas foreign
threats, and search for ?foreign Moby Dicks.? (?Novel Politics: Questions for Carlos
Fuentes,? Deborah Solomon, NY Times, April 30, 2006)

Their ?studies? appear inside special Pentagon offices for analysis. A December 2007
report was called ?A Nuclear-Armed Regional Opponent: Is Victory Possible??; in July
2002, ?After Next Nuclear Use.? Other studies have classified titles, but their authors
come from (un)think tanks like the Washington-based Hudson Institute, or belong to
government consulting firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, or Scitor Corporation and IHS
International.

Former Office of Net Assessment director Andrew Marshall epitomizes this breed of
horror scenario script writers. People who the late C. Wright Mills called ?defense
intellectuals? now postulate concurrent, and different, military strategies: nuclear
battlefields, star wars, traditional warfare, irregular warfare, virtual warfare,
counterinsurgency, foreign internal defense, unconventional warfare, full spectrum
dominance, homeland security (somehow different from Defense), stability operation,
post warfare security, smart power, soft power, hard power, militarized humanitarian
assistance, complex security challenges and "nation building".

Left critics misunderstood the new strategies when they screamed: ?The Iraq War is
about oil.? Or the Afghan conflict is about ?natural gas pipelines.? As if decisions on
going to war depended solely on a few large energy corporations profiting on the
trillion plus spent on these wars.

A few right wingers ? not liberals -- like Pat Buchanan and Congressman Ron Paul
dare challenge the empire. ?Our situation is unsustainable. The steady expansion of
global commitments, as relative national power declines, is a prescription for endless
wars and eventual disaster,? wrote Buchanan. "It is my hope that the price in blood,
treasure, and humiliation America will eventually be forced to pay for the hubris,
arrogance, and folly of our reigning foreign policy elites is not, God forbid, war,
defeat, and the diminution of this republic -- the fate of every other great nation or
empire that set out on this same course."

After World War II US manufacturing stood as the foundation of economic power.
Sixty five years later, manufacturing has become a US expatriate. Successive
Administrations have paved the road for gonifs (bankers and investors) to usurp the
economy. After manipulating other people?s money for their own profits led to
financial collapse two Presidents and Congresses nevertheless bailed them out.
What should be done? Charlie Cray and Lee Drutman call for converting all defense-
related companies into publicly-controlled, nonprofit status entities and forbid them to
lobby or contribute to campaigns? (Corporations and the Public Purpose: Restoring
the Balance, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Winter 2005) Unlikely!

Obama, however, could propose a National Defense Medicare bill, lodged inside the
Pentagon budget. Instead of the Pentagon fighting health care for the lion?s share of
the total US budget it would assume health care as just one more task in the
unending challenge of defending our besieged nation.

Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. He is the author of A Bush and
Botox World.

Nelson P. Valdes is Professor Emeritus, University of New Mexico.


From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 17:19:09 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:19:09 +0100
Subject: [THS] Gideon Levy: There Has Never Been an Israeli Peace Camp
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309171850.04c6fc88@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24934.htm

There Has Never Been an Israeli Peace Camp

By Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent

March 07, 2010 "Haaretz " -- The Israeli peace camp didn't die. It was never born in
the first place. While it's true that since the summer of 1967, several radical and
brave political groups have been working against the occupation - all worthy of
recognition - a large, influential peace camp has never existed here.

It's true that after the Yom Kippur War, after the first Lebanon War and during the
giddy days of Oslo (oh, how giddy those days were), citizens took to the streets,
generally when the weather was nice and when the best of Israeli music was being
performed at rallies, but few people really said anything decisive or courageous, and
fewer still were willing to pay a personal price for their activities. After the
assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, people lit candles in the square and
sang Aviv Geffen songs, but this certainly isn't what one would call a peace camp.

It is also true that the stance advocated by the so-called Matzpen movement
immediately after the Six-Day War has now more or less become the Israeli
consensus position - but it is mere words, devoid of content. Nothing meaningful has
been done so far to put it into practice. One would have expected more, a lot more,
from a democratic society in whose backyard such a prolonged and cruel occupation
has existed and whose government has primarily invoked the language of fear,
threats and violence.

There have been societies in the past in whose name frightful injustice has been
committed, but at least within some of them, genuine, angry and determined left-
wing protest took place - of the sort that requires personal risk and courage, and
which is not limited to action within the cozy consensus. An occupying society whose
town square has been empty for years, with the exception of hollow memorial rallies
and poorly attended protests, cannot wash its hands of the situation. Neither
democracy nor the peace camp can.

If people didn't take to the streets in large numbers during Israel's Operation Cast
Lead in Gaza, then there isn't a genuine peace camp. If people don't flood the
streets now - when dangers lie in wait and opportunity is wasted time after time, and
democracy sustains blow after blow on a daily basis and there are no longer sufficient
resources to properly defend it, and when the right wing controls the political map
and settlers amass more and more power - then there is no genuine left wing.

There is nothing like the debate over the future of the Meretz party to demonstrate
the sorry state of the left. This comes in the wake of the strange and ridiculous report
last week about the party's poor showing in the last election, and which gives every
possible recommendation. Meretz disappeared because the party fell silent; you don't
need a commission to find that out. But even during its relatively better days, Meretz
was not a real peace camp. When Meretz applauded Oslo, it deliberately ignored the
fact that the champions of the "historic" peace accords never intended to evacuate
even a single settlement over the course of the great "breakthrough" that earned its
promoters Nobel peace, yes, peace prizes. This camp also overlooked Israel's
violations of the agreements, its illusions of peace.

Above all, however, the problem was rooted in the left's impossible adherence to
Zionism in its historical sense. In precisely the way there cannot be a democratic and
Jewish state in one breath, one has to first define what comes before what - there
cannot be a left wing committed to the old-fashioned Zionism that built the state but
has run its course. This illusory left wing never managed to ultimately understand the
Palestinian problem - which was created in 1948, not 1967 - never understanding
that it can't be solved while ignoring the injustice caused from the beginning. A left
wing unwilling to dare to deal with 1948 is not a genuine left wing.

The illusory left never understood the most important point: For the Palestinians,
consenting to the 1967 borders along with a solution to the refugee problem,
including at least the return of a symbolic number of refugees themselves, are
painful concessions. They also represent the only just compromise, without which
peace will not be established; but there's no sense in accusing the Palestinians of
wasting an opportunity. Such a proposal, even including the "far-reaching" proposals
of Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, has never been made to them.

Meretz will surely find some kind of organizational arrangement and will again get
half a dozen members elected to the Knesset, on a good day maybe even a dozen.
This doesn't mean much, however. The other left-wing groups, both Jewish and
Arab, remain excluded. No one has any use for them, no one thinks about including
them, and they are too small to have any influence. So let's call the child by its real
name: The Israeli peace camp is still an unborn baby.





From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 17:25:06 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:25:06 +0100
Subject: [THS] US - China: Provoking the Creditor, Hugging the Holy Man
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309171939.04762dc8@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24932.htm

Washington?s Road to Ruin

US ? China: Provoking the Creditor, Hugging the Holy Man

By James Petras

March 08, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- The Obama Administration has
heightened tensions with China through a series of measures which can only be
characterized as major provocations designed to undermine relations between the
two countries. These provocations include political support for separatist movements,
such as the US-funded theocratic-monk led Tibetan secessionists and the
Washington-based Uyghur secessionists, as well as through the $6.4 billion-dollar
advanced arms sales to Taiwan, a virtual protectorate of the US Navy. President
Obama has publicly met with and openly backed these separatist and secessionists
groups, flaunting Washington?s refusal to recognize China?s existing borders. This is
part of the US strategy of encouraging the physical break-up of independent nations,
which are viewed as ?obstacles? to its program of global military empire building.

In addition to continuing and escalating the hostile policies of his predecessor, the
Obama Administration has exploited several other issues in order to rally American
public opinion and mobilize overseas allies behind its confrontational posture. First,
the Obama Administration claims that China?s currency (the Renminbi) is artificially
undervalued to give Chinese exports an unfair price advantage, thus undercutting US
manufacturing exports and costing ?millions of American jobs?. And secondly, the
Administration claims that, after the US had opened its domestic manufacturing
market to Chinese firms, the Chinese would not ?reciprocate? and open their financial
sectors to Wall Street investment banks.

In retaliation for growing Chinese exports, Washington has raised protective tariffs on
steel pipes and automobile tires, and issued Congressional threats of further
protectionist measures.

The US has insists that other nations support its aggressive policy toward Iran,
including imposing trade, investment and financial sanctions, supporting the
provocative US naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and backing Israel?s bellicose
threats to bomb Teheran. In contrast, China rejects economic sanctions, in favor of
negotiations, while increasing its trade and investments in strategic sectors of the
Iranian economy. In the United Nations Security Council, the US has exerted
diplomatic and mass media pressure to force China to vote for a Zionist-authored
proposal of wide-reaching sanctions against Iran. Obama refuses to accept China?s
rejection of the US military-driven policy of regime change and the Chinese pursuit of
free trade with Iran.

The US Administration?s selective definition of ?self-determination? includes giving
support to secessionist ethno-religious regional movements in China, while, at the
same time, invading and occupying independent states, like Iraq and Afghanistan,
ordering missile attacks on other states, like Pakistan and Somalia, establishing over
700 military bases world-wide with extra-territorial jurisdiction and engaging in
assassinations of its opponents abroad via the CIA and Special Forces.

In contrast, China is not at war and opposes military invasions of sovereign states.
China does not have overseas military bases and is menaced by the US policy of
encircling China?s frontiers with American bases in client states in Northeast,
Southeast and Central Asia.

While US military occupation forces brutally violate human rights of millions of citizens
in occupied or targeted countries, and threaten the civil rights of critical Americans
with arbitrary rulings, secret trials and the suspension of habeas corpus, the Obama
regime excoriates China for its prosecution of opposition activists.

The Obama regime has latched onto a conflict between a private US corporation,
Google, and Chinese hackers, which it alleges are state sponsored, turning the issue
into a major struggle for ?internet freedom? at the level of state to state relations.
Despite the expanding presence of scores of US-owned IT companies in China, the
Obama regime has raised the issue of ?internet censorship? to the level of a major
ideological confrontation.

