News Items You Might Have Missed
Bankers’ Acceptances
A cozen of prominent money center bankers