Climate change is another source of aggravation between the states. At the
Copenhagen summit in December 2009, Obama rejected any formal agreement on
the reduction of carbon emissions while deflecting criticism and blame on to China
and other developing countries, which had agreed to informal substantive targets on
CO2 reductions.

Of all these points of contention, the most serious is Washington?s financial,
diplomatic and political support for ethnic secessionist groups in China, threatening
the security and territorial integrity of the Chinese state. This paramount issue has re-
awakened painful memories of earlier imperialist carving up of China, its rich port
cities and territories and has forced the Chinese authorities to consider retaliatory
measures.

Imperial Policies: At What Price?

The Obama regime?s political and diplomatic provocations against China in pursuit of
its military-driven empire, come at a very high real and potential price. We cannot
assume that China will remain a stoic punching bag for the US, absorbing territorial
threats, economic pressures and gratuitous diplomatic insults without taking counter-
measures especially in the economic sphere.

China?s Crucial Role as US Creditor

Obama?s provocative militarist posturing toward China endangers major US private
and public economic interests, including China?s financing of the burgeoning US
debt.

China is the world?s largest and fastest growing investor in US securities. According to
a detailed study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) (July 30, 2009), China
holds a vast amount of long-term treasury debt, US agency debt, US corporate debt,
US equities and short-term debt estimated at over $1.2 trillion. China?s investment in
US Treasury securities were used to help finance the economic ?recovery? (such as it
is). If the Obama regime persists in its provocations, China may decide to unload a
large share of its US securities holdings, inducing other foreign investors to also sell
off their holdings (CRS op cit). This would lead to a sharp depreciation of the dollar
and force Washington to raise interest rates, which could drive the US into a deeper
recession/depression. Economists, who claim Chinese economic interests would suffer
from such a sell off, overlook the fact that for Beijing, national sovereignty is more
important than short-term economic losses, especially in view of US support for
secessionist movements. Moreover, the Chinese have a high rates of savings, huge
foreign reserves and increasingly diverse markets and suppliers of essential
commodities. China is in a better position to absorb the ?shock? of a decline in US
economic relations resulting from American bellicosity than the debt-ridden, negative-
saving, military-driven North American economy.

Foreign Direct Investments

Almost all of the 400 biggest US multi-national corporations, listed in Forbes, have
major profitable investments in China, which are growing. The Obama regime?s
increasingly confrontational position toward China puts these investments at risk.

US foreign investments in China far exceed the latter?s investments in the US,
according to a report published by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. In 2006,
China?s foreign direct investment (FDI) in the US was $600 million, while US
investments in China were $22.2 billion. The Report goes on to state ?
the
complaints by many American businesses and politicians that China can invest in US
companies with relative ease while China still tightly restricts access to Chinese
markets and companies appear not to be borne out by the numbers?. The US
government has, in fact, blocked several large scale investments by Chinese
companies, including the multi-billion dollar purchase of an oil company (UNOCAL),
an appliance company (Maytag) and computer company (3Com Corp). Chinese
investments in the US are not always profitable. The Sovereign Wealth Fund (a
Chinese government-run investment fund) lost over 50% of its $8 billion-dollar
investment in the finance groups, Blackstone Group and Morgan Stanley, in less than
a year.

The Obama regime?s complaints about China?s ?restrictive? treatment of US
companies fly in the face of economic reality. The attacks are part of a political
strategy of anti-Chinese propaganda to heighten the American public?s antagonism
against China and rally domestic support for any military confrontation. Even as US
companies in China reap profits a thousand times greater than Chinese investments
in the US, and the leading investment houses swindle Chinese sovereign investors of
billions, the White House claims foul play!.

China?s much-maligned policy of restricting financial takeovers by Wall Street firms
was one of the reasons the US speculative collapse did not impact its economy. And
still Washington continues to attack Beijing on the issue of ?opening Chinese financial
markets to Wall Street?.

US ? China Trade

The Obama regime has repeatedly raised the issue of China?s ?undervalued? currency,
conveniently ignoring the fact that China?s imports from the US are growing faster
than its exports to the US. Between 2006 ? 2008 US annual exports to China grew
32%, 18%, 9.5%, while its imports of Chinese goods grew 18.2%, 11.7%, 5.1%.
Moreover top US exports included electrical machinery and equipment, power
generation equipment, oil seeds and oleaginous fruits, aero-space products, optical
equipment and iron and steel ? a broad spectrum of American industrial products
with high value-added, well-paying skilled employment and lucrative profits.

Moreover, the fact that US exports to China include a diverse array of manufacturing
sectors and are competitive at the current exchange rate, suggests that the vast US
trade deficit with China has less to do with China?s currency policy and more to do
with US public and private investment policies and the relative strengths of the
productive forces of each economy. In large part, the majority of exports from China
to the US are the result of US multi-national corporate decisions to produce and sub-
contract in China. In other words, the trade deficit with China is directly related to US
corporate global investment strategy, which, in turn, flourished after the US
government liberalized it rules and deregulated US corporate conduct. Liberal
investment policies under the US government, and not Chinese ?unfair trade rules?,
are a major cause of the trade deficit.

The angry posture adopted by the Obama regime toward China?s ?undervalued?
currency is a political ploy to deflect attention from its disastrous liberal economic
policies and its support for the investment conduct of large US corporations.

The US annual trade deficit with China has grown almost four fold between 1999 ?
2008, from $68.7 billion to $266.3 billion. The growth of the trade deficit coincides
with the massive shift of US investment from manufacturing to speculative financial,
real estate and insurance activities. In other words, the US re-directed its investment
strategies from producing useful, quality commodities for domestic consumption and
export to importing manufactured goods from abroad at a greater profit for the
corporations. The weakening of US productive capacity - its productive forces - was
reflected in its declining competitive position and its deepening trade imbalances.
Given the tight relations between the White House and Wall Street, policy makers
sought to blame Chinese monetary officials for an undervalued currency, rather than
confront the bubble economy stimulated by the policies of the Federal Reserve and
generated by the Wall Street investment houses, whose executives go on to occupy
key economic posts in the US government and who provide substantial funding for
electoral campaigns.

In those economic sectors where US investment has led to increased efficiency, like
agriculture, the US has competed successfully. China is the leading buyer of
American soybeans and cotton ? accounting for over half world sales of the former
and between almost a third of the latter according to the U.S. International Trade
Commission and the US Department of Commerce.

Trade, Credit, Investments versus Militarism and Speculation

China?s economic relations with the US have been extraordinarily lucrative and
favorable to the big US capitalists and the American government. By purchasing low-
interest US Treasury notes, China has financed US trade and budget deficits, which
are the result of exorbitant military spending, multiple imperial wars and occupations,
and unproductive speculative investments. The US multi-nationals have reaped high
rates of profit from their investments in China, profits far in excess of what they
would have gained in the US, and many times more than what a few Chinese firms
earn in the more restrictive US climate. Important US economic sectors in aerospace,
agro business, port facilities, transport and giant commercial retailers and importers
depend on and profit from trade with China. US speculators have been able to rake
in huge profits from the Chinese Sovereign Funds by pumping and dumping
speculative US stocks.

As China?s dynamic growth and rate of consumer demand continue to race ahead of
the US, American exports to China outpace its imports from China.

The growing political antagonism and reckless diplomatic actions against China taken
by the White House and Congress serve to undermine the basic economic interests of
a broad swath of US capitalist enterprises as well as the credibility of the US
economy. What is even more striking is that many of the charges leveled against
Beijing, including its ?unfair treatment? of investors and ?closed economy? ? apply with
greater force to Washington.

The Paradox of Economic Gain and Political Hostility

The key to understanding this paradox of economic gain and political hostility lies in
the fundamentally different political and economic structures and global strategies of
the two countries. The US economy has been driven by its financial and speculative
capitalist classes, which in turn wield decisive political influence over state economic
policy. At the same time, the commercial capitalist class is more attuned to importing
manufactured goods, rather than in long-term investment in research, development
in the American manufacturing sector. Neither commercial nor financial capital has a
stake in stimulating US exports and in investing in the productive forces of the
country. The design and implementation of US global strategy is controlled by the
civilian militarists and imperial ideologues, (especially the Zionists) in government and
their counterparts in sectors of the military high command.

In contrast to the Chinese market-driven quest for global power, US imperialism is
built around military conquest and appropriation of economic wealth. The
disproportionate influence exercised by the civilian militarists in the US government
has resulted in a series of foreign wars, which have severely strained the US economy
and led to a military definition of US global objectives. Faced with China?s growing
economic relations and influence in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East
and Beijing?s opposition to US military-driven imperial policies against Iran, the
Washington has escalated its political provocations, diplomatic pressures and
interference in Chinese internal affairs. As these external pressures increase, Chinese
public opinion turns more nationalistic, which in turn serves as a basis for US mass
media charges of ?xenophobia? and ?chauvinism? on the part of the Chinese. The
irrational nature of the recent anti-China propaganda promoted by the US mass
media is most evident in the shrill warnings of a Chinese military threat to Asian
security, especially when the US continues to expand its chain of military bases
encircling China from South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Australia, Afghanistan and
Central Asia. China has neither military bases abroad nor naval fleets off the coasts of
any US or allied territory.
The greater the US reliance on military force, brutal economic sanctions and outright
blockades to overthrow regimes and extend its network of client regimes, the greater
its hostility toward China, which is expanding its economic ties with US ?adversaries?,
such as Iran, Venezuela, Sudan, Nicaragua, etc.

The US has severely weakened its productive forces in the process of funding a
global military machine. China, on the other hand, has sought to become a world
power on the bases of the long-term, large-scale development of its productive
forces, even in the face of US opposition. At each and every turn, Washington has
passed up enormous opportunities for the US economy from China?s dynamic growth,
booming market and overseas economic expansion, in favor of petty provocations.

Conclusion

Ultimately what we have is a conflict between two diametrically opposing political
economic systems.

On the one hand, a United States military driven empire, which focuses on
conquering Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, backs the ambitions of a militarist Israel,
seeks marginal client states in Latin America and militarizes Pakistan, Colombia and
Mexico.

On the other hand, China deepens its economic ties with dynamic Asian countries;
increases its oil links with Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Gulf States, Venezuela, Russia and
Angola; displaces the US as the leading trading partner of Brazil, Argentina, Peru and
Chile; and increases its trade and investment links with Southern Africa in minerals
and related infrastructure projects. The contrast is striking.

China?s global economic expansion is confronted by US military encirclement,
diplomatic provocations and a massive anti-Chinese propaganda campaign designed
to deflect US public attention from the extreme imbalances in its domestic economy.
Instead of looking inward to understand why the US is declining, the Obama regime
encourages the public to blame China?s supposedly unfair trade policies, its
?restrictive? investment policies, its manipulated currency rate and its tough response
to secessionist movements funded by the US.

In the end the US will not resolve its budget deficits and trade imbalances, not to
mention its endless imperial wars, by pandering to self-described divine rulers, like
the Dali Lama, and provoking a dynamic economic power such as China. Nor can
Washington escape its profound economic imbalances by catering to Wall Street
speculators and ignoring the decline of America?s productive forces. Drones, military
surges and surrogate puppet armies engaged in endless wars are no match for the
surging investments, robust developing markets and joint ventures linking China with
the dynamic emerging economies of the world.

James Petras has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular
with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In 1973-76 he was a
member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He writes a
monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, and previously, for the
Spanish daily, El Mundo. He received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from
the University of California at Berkeley.



From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 17:27:07 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:27:07 +0100
Subject: [THS] Bill Quigley: Time for a U.S. Revolution - Fifteen Reasons
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309172551.04762b38@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24935.htm

Time for a U.S. Revolution ? Fifteen Reasons

By Bill Quigley

March 08, 2010 "Information Clearing House"- - It is time for a revolution.
Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big
corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the
rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by
those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a
revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said forty three years ago next month that it was time for a
radical revolution of values in the United States. He preached ?a true revolution of
values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and
present policies.? It is clearer than ever that now is the time for radical change.

Look at what our current system has brought us and ask if it is time for a revolution?

Over 2.8 million people lost their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions
? nearly 8000 each day ? higher numbers than the last two years when millions of
others also lost their homes.

At the same time, the government bailed out Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Bear
Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the auto industry and enacted the troubled asset
(TARP) program with $1.7 trillion of our money.

Wall Street then awarded itself over $20 billion in bonuses in 2009 alone, an average
bonus on top of pay of $123,000.

At the same time, over 17 million people are jobless right now. Millions more are
working part-time when they want and need to be working full-time.

Yet the current system allows one single U.S. Senator to stop unemployment and
Medicare benefits being paid to millions.

There are now 35 registered lobbyists in Washington DC for every single member of
the Senate and House of Representatives, at last count 13,739 in 2009. There are
eight lobbyists for every member of Congress working on the health care fiasco
alone.

At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that corporations now have a
constitutional right to interfere with elections by pouring money into races.

The Department of Justice gave a get out of jail free card to its own lawyers who
authorized illegal torture.

At the same time another department of government, the Pentagon, is prosecuting
Navy SEALS for punching an Iraqi suspect.

The US is not only involved in senseless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the
U.S. now maintains 700 military bases world-wide and another 6000 in the US and
our territories. Young men and women join the military to protect the U.S. and to get
college tuition and healthcare coverage and killed and maimed in elective wars and
being the world?s police. Wonder whose assets they are protecting and serving?

In fact, the U.S. spends $700 billion directly on military per year, half the military
spending of the entire world ? much more than Europe, China, Russia, Iran,
Pakistan, North Korea, and Venezuela - combined.

The government and private companies have dramatically increased surveillance of
people through cameras on public streets and private places, airport searches, phone
intercepts, access to personal computers, and compilation of records from credit card
purchases, computer views of sites, and travel.

The number of people in jails and prisons in the U.S. has risen sevenfold since 1970
to over 2.3 million. The US puts a higher percentage of our people in jail than any
other country in the world.

The tea party people are mad at the Republicans, who they accuse of selling them
out to big businesses.

Democrats are working their way past depression to anger because their party,
despite majorities in the House and Senate, has not made significant advances for
immigrants, or women, or unions, or African Americans, or environmentalists, or gays
and lesbians, or civil libertarians, or people dedicated to health care, or human
rights, or jobs or housing or economic justice. Democrats also think their party is
selling out to big business.

Forty three years ago next month, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Riverside
Church in New York City that ?a time comes when silence is betrayal.? He went on to
condemn the Vietnam War and the system which created it and the other injustices
clearly apparent. ?We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We
must rapidly begin the shift from a ?thing oriented? society to a ?person oriented?
society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are
considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and
militarism are incapable of being conquered.?

It is time.

Bill is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at
Loyola University New Orleans. Quigley77 at gmail.com


From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 17:33:16 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:33:16 +0100
Subject: [THS] !!!! Chris Hedges: Calling All Rebels
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309172737.047628a8@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24941.htm

Calling All Rebels

By Chris Hedges

March 08, 2010 "Truthdig" - -There are no constraints left to halt America's slide into
a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased
and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is
now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to
serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties,
have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest,
no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to
rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing
through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence
inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to
be horrifying.

Those singled out as internal enemies will include people of color, immigrants, gays,
intellectuals, feminists, Jews, Muslims, union leaders and those defined as "liberals."
They will be condemned as anti-American and blamed for our decline. The economic
collapse, which remains mysterious and enigmatic to most Americans, will be pinned
by demagogues and hatemongers on these hapless scapegoats. And the random
acts of violence, which are already leaping up around the fringes of American society,
will justify harsh measures of internal control that will snuff out the final vestiges of
our democracy. The corporate forces that destroyed the country will use the
information systems they control to mask their culpability. The old game of blaming
the weak and the marginal, a staple of despotic regimes, will empower the dark
undercurrents of sadism and violence within American society and deflect attention
from the corporate vampires that have drained the blood of the country.

"We are going to be poorer," David Cay Johnston told me. Johnston was the tax
reporter of The New York Times for 13 years and has written on how the corporate
state rigged the system against us. He is the author of "Free Lunch: How the
Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With
the Bill," a book about hidden subsidies, rigged markets and corporate socialism.
"Health care is going to eat up more and more of our income. We are going to have
less and less for other things. We are going to have some huge disasters sooner or
later caused by our failure to invest. Dams and bridges will break. Buildings will
collapse. There are water mains that are 25 to 50 feet wide. There will be huge
infrastructure disasters. Our intellectual resources are in decline. We are failing to
educate young people and instill in them rigor. We are going to continue to pour
money into the military. I think it is possible, I do not say it is probable, that we will
have a revolution, a civil war that will see the end of the United States of America."

"If we see the end of this country it will come from the right and our failure to
provide people with the basic necessities of life," said Johnston. "Revolutions occur
when young men see the present as worse than the unknown future. We are not
there. But it will not take a lot to get there. The politicians running for office who are
denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors in Congress, who say
we do not need the IRS, this when no government in the history of the world has
existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the seeds for the destruction
of the country. A lot of the people on the right hate the United States of America.
They would say they hate the people they are arrayed against. But the whole idea of
the United States is that we criticize the government. We remake it to serve our
interests. They do not want that kind of society. They reject, as Aristotle said, the
idea that democracy is to rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a world where they
are right and that is it. If we do not want to do it their way we should be vanquished.
This is not the idea on which the United States was founded."

It is hard to see how this can be prevented. The engines of social reform are dead.
Liberal apologists, who long ago should have abandoned the Democratic Party,
continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf corporate state and Barack Obama
while the working and middle class are ruthlessly stripped of rights, income and jobs.
Liberals self-righteously condemn imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury
by Wall Street but not the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal
class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs, the
more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited American liberalism
more than liberals themselves. And I do not hold out any hope for their reform. We
have entered an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote, "the best lack all
conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity."

"If we end up with violence in the streets on a large scale, not random riots, but
insurrection and things break down, there will be a coup d'?tat from the right,"
Johnston said. "We have already had an economic coup d'?tat. It will not take much
to go further."

How do we resist? How, if this descent is inevitable, as I believe it is, do we fight
back? Why should we resist at all? Why not give in to cynicism and despair? Why not
carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace of the corporate
state and spend our lives attempting to satiate our private needs? The power elite,
including most of those who graduate from our top universities and our liberal and
intellectual classes, have sold out for personal comfort. Why not us?

The French moral philosopher Albert Camus argued that we are separated from each
other. Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our
individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that "one of the only
coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man
and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the
certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it."

"A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,"
Camus warned. "But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence
of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object."

The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed-the unemployed workers being
thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in
Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our
global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities,
immigrants and those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them does
not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the Democrats, who can mouth the
words of justice while carrying out acts of oppression. It means open and direct
defiance.

The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as impractical and see
the rebel's outsider stance as counterproductive. They condemn the rebel for
expressing anger at injustice. The elites and their apologists call for calm and
patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality, compromise, generosity
and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to accept and work with the
systems of power. The rebel, however, is beholden to a moral commitment that
makes it impossible to stand with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off
with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book
contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel is not concerned with
self-promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has
two beautiful daughters, anger and courage - anger at the way things are and the
courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. The rebel is aware that
virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion defines itself.

"You do not become a ?dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this
most unusual career," Vaclav Havel said when he battled the communist regime in
Czechoslovakia. "You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility,
combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the
existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an
attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. ...
The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not
seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not
attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if
anything, only his own skin-and he offers it solely because he has no other way of
affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen,
regardless of the cost."

Those in power have disarmed the liberal class. They do not argue that the current
system is just or good, because they cannot, but they have convinced liberals that
there is no alternative. But we are not slaves. We have a choice. We can refuse to be
either a victim or an executioner. We have the moral capacity to say no, to refuse to
cooperate. Any boycott or demonstration, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act
of obstruction or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement
and any act of civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel and exposes the dead
hand of authority. "There is beauty and there are the humiliated," Camus wrote.
"Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be unfaithful
either to the second or the first."

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you
so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and
you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers,
upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop," Mario Savio said in 1964.
"And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that
unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

The capacity to exercise moral autonomy, the capacity to refuse to cooperate, offers
us the only route left to personal freedom and a life with meaning. Rebellion is its
own justification. Those of us who come out of the religious left have no quarrel with
Camus. Camus is right about the absurdity of existence, right about finding worth in
the act of rebellion rather than some bizarre dream of an afterlife or Sunday School
fantasy that God rewards the just and the good. "Oh my soul," the ancient Greek
poet Pindar wrote, "do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the
possible." We differ with Camus only in that we have faith that rebellion is not
ultimately meaningless. Rebellion allows us to be free and independent human
beings, but rebellion also chips away, however imperceptibly, at the edifice of the
oppressor and sustains the dim flames of hope and love. And in moments of
profound human despair these flames are never insignificant. They keep alive the
capacity to be human. We must become, as Camus said, so absolutely free that
"existence is an act of rebellion." Those who do not rebel in our age of totalitarian
capitalism and who convince themselves that there is no alternative to collaboration
are complicit in their own enslavement. They commit spiritual and moral suicide.

? 2010 TruthDig.com


From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 17:38:33 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:38:33 +0100
Subject: [THS] !! David Michael Green: To Hell In A Handbasket
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309173432.04762618@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24933.htm

To Hell In A Handbasket

By David Michael Green

March 08, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- I live in New York. To say that the
politics of my state are dysfunctional would be like saying that Adolph Hitler could
sometimes be not such a nice fellow. It?s all true, of course. It just doesn?t do just
justice to the scope of the crimes committed.

We have a governor (as of this writing, anyhow) who just got blasted by the New
York State Commission on Public Integrity for lying to them under oath in their
investigation of him. But that?s okay. Before that, he accepted the favor of free tickets
to the World Series, which is what he lied about. But that?s okay. Before that he was
putting pressure on a woman who was the victim of domestic violence to go away
and shut up. But that?s okay. The person who was beating and choking her was one
of his top staffers. But that?s okay, before that he and his wife were involved in all
sorts of tawdry but unspecified sex and drug related scandalous behavior. But that?s
okay. He?s the governor who came in after the last governor had to resign because
he was laundering money in order to visit high-priced hookers. But that?s okay.
Everybody in Albany is out of control, including one state senator who cut his
girlfriend?s face open with broken glass, and a former leader of the Senate on trial for
wholesale corruption. But that?s okay, because none of them actually do anything,
anyhow.

Which, considering the sheer scumminess of this lot, could very well be a good thing.

It?s certainly a common thing. I grew up in California, which seems determined not to
be eclipsed by New York or anybody in the dyfunctionality department. California
once had the nation?s top school system. But it cost money, so they gutted property
tax revenues and made it nearly impossible for the state to ever raise taxes again.
Now the schools are making Mississippi?s look good. California once had a great
Supreme Court, too, which was the envy of other states in the union. But the justices
weren?t killing enough inmates, so some nice folks engineered a then-unheard of
thing and got the public to recall half the bench, replacing them with pro-death
penalty (oh, and incidentally, pro-corporate) new judges. California also once had a
decent and politically very moderate governor. But then Enron came in and created
power black-outs in order to drive up electricity prices on the grid, and so he to was
blamed and then recalled too, replaced by a movie actor who played a tough but
loving cyborg from the future. Now, in his new role as governor of California, he
plays the leader of a nascent third world country, fiscally so chaotic it?s about ready to
qualify for IMF bailouts.

As for Texas, I don?t live there and I didn?t grow up there, either. (I did kinda like
Stevie Ray Vaughan, though. I don?t know if that counts for anything.) But them folks
are about to re-elect a governor who just last year was talking about how so very
heavy is the yoke of the federal government that Texas just might have to secede
from the union. Er, rather, secede again, I should say. Funny, though. He didn?t
mention how the states where you find the most tea-partiest type of politics tend to
be the ones bringing home the bulk of the federal bacon. As the Seattle Post-
Intelligencer noted in 2005, only five blue states are net recipients of federal
subsidies, while only two red states are net payers of federal taxes. Imagine my
surprise at the hypocrisy of it all, and at recent revelations that lots of the
Neanderthal Party?s members fulminated in Congress expressing their outrage at the
stimulus bill, while simultaneously bragging at home about how many federal dollars
from it they were able to funnel into fat local projects.

And then, of course, nominally presiding over New York, California and Texas is the
United States federal government, about as pathetic a sight as one is ever likely to
see. Groaning under the weight of enormous problems, almost all of them entirely of
its own making, it is completely unable to act in any fashion other then to exacerbate
those problems further while denying their existence. It?s true that the Founders of
this country set out to create a system of government that would almost never be
able to do anything, and boy were those fellas good. Just in case, though, the
current lot of kleptocrats in the Republican Party have done them one better,
grinding a system that?s already ground to a halt all the way into reverse. Except
when they have the keys to the government, of course. At which point they employ
the legislative equivalent of bunker buster bombs to kick out the jambs and rape the
country with impunity.

Meanwhile, there?s another party in Washington, too. You may have heard of them.
Heck, they even control the government, though you?d never know it. They?re pretty
much committed to not doing anything, ever. And, if by some inadvertent mistake
they actually do take action of some sort, they?re equally devoted to doing it ineptly,
ineffectively, and on the terms of their adversaries.

Well, really, nominal adversaries would be a more accurate way to put it, since the
party that once actually used to do something for the public interest every once in a
while has now joined the other party in full-on devotion to the feeding and care of
oligarchs, 24/7. The only difference is the masks they wear. If you?re merely a sick
puppy, you put on the disguise of ineptitude and frustration as you do the bidding of
your corporate masters. If you are, on the other hand, absolutely sociopathic, you
work for the same folks, but you sell it to the numb-nuts you affectionately refer to as
your constituents in the form of protection from fur?ners and fags, instead. Oh, and a
bit of wholesale violence with the invasion of some third world country every other
year or so.

A very good measure of the health of a given polity ? especially in a democracy ? is
given by the quality of leadership running the joint. That measure is incredibly telling
in the case of the United States, and what it is telling us is grim indeed. Consider the
last three presidents against the comparative backdrop of one of our greats, and his
response to the country?s most serious existential crisis ever, excepting the Civil War.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the Germans soon thereafter
declared war on the US as well, Franklin Roosevelt led the country into a massive
national response and a four-year-plus effort combining full-on public support,
massive military, industrial and societal mobilization, masterful diplomacy and stellar
strategic vision in order to defeat the genuine threat of global fascism.

If Bill Clinton had been president, on the other hand, he would have responded by
trying to cop a feel off the Japanese ambassador?s daughter. If George W. Bush had
been president, he would invaded Mexico, bungled the war for seven years, then
invaded Botswana, and sapped the military?s strength by simultaneously bungling
that irrelevant war for six years, all while the Japanese and Germans rampaged
freely, coming closer to American shores every day. And if Barack Obama had been
president, he would have studied the matter for a year, offered to bargain away half
of Europe and Asia in a deal with the Axis Powers, and then, when they spit in his
face for the thirty-seventh time, deployed a half-dozen or so unarmed marines in a
rubber dinghy as America?s military response to the attack.

Our so-called leaders are bad enough, but it gets almost worse at the level of the
American public, who of course also bear the burden of choosing these abysmal
presidents, on top of their own crimes. These latter include utter negligence in
maintaining the gift of American democracy, complete laziness in the most basic of
civic duties, mass corruption of social, political and personal values, and a reliance
upon every form of cheap magic or distraction to avoid basic personal and civic
responsibilities.

And, always, it?s about having everything. At once. For nothing. The same idiots who
have been seduced by cigarette-money-sized tax cuts for themselves, used to justify
a massive slashing of the burden once carried by the rich, are now bitching as
government services implode. The New York Times is reporting that citizens of
Arizona ? one of the most regressive states in the union ? are now unhappy because
their highway rest stops have been eliminated due to the state?s fiscal crisis. I just
want to grab these people and shake them by the shoulders, politely suggesting to
them that next time they have to pull over in the desert sands between Tucson and
Phoenix and squat by the side of the road, they might want to give a thought or two
to all the money they pissed away in another desert, this one in Mesopotamia.
Likewise, people are now also starting to whine about schools closing and prisoners
being released from jail, also because of budget slashing. And I just want to ask
those bright folks whether they still think all those tax cuts for the already
outrageously wealthy plutocracy were such a good idea in retrospect, after all.

This is just the tip of the spear. American government is in the process of imploding,
and it won?t be long until the pathetically minuscule social safety net that we have will
be shredded as well. Stupid voters who turn to the Republican Party in the next two
election cycles will be outraged at the GOP if it does what it says it will do and slashes
social spending. And, of course, they will be equally outraged if the Republicans
don?t. It just doesn?t seem to occur to these folks that you have to pay for
government services. And why should it, really? The GOP have been selling the magic
of free government since Ronald Reagan brought voodoo economics to the national
stage in 1980, nearly quadrupling the national debt in the process.

And when the financial voodoo remedies somehow amazingly fail to entice the gods
sufficiently to redeem the disaster that is American fiscal policy, desperate political
invocations and supplications to the deities du jour are sure to follow. In fact, they
began long ago. Term limits? Swell! No tax increase pledges? Cool! Tea parties? What
a great idea! Ross Perot and his binders full of government plans gathering dusts on
the shelves of bureaucracies all across Washington? Brilliant! Deregulation? Of
course! Let the market fix everything! Privatization? Why have a government when
you can buy a lousier one for a lot more money, so that profits can be extracted?
Hey, and while we?re at it, why not pretend to fund our schools as the pretext for
government-sponsored gambling through lotteries? Excellent! That?s a threefer! Bad
schools, government-induced addiction, and a rip-off of the public?s money.

The American public is in oscillating parachute mode right now, and my guess is that
it?s going to get worse. Like a desperate patient with a potentially terminal illness, we
careen from one panacea to the next, hoping that the laws of political physics can
somehow be suspended if we just wish it earnestly enough. In observing this pathetic
sight, I am reminded of nothing so much as a cranky adolescent who expends ten
times the energy and grief to avoid doing his math assignment as it would take to
just sit down for twenty minutes and crank it out.

That?s the funny thing about the American political malaise. Some of the changes
most necessary for our rescue would not only be easy, they?d be way cheaper than
free. This country could solve ninety percent of its problems by the simple act of
getting money out of politics and thereby (re)turning the American government into
being an instrument for the benefit of the public, rather than a servant for
aggregating wealth on behalf of a predatory plutocracy. Among the immediate
benefits such a change might be expected to realize would be precipitous drops in
military spending and corporate welfare, along with a serious rise in revenues from a
tax system that required the rich to actually pay their share. In other words, for no
cost to the individual American other than getting up off their couches and actually
demanding government for the people rather than for the people?s vampires, the
public could right the ship of state and probably even get a beloved tax cut out of
the deal. But, alas, there is that couch to keep warm...

Really, I?m afraid the kindest thing you can say about America today is that it is so
not a serious country anymore. Churchill joked that you can always count on America
to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all the other possibilities. I?m down with
the second half of the equation, but unfortunately growing increasingly dubious
about the first.

Let?s assume, for the sake of argument, that there is no substantial economic
recovery ? measured in jobs, not GDP or the Dow or Wall Street bonuses ? in the
coming years. I regret to say that I think that?s a pretty safe assumption. The
abandonment of workers in America that we?re seeing today is a the final (we hope)
result of a decades-long relentless pursuit of profits in the name of overclass greed
?ber alles. Who cares about American workers if you can do a job cheaper with a
machine? Why give a shit about shutting down entire communities if you can export
those jobs overseas at a fraction of the cost? Sorry too about those trade treaties that
only helped to exacerbate that tendency! Oh, and too bad we don?t have any money
to dump into community redevelopment or schools or infrastructure. Gots to do tax
cuts for the rich instead. Gots to keep our priorities straight, you know?

In short, we?ve worked pretty hard these last decades to destroy the American middle
class and to hammer the working class and poor, all because the folks who were
really rich decided about thirty years ago that they instead deserved to be
fantastically rich. And, lo and behold, it?s worked! The good years of the mid-
twentieth century in America are now going, in the long view of history, from being a
foundation to a continuing and improved future to instead becoming an historical
anomaly. It was a blip, in between the normal of gross disparities of wealth that
came before it and after it. A thirty year party. A generational experiment that went
badly awry for the boss class, ?til they returned to clean up the mess.

But it?s hard to give it up, especially since nobody told us it was a one-time deal.
Ironically, our decline based on class thievery soon became become the perfect
condition for its own amplified replication, as the regressive movement in America,
starting with Reagan, began marketing an exacerbation of this effect, masked as just
its opposite and channeling the fear and rage of economic insecurity into hatred and
violence toward brown people, gays, women, etc. Aided and abetted by an
?opposition? party that went from consternation to crash to concussion to confusion to
compliance to co-optation to collaboration and then finally to clones, the process has
been really quite remarkable for its diabolical ingeniousness and its near complete
success.

Emphasis on the word ?near?, though. It?s not over yet, and this is where I think we
begin to get into some really scary territory, and where Churchill?s formula may well
break down. This is a country steeped in violence, political stupidity, racism, sexism,
homophobia, and beliefs in every kind of magic, including ? especially ? religion. It
feels in my gut, right now, like a very combustible collection of tinder, and I don?t
imagine the revolution, if it comes, will be a particularly progressive one.

I would expect the Democratic Party to get annihilated in the next two election
cycles. Assuming people will even wait that long for serious change, that brings
Sarah Palin, or her equivalent, and gang to power three years from now.

Consider their choices as they take control of the government.

If this new regime does nothing, or reverts to the GOP?s previous form of spending
more, taxing less and borrowing like crazy, they will solve nothing, and will be tossed
out (again) like the Democrats before them.

If they govern like they actually say they will, they will slash spending on social
programs, angering the public furiously, and completely alienating their only real
remaining base, old white people.

Which leaves, to my mind, only a third option, kinda like the one Hitler brought to the
Weimar Republic, then suffering from similar tendencies toward economic despair,
political oscillation and ineffective governance.
That?s pretty drastic, but I guess it comes down to the question of just what one
thinks these people are capable of.

As for me, I say keep you passport current.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New
York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles
(dmg at regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow
him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net.


From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 17:41:13 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:41:13 +0100
Subject: [THS] !!! The inspiring example of Evo Morales` Bolivian government
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309173906.04762388@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24940.htm

Bolivia, A Beacon of Hope

The inspiring example of Evo Morales' Bolivian government

By Matt Kennard

March 08, 2010 "The Guardian" - - There's a game I've been playing recently. Any
time I read the news and get depressed about the parlous state of our world, I type
"Bolivia" into Google news and wait for the results. It's really all you need to brighten
up your day.

In the last month things such as this have popped up: Bolivian women spearhead
Morales revolution, which describes the decision by Bolivia's president, Evo Morales,
to stock half his new cabinet with women, nearly half of them indigenous. More
recently there was this: Bolivian president donates half pay to victims, which detailed
Morales and his vice president Alvaro Garc?a's decision to donate half their March
salaries to help the victims of the Haiti and Chile earthquakes.

What is happening in Bolivia now - and has been since MAS, or Movimiento al
Socalismo, came to power in 2005 - is truly inspiring. There has been a lot of talk
about how the left is dead and Francis Fukayama's "End of History" means we all
have to accept that a global economic system that creates obscene inequalities and
mass starvation is the highest stage of social and economic organisation our species
can attain.

That might be true for an academic at Johns Hopkins, but for everyone else looking
to the future and something to fight for, I ask them to kindly divert their gaze to
Bolivia. It is the closest thing we have to real democratic socialism: a government, but
more importantly a grassroots movement, committed to economic and gender
equality, anti-racism, free speech and every other ideal the left should hold dear.

In December last year MAS won their second five-year term with 67% of the public
vote, more than double the percentage won by their nearest opponent, Manfred
Reyes Villa. The re-election of an incumbent was particularly exceptional in Bolivia. A
country often dismissed by regional experts as "ungovernable" due to its bloody
history of military coups and mass public protests, it has seen only a handful of
presidents complete their terms in office. The FT now calls Morales "one of Latin
America's most popular leaders".

Morales's landslide victory was a clear sign of public support for the present
administration and the extensive social reforms they have implemented. On coming
to power in 2005, Morales pledged to see through a "democratic revolution" in an
attempt to alleviate poverty in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. The
democratic revolution had its genesis in 2000 in what were called the "water wars",
centred in the city of Cochabamba. The water industry had just been privatised with
the help of the neoliberal government and the IMF and was run now by the US
corporation Bechtel.

Prices soared and police were even instructed to arrest people collecting rainwater to
bypass the new prices. The indigenous community was up in arms and Bechtel was
forced out by the local communities. The indigenous movement, which is based
around small micro-democratic communities, went on to blockade La Paz. The
government shot dead a score of protesters in 2005, before the presidential
incumbent was forced out and fled to Miami.

When Morales was elected he became the country's first indigenous president and
his party embarked on a programme of "decolonising the state". For Latin America,
the election of an indigenous leader had the same poignancy as Barack Obama's
election in the US.

Throughout his mandate Morales has determinedly pursued a programme of social
change, including the part-nationalisation of the country's energy resources and a
surge in social spending that has focused on conditional cash transfers (whereby
payments have been made to poor families on the condition that they send their
children to school.) These measures have seen Bolivia record a fiscal surplus for the
first time in 30 years; the country has been predicted a higher growth rate this year
than anywhere else in the Americas; and poverty levels have dropped continually
since MAS came to power. Even the head of the IMF's western hemisphere countries
unit has praised the Morales government for what he referred to as its "very
responsible" macroeconomic policies.

The backbone of Morales's reform programme was the creation of a new Bolivian
constitution, which was ratified by a public referendum in 2009. Morales has signalled
that he will make the implementation of the new constitution his main legislative
priority at the start of his second term. In a country that is often compared to
apartheid South Africa, as the stark divisions of poverty and inequality are marked
along racial lines, this constitution represents Bolivia's Freedom Charter.

The texture of the modern Bolivian revolution is different to that of Hugo Ch?vez's
Venezuela. It is a much more bottom-up revolution, and Morales is kept on a tight
leash by the democratic movement that was behind his rise to power in a way Ch?vez
isn't. As you look to our election battle between a Labour government that has been
in power for 13 years and allowed inequality to worsen and a Conservative cabinet
full of reactionary Old Etonians, it's easy to despair. But when you do, look to Bolivia.
The future lies in that small landlocked Latin American country of 9 million people.

? 2010 Guardian News and Media Limited





From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 18:38:48 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:38:48 +0100
Subject: [THS] Proof that 9/11 Truthers Are Dangerous
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309183452.04762070@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24942.htm

[[embedded links at url above]]

Proof that 9/11 Truthers Are Dangerous

By Washington's Blog

March 08, 2010 "Washington's Blog" --  Most Americans don't know what kind of
people 9/11 truthers really are. So they can't figure out whether or not they are
dangerous.

Below is a list of people who question what our Government has said about 9/11.

The list proves - once and for all - that people who question 9/11 are dangerous.

Email this list to everyone you know, to prove to them that 9/11 truthers are all
dangerous nut cases.

Senior intelligence officers:

    * Former military analyst and famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that the
case of a certain 9/11 whistleblower is "far more explosive than the Pentagon
Papers". He also said that the government is ordering the media to cover up her
allegations about 9/11. And he said that some of the claims concerning government
involvement in 9/11 are credible, that "very serious questions have been raised about
what they [U.S. government officials] knew beforehand and how much involvement
there might have been", that engineering 9/11 would not be humanly or
psychologically beyond the scope of the current administration, and that there's
enough evidence to justify a new, "hard-hitting" investigation into 9/11 with
subpoenas and testimony taken under oath.

    * A 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and
personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
many other senior government officials (Raymond McGovern) said ?I think at simplest
terms, there?s a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke?, and is open to the possibility
that 9/11 was an inside job.

    * A 29-year CIA veteran, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former
Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis (William Bill Christison)
said ?I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not
unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe. ...
All three [buildings that were destroyed in the World Trade Center] were most
probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings before
9/11." (and see this: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Christison14.htm).

    * A number of intelligence officials, including a CIA Operations Officer who co-
chaired a CIA multi-agency task force coordinating intelligence efforts among many
intelligence and law enforcement agencies (Lynne Larkin) sent a joint letter to
Congress expressing their concerns about ?serious shortcomings,? ?omissions,? and
?major flaws? in the 9/11 Commission Report and offering their services for a new
investigation (they were ignored)

    * 20-year Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer, the second-ranking civilian
in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer
(David Steele) stated that "9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for
war", and it was probably an inside job (scroll down to Customer Review dated
October 7, 2006).

    * A decorated 20-year CIA veteran, who Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh called "perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the
Middle East?, and whose astounding career formed the script for the Academy Award
winning motion picture Syriana (Robert Baer) said that "the evidence points at" 9/11
having had aspects of being an inside job


    * The Division Chief of the CIA?s Office of Soviet Affairs, who served as Senior
Analyst from 1966 - 1990. He also served as Professor of International Security at the
National War College from 1986 - 2004 (Melvin Goodman) said "The final [9/11
Commission] report is ultimately a coverup."

    * Professor of History and International Relations, University of Maryland. Former
Executive Assistant to the Director of the National Security Agency, former military
attach? in China, with a 21-year career in U.S. Army Intelligence (Major John M.
Newman, PhD, U.S. Army) questions the government's version of the events of 9/11.

Congressmen:

    * According to the Co-Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 and former
Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, an FBI informant had
hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry
sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an
unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers
were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here)

    * Current Democratic U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy said "The two questions that the
congress will not ask . . . is why did 9/11 happen on George Bush's watch when he
had clear warnings that it was going to happen? Why did they allow it to happen?"

    * Current Republican Congressman Ron Paul calls for a new 9/11 investigation and
states that "we see the [9/11] investigations that have been done so far as more or
less cover-up and no real explanation of what went on"

    * Current Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich hints that we aren't being told
the truth about 9/11

    * Current Republican Congressman Jason Chafetz says that we need to be vigilant
and continue to investigate 9/11

    * Former Democratic Senator Mike Gravel states that he supports a new 9/11
investigation and that we don't know the truth about 9/11

    * Former Republican Senator Lincoln Chaffee endorses a new 9/11 investigation

    * Former U.S. Democratic Congressman Dan Hamburg says that the U.S.
government "assisted" in the 9/11 attacks, stating that "I think there was a lot of help
from the inside"

    * Former U.S. Republican Congressman and senior member of the House Armed
Services Committee, and who served six years as the Chairman of the Military
Research and Development Subcommittee Curt Weldon has shown that the U.S.
tracked hijackers before 9/11, is open to hearing information about explosives in the
Twin Towers, and is open to the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job

9/11 Commissioners:


    * The Commission's co-chairs said that the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military
officials misrepresented the facts to the Commission, and the Commission considered
recommending criminal charges for such false statements (free subscription required)

    * 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton says "I don't believe for a minute we got
everything right", that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep
asking questions about 9/11, and that the 9/11 debate should continue

    * 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said "We were extremely frustrated with the
false statements we were getting"

    * 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: "It is a
national scandal"; "This investigation is now compromised"; and "One of these days
we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America.
But this White House wants to cover it up"

    * 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that "There are ample reasons to suspect
that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn't
have access . . . ."

    * And the Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) - who led the
9/11 staff's inquiry - recently said "At some level of the government, at some point in
time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened". He also
said "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described ....
The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the
public for two years.... This is not spin. This is not true."

Other government officials:

    * U.S. General, Commanding General of U.S. European Command and Supreme
Allied Commander Europe, decorated with the Bronze Star, Silver Star, and Purple
Heart (General Wesley Clark) said "We've never finished the investigation of 9/11 and
whether the administration actually misused the intelligence information it had. The
evidence seems pretty clear to me. I've seen that for a long time."

    * Former Deputy Secretary for Intelligence and Warning under Nixon, Ford, and
Carter (Morton Goulder), former Deputy Director to the White House Task Force on
Terrorism (Edward L. Peck), and former US Department of State Foreign Service
Officer (J. Michael Springmann), as well as a who's who of liberals and independents)
jointly call for a new investigation into 9/11

    * Former Federal Prosecutor, Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of
Justice under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan; former U.S. Army
Intelligence officer, and currently a widely-sought media commentator on terrorism
and intelligence services (John Loftus) says "The information provided by European
intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for
either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence."

    * The Group Director on matters of national security in the U.S. Government
Accountability Office said that President Bush did not respond to unprecedented
warnings of the 9/11 disaster and conducted a massive cover-up instead of accepting
responsibility

    * President of the U.S. Air Force Accident Investigation Board, who also served as
Pentagon Weapons Requirement Officer and as a member of the Pentagon's
Quadrennial Defense Review, and who was awarded Distinguished Flying Crosses for
Heroism, four Air Medals, four Meritorious Service Medals, and nine Aerial
Achievement Medals (Lt. Col. Jeff Latas) is a member of a group which doubts the
government's version of 9/11

    * Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan (Col.
Ronald D. Ray) said that the official story of 9/11 is "the dog that doesn't hunt"

    * The former director of the FBI (Louis Freeh) says there was a cover up by the
9/11 Commission

    * Director of the U.S. "Star Wars" space defense program in both Republican and
Democratic administrations, who was a senior air force colonel who flew 101 combat
missions (Col. Robert Bowman) stated: "If our government had merely [done]
nothing, and I say that as an old interceptor pilot?I know the drill, I know what it
takes, I know how long it takes, I know what the procedures are, I know what they
were, and I know what they?ve changed them to?if our government had merely
done nothing, and allowed normal procedures to happen on that morning of 9/11,
the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead Americans would still
be alive. [T]hat is treason!"

Numerous other politicians, judges, legal scholars, and attorneys also question at
least some aspects of the government's version of 9/11.





From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 18:42:18 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:42:18 +0100
Subject: [THS] Economist Lewis Black Tells It Like It Is
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309184207.04761de0@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24937.htm

Economist Lewis Black Tells It Like It Is

By Mike Ferner

March 08, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --  ADULT CONTENT WARNING: If
you're not familiar with Lewis Black, I'd turn back if I were you.

Lewis Black is funny. Dangerously funny. That he has such a large audience and still
packs plenty of politics in his shtick gives one hope for the fate of our sorry species.
So I figured it's time I learned something from him.

What I've learned is that since a million more of you pricks out there watch him than
will ever read my stuff, I'm done with all the painstaking research and putting in links
to original sources so you can see that I'm not making it all up. I don't have time any
more. We're killing people in more countries than I can count and YOU want me to
be fair and balanced and plus show you where all this shit comes from. Well, I'm
sorry...if you don't believe me, LOOK THIS SHIT UP FOR YOURSELF!!

Here's a perfectly good example.

My favorite Lewis Black show is a Broadway HBO special from probably 10 years ago
that I have on perfectly good VHS - YES, VHS - not one of those goddamnUSELESS
DVDs that get stuck over and over and over and break up into crazy little squares
whenever they want and some day will be more of a goddamn JOKE than 8-Track
cassette tapes - he talks about what it would take to get the economy going after
those greedy little shits from Enron and Global Crossing and Tyco made off with
billions and threw thousands upon thousands out of work.

Then Lewis made a very courageous statement: "The economy goes up. The
economy goes down. The economy goes up. The economy goes
down...up...down...up...and NOBODY KNOWS WHY THE FUCK IT DOES!"

"THAT is really FUNNY," I thought! And that's what I've believed. Until last week. I
was listening to NPR and a reporter was talking with the economist de jour about
how to get the economy going after those greedy little shits from AIG and Citicorp
and Goldman-Sachs made off with trillions and threw MILLIONS out of work...and
there...right THERE on NationalPetroleumfuckingRadio the economist says, "Well, you
know, Linda, nobody really knows what makes the economy do what it does..."

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!! So in other words, those greedy bastards in the Republican
Party and those spineless bastards in the Democratic Party really have NO IDEA if tax
cuts and bailouts will stimulate the economy! For all we know, we should be doing
what Lewis said 10 years ago - enact a big, massive jobs program, put millions of
people to work building transit systems or health clinics or parks or any fucking thing.
As long as it's BIG and it's a fuckingTHING...and THAT would STIMULATE THE
ECONOMY, TOOOO!!!

You may think that's just a broad, sweeping generalization made by some smartass
comedian trying to sound like an economist. But it's true. Just like Lewis said, think of
all the BIGFUCKING THINGS you've seen built over the years and ask yourself if
pretty soon there wasn't a BIGFUCKING RESTAURANT and a BIGFUCKING MOTEL
and a BIGFUCKING CASINO and BIGFUCKING SPA. You KNOW it works like that!

And here's another one. Lewis didn't say it, I did. Or rather, some economist, who's
name I can't remember, said it a meeting in Pittsburgh last year. If you add up all
the college tuition costs in the entire country, you'd find they equal less than 5% of
what we've spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan war so far. Five percent!!!

FIVEgoddamnperCENT!! of what we've pissed away in the sand, killing millions of
people, ruining the environment, making a good part of the world's population HATE
OUR GUTS...five percent of that would pay every single college tuition in the United
States!! HowffffuckingSTUPID is THAT!?!??

OK, so I can't remember if that was all college tuitions or just tuition for public
colleges. If you don't believe me, go look it up for yourself - there's only so much
research I can do out of one bloodshot eye - and DON'T expect me to put in any
links to the Dept. of Goddamn Education for you to just click and forget.

And here's another one! Every so often you'll hear of some politician - usually one
who's got a death wish or is never going to run for office again - suggesting that just
MAYBE we might just CONSIDER some kind of new tax so we can start PAYING for all
these FUCKING WARS!! If Lewis wants to use that one he can have it and I promise I
won't sue as long as he keeps his flying monkeys off me.

The reason I like the war tax idea is because it saves a lot of time...I mean a LOT of
time. Why, the other day, I had just BEGUN thinking about it and within MINUTES I
had graphs and tables and links upon links spinning before my eyes...coming at me
from every direction. And I said ENOUGH!! ENOUGH!!! Let those little bastards look it
up On. Their. Own!!! Here's how.

Pick up your local newspaper if you've still got one. Or one of those national ones
always sitting around in airports and freeway rest stops - god knows we don't have
an TRAIN stations worth mentioning - but don't get me started!!

If it's your local paper - and maybe you'll have to wait till next Wednesday when it
makes its weekly appearance - I'll give you FIVE TO ONE odds on
any...ANY!...amount of money you want to bet, that somewhere in that paper will be
a story of a library near you, or school system or mental health agency or fire
department or transit system that's going broke and will probably be asking for a tax
increase any day now. If it's a national paper it'll have the exact same story in it, only
the numbers will be bigger.

If you want to do some really FANCY research, here's what you do: you pick up the
phone and call your city government. If there's still anybody there to answer the
phone, ask them this simple question. "Did we used to get federal money for things
like water plants or sewer plants or housing programs or health departments, say 20"
or - make it easy on them - "10 years ago that we don't get now?"

You'll probably hear a couple minutes of silence. Don't worry. They're just in the
bathroom changing their pants because they LAUGHED so fucking hard they couldn't
control their BLADDER! And they'll say: "ARE YOU CRAZY?? ARE YOU
FUCKINGCRAZYORSOMETHING??!!?? IS YOUR HEAD FAR ENOUGH UP YOUR ASS
YOU CAN TASTE BRYLCREEM YET?! EXACTLY WHAT DO YOU THINK HAS BEEN
GOING ON IN THIS COUNTRY??!!

After their aneurism passes, they'll maybe apologize and say something a little more
subdued like, "Well, OK. I guess I can understand. It's not as if you've had much of a
chance to hear about where all the money's been going. What with
BigFootDopplerRadar weather reports, commercials, sports and murders committed
halfway across the country, there's only about two minutes for hometown fires and
stabbings on the local news. But take my word. We don't get JACK from the feds any
more."

And you'll have to take their word for it because you are probably talking with the last
human being still working for your city and they're getting laid off next week. So if
you don't believe them, guess what? YOU'LL HAVE TO LOOK IT UP YOURSELF!!!

But it's true. Every bit of it. I can tell you firsthand from my own gloriously brief
career as an elected official 20 years ago when bullshit like Trickle Down Economics
started rolling downhill BIG time. Here's just one example.

We had a huge problem, just like every other city in this part of the country, because
every time it rained our sewage plant would burp millions of gallons of...well,
crap...into Lake Erie.

Fixing it cost MILLIONS. The EPA paid for the first phase, even though it sucked up
almost all the money for that kind of work in Ohio. For Phase II, we split the cost
between the city and the feds. The latest and biggest phase, required a public vote
for a 15-YEAR, 450 MILLION DOLLAR RATE HIKE! ALL of it...every goddamn DOLLAR,
comes out of our pockets! So WHY didn't local officials add a little line to sewer bills,
right there, just above the Total Amount Due, called "PLUS THIS MUCH MORE SO WE
CAN INVADE ANOTHER GODDAMN COUNTRY!!" with a big fucking EXCLAMATION
POINT - TWO OF 'EM - to let people know who's been SHOVING IT UP THEIR
ASS??!!

No, instead, it gets piled on top of a little more tax for schools and a little more library
tax and a little higher bus fare and a little more...YOU know what I mean...do I have
to paint you a GODDAMNPICTURE? Then when everything's really going down the
shitter your city lays off police and firefighters! And I'd make a joke about THAT,
except Lewis does it so much better when he says, "Cops? Nah...who needs 'em?!
And firefighters? Hell...we ALL know it's a lot more fun to just sit back and watch shit
burn down!"

It's all true. I swear. Go look it up for yourself.

Mike Ferner claims to be a writer from Ohio. You can look it up here.


From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 18:45:48 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:45:48 +0100
Subject: [THS] Netanyahu: My father foresaw 9/11 attacks in 1990s
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309184450.04761b50@spamarrest.com>

http://presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=120347&sectionid=351020202

['foresaw' might not quite be the most accurate term]

Netanyahu: My father foresaw 9/11 attacks in 1990s
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:32:05 GMT

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that his father predicted the 9/11
attacks on New York's twin towers back in the '90s.

The remark was made during the 100th birthday celebration of the premier's father,
Benzion Netanyahu, Haaretz reported.

The Israeli prime minister added that those who do not know their past will not
understand their presence and will not be able to predict their future.

Benzion Netanyahu is an Israeli historian and Zionist activist.



From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 19:48:35 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:48:35 +0100
Subject: [THS] U.S. Government Poisoned Alcohol
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309194813.043b4d88@mail.messagingengine.com>

Pubdate: Fri, 19 Feb 2010
Source: Slate (US Web)
Webpage: http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/
Copyright: 2010 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Contact: letters at slate.com
Website: http://www.slate.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/982
Author: Deborah Blum
Note: Deborah Blum is a professor of science journalism at the 
University of Wisconsin and author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder 
and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.

THE CHEMIST'S WAR

The Little-Told Story of How the U.S. Government Poisoned Alcohol 
During Prohibition With Deadly Consequences.

It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, 
when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room 
at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with 
fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, 
wielding a baseball bat.

Before hospital staff realized how sick he was--the alcohol-induced 
hallucination was just a symptom--the man died. So did another 
holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the 
hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by 
alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 
23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of 
life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called 
gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills 
frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this 
outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would 
shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even 
after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different 
kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial 
alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen 
by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare 
people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time 
Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some 
estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" 
remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American 
law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, 
Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during 
the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in 
extermination." Poisonous alcohol still kills--16 people died just 
this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where 
bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes--but that's due 
to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.

I learned of the federal poisoning program while researching my new 
book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which is set in jazz-age New York. My 
first reaction was that I must have gotten it wrong. "I never heard 
that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?" I 
kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues.

I did, however, remember the U.S. government's controversial decision 
in the 1970s to spray Mexican marijuana fields with Paraquat, an 
herbicide. Its use was primarily intended to destroy crops, but 
government officials also insisted that awareness of the toxin would 
deter marijuana smokers. They echoed the official position of the 
1920s--if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they'd brought it 
upon themselves. Although Paraquat wasn't really all that toxic, the 
outcry forced the government to drop the plan. Still, the incident 
created an unsurprising lack of trust in government motives, which 
reveals itself in the occasional rumors circulating today that 
federal agencies, such as the CIA, mix poison into the illegal drug supply.

During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept 
the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized 
in 1927: "Normally, no American government would engage in such 
business. ... It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition 
that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified." Others, 
however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in 
cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their 
law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. "Must Uncle 
Sam guarantee safety first for souses?" asked Nebraska's Omaha Bee.

The saga began with ratification of the 18th Amendment, which banned 
the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages in 
the United States.* High-minded crusaders and anti-alcohol 
organizations had helped push the amendment through in 1919, playing 
on fears of moral decay in a country just emerging from war. The 
Volstead Act, spelling out the rules for enforcement, passed shortly 
later, and Prohibition itself went into effect on Jan. 1, 1920.

But people continued to drink--and in large quantities. Alcoholism 
rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the 
increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened 
for business. By the decade's end, some 30,000 existed in New York 
City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on 
smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country's 
defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and 
naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of 
upright behavior.

Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol 
from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by 
stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol--used in paints and 
solvents, fuels and medical supplies--and redistilling it to make it potable.

Well, sort of. Industrial alcohol is basically grain alcohol with 
some unpleasant chemicals mixed in to render it undrinkable. The U.S. 
government started requiring this "denaturing" process in 1906 for 
manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable 
spirits. The U.S. Treasury Department, charged with overseeing 
alcohol enforcement, estimated that by the mid-1920s, some 60 million 
gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually to supply the 
country's drinkers. In response, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge's 
government decided to turn to chemistry as an enforcement tool. Some 
70 denaturing formulas existed by the 1920s. Most simply added 
poisonous methyl alcohol into the mix. Others used bitter-tasting 
compounds that were less lethal, designed to make the alcohol taste 
so awful that it became undrinkable.

To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed 
chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable 
state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the 
government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and 
redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the 
country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their 
products far more deadly.

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable 
poisons--kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to 
strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, 
nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, 
quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more 
methyl alcohol be added--up to 10 percent of total product. It was 
the last that proved most deadly.

The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body 
count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded 
with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by 
putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles 
Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it 
continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people 
determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to 
be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral 
responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although 
it cannot be held legally responsible."

His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in 
whiskey circulating in the city: "[P]ractically all the liquor that 
is sold in New York today is toxic," read one 1928 alert. He 
publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his 
toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for 
poisons--that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from 
studies done by the New York City medical examiner's office.

Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate 
effect on the country's poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed 
out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened 
and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal 
in low grade stuff."

And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 
were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, 
deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around 
the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry 
clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the 
use of lethal chemistry. "Only one possessing the instincts of a wild 
beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of 
liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition 
statutes," proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.

Officially, the special denaturing program ended only once the 18th 
Amendment was repealed in December 1933. But the chemist's war itself 
faded away before then. Slowly, government officials quit talking 
about it. And when Prohibition ended and good grain whiskey 
reappeared, it was almost as if the craziness of Prohibition--and the 
poisonous measures taken to enforce it--had never quite happened.

* Correction, Feb. 22, 2010: The article originally and incorrectly 
said that the 18th Amendment banned the sale and consumption of 
alcohol. It banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of 
alcohol, not consumption.
________________________________________________________________________


From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 19:52:27 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:52:27 +0100
Subject: [THS] How The War On Drugs Can Kill
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309195206.04c13d48@mail.messagingengine.com>

Pubdate: Sat, 27 Feb 2010
Source: Guardian, The (CN PI)
Webpage: http://mapinc.org/url/MdubBAp6
Copyright: 2010 The Guardian, Charlottetown Guardian Group Incorporated
Contact: letters at theguardian.pe.ca
Website: http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/174
Author: Jennifer Abel

HOW THE 'WAR ON DRUGS' CAN KILL

During prohibition, the US government poisoned alcohol. Such punitive
zeal is seen in today's 'war on drugs'

In America there are plenty of scare stories about the "obesity
epidemic", which is caused by too many Yanks eating too much junk
food, and does bad things to public-health statistics. Clearly this
obesity problem needs solving, and here's how: poison the nation's
sugar and fat supply so anyone who eats too much will immediately drop
dead, and serve as a warning to children and other
impressionables.

Why not? Last week, science writer Deborah Blum reported the US
government pulled a similar stunt during prohibition, only with
alcohol rather than sweets. Since bootleggers often stole
industrial-grade alcohol to resell in drinkable form, the feds figured
they'd dissuade potential customers by ordering industrial alcohol
manufacturers to spike their wares with poison. Over Christmas 1926
the toxic hooch killed 31 partygoers in New York City alone; estimates
for the poison programme's total death toll go as high as 10,000.

Killing people to enforce a law ostensibly for their own good: it's
like the punitive zeal that applies to America's "war on drugs".
Harm-reduction measures are always shot down by the drug warriors, who
fear such initiatives as needle-exchange programmes, pharmaceutical
heroin, and testing in nightclubs to ensure drugs aren't contaminated
"send the wrong message" - but they must know that without them, bad
consequences of drug use are more likely. Where drug warriors are
concerned, reducing the rate of contagion of diseases such as Aids or
hepatitis isn't nearly as important as sending the message: "Drugs are
bad, OK?"

Even if you favour the argument that "drug users are lawbreakers by
definition, and who cares what happens to criminals?" it still raises
the question: why do crimes of intoxication inspire such governmental
extremes? The feds don't booby-trap houses to kill burglars. Murder
and rape are serious crimes, but convictions won't disqualify you for
college financial aid, whereas a drug conviction just might.
Non-violent drug offences can carry criminal penalties higher than
those for theft, assault and even murder: the "Preppie Killer" Robert
Chambers got 15 years in prison for strangling a young woman to death
in 1986. He faced a much stiffer sentence for selling cocaine: he
plea-bargained for 19 years rather than risk being sentenced to life.

What rationale makes authorities believe selling illicit powder warrants
a higher penalty than strangling the life out of a person? Is it simply
that people who take drugs are seen as misfits? As Aldous Huxley wrote
in Brave New World:

"No offence is as heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills
only the individual - and after all, what is an individual? We can
make a new one with the greatest ease - as many as we like.
Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it
strikes at Society itself."

It requires no propaganda, let alone dangerous traps, to convince
people that murder, assault or theft should be crimes; those tricks
justify crimes not against individuals or even property, but the
nebulous victim named "society."

In the 1920s, when prohibition ruled the day, we had over 100 million
individuals living in America. Today there are over 300 million, with
more arriving each day. So what is an individual? We can get as many
new ones as we like. But unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a
mere individual; it strikes at society itself. 
________________________________________________________________________


From psalience at fastmail.fm  Tue Mar  9 23:44:10 2010
From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster)
Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:44:10 +0100
Subject: [THS] Collapse of the American Empire: Swift, Silent, Certain
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309233912.042f6da8@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24949.htm

Collapse of the American Empire: Swift, Silent, Certain

Commentary: Historians warning of a sudden 'thief at night,' an 'accelerating car
crash'

By Paul B. Farrell,

March 09, 2010 "MarketWatch" -- "One of the disturbing facts of history is that so
many civilizations collapse," warns anthropologist Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Many "civilizations share a sharp curve of
decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches
its peak population, wealth and power."

Now, Harvard's Niall Ferguson, one of the world's leading financial historians, echoes
Diamond's warning: "Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many
historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests
that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice." Yes, America is on
the edge.

Dismiss his warning at your peril. Everything you learned, everything you believe and
everything driving our political leaders is based on a misleading, outdated theory of
history. The American Empire is at the edge of a dangerous precipice, at risk of a
sudden, rapid collapse.

Ferguson is brilliant, prolific and contrarian. His works include the recent "Ascent of
Money: A Financial History of the World;" "The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the
Modern World;" "Colossus: The Rise and Fall of The American Empire;" and "The
War of the World," a survey of the "savagery of the 20th century" where he
highlights a profound "paradox that, though the 20th century was 'so bloody,' it was
also 'a time of unparalleled progress.'"

Why? Throughout history imperial leaders inevitably emerge and drive their nations
into wars for greater glory and "economic progress," while inevitably leading their
nation into collapse. And that happens suddenly and swiftly, within "a decade or
two."

You'll find Ferguson's latest work, "Collapse and Complexity: Empires on the Edge of
Chaos," in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council of Foreign Relations, a
nonpartisan think tank. His message negates all the happy talk you're hearing in
today's news -- about economic recovery and new bull markets, about "hope," about
a return to "American greatness" -- from Washington politicians and Wall Street
bankers.

'Collapse of All Empires:' 5 stages repeating through the ages

Ferguson opens with a fascinating metaphor: "There is no better illustration of the
life cycle of a great power than 'The Course of Empire,' a series of five paintings by
Thomas Cole that hangs in the New York Historical Society. Cole was a founder of the
Hudson River School and one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century American
landscape painting; in 'The Course of Empire,' he beautifully captured a theory of
imperial rise and fall to which most people remain in thrall to this day. Each of the
five imagined scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop."

If you're unable to see them at the historical society, they're all reproduced in Foreign
Affairs, underscoring Ferguson's warnings that the "American Empire on the
precipice," near collapse.

First. 'The Savage State,' before the Empire rises

"In the first, 'The Savage State,' a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of
hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn."
Imagine our history from Columbus' discovery of America in 1492 on through four
more centuries as we savagely expanded across the continent.

Second. 'The Arcadian or Pastoral State,' as the American Empire flourishes

"The second picture, 'The Arcadian or Pastoral State,' is of an agrarian idyll: the
inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields, and built an elegant Greek
temple." The temple may seem out of place. However, Cole's paintings were done in
1833-1836, not long after Thomas Jefferson built the University of Virginia using
classical Greek and Roman revival architecture.

As Ferguson continues the tour you sense you're actually inside the New York
Historical Society, visually reminded of how history's great cycles do indeed repeat
over and over. You are also reminded of one of history's great tragic ironies -- that all
nations fail to learn the lessons of history, that all nations and their leaders fall prey to
their own narcissistic hubris and that all eventually collapse from within.
Third. Consummation of the American Empire

"The third and largest of the paintings is 'The Consummation of Empire.' Now, the
landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrep?t, and the contented farmer-
philosophers of the previous tableau have been replaced by a throng of opulently
clad merchants, proconsuls and citizen-consumers. It is midday in the life cycle."

'The Consummation of Empire' focuses us on Ferguson's core message: At the very
peak of their power, affluence and glory, leaders arise, run amok with imperial visions
and sabotage themselves, their people and their nation. They have it all.

But more-is-not enough as greed, arrogance and a thirst for power consume them.
Back in the early days of the Iraq war, Kevin Phillips, political historian and former
Nixon strategist, also captured this inevitable tendency in Wealth and Democracy:

"Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and
wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt,
and ultimately burning themselves out." We sense the "consummation" of the
American Empire occurred with the leadership handoff from Bill Clinton to George W.
Bush.

Unfortunately that peak is behind us: Clinton, Bush, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke,
Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and all future American leaders are merely
playing their parts in the greatest of all historical dramas, repeating but never fully
grasping the lessons of history in their insatiable drive for "economic progress," to
recapture former glory ... while unwittingly pushing our empire to the edge, into
collapse.

Four. Destruction of the Empire

Then comes 'The Destruction of Empire,' the fourth stage in Ferguson's grand drama
about the life-cycle of all empires. In "Destruction" "the city is ablaze, its citizens
fleeing an invading horde that rapes and pillages beneath a brooding evening sky."
Elsewhere in "The War of the World," Ferguson described the 20th century as "the
bloodiest in history, one hundred years of butchery." Today's high-tech relentless
news cycle, suggests that our 21st century world is a far bloodier return to savagery.

At this point, investors are asking themselves: How can I prepare for the destruction
and collapse of the American Empire? There is no solution in the Cole-Ferguson
scenario, only an acceptance of fate, of destiny, of history's inevitable cycles.

But there is one in "Wealth, War and Wisdom" by hedge fund manager Barton Biggs,
Morgan Stanley's former chief global strategist who warns us of the "possibility of a
breakdown of the civilized infrastructure," advising us to buy a farm in the
mountains.

"Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food ...
well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think
Swiss Family Robinson." And when they come looting, fire "a few rounds over the
approaching brigands' heads."

Five. Desolation ... after the Empire disappears

"Finally, the moon rises over the fifth painting, 'Desolation,'" says Ferguson. There is
not a living soul to be seen, only a few decaying columns and colonnades overgrown
by briars and ivy." No attacking "brigands?" No loveable waste-collecting robots from
Wall-E?

The good news is the Earth will naturally regenerate itself without savage humans, as
we saw in Alan Weisman's brilliant "The World Without Us:" Steel buildings decay.
Microbes eat indestructible plastics. Eons pass. And Earth reemerges in all its glory, a
Garden of Eden.

Epilogue: 'All Empires ... are condemned to decline and fall'

In a Los Angeles Times column, Ferguson asks: "America, a Fragile Empire: Here
today, gone tomorrow, could the United States fall that fast?" And his answer is clear
and emphatic: "For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the
public have tended to think about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms ...
we discern a rhythm to history. Great powers, like great men, are born, rise, reign
and then gradually wane. No matter whether civilizations decline culturally,
economically or ecologically, their downfalls are protracted."

We are deceiving ourselves, convinced "the challenges that face the United States
are often represented as slow-burning ... threats seem very remote."

"But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic?" asks Ferguson.
What if history is "at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating
suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of
centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?" What if the collapse of the
American Empire is dead ahead, in the next decade? What if, as with the 2000 dot-
com crash, we're in denial, refusing to prepare?

Ferguson's final message about America's destiny comes from Foreign Affairs:
"Conceived in the mid-1830s, Cole's great five-part painting has a clear message: all
empires, no matter how magnificent, are condemned to decline and fall."
Throughout history, empires function "in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable
period. And then, quite abruptly ... collapse," a blunt reminder of the sudden, swift,
silent, certain timetable in Diamond's "Collapse" where a "society's demise may begin
only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power."

You are forewarned: If the peak of America's glory was the leadership handoff from
Clinton to Bush, then we have already triggered the countdown to collapse, the
decade from 2010 until 2020 ... tick ... tick ... tick ...

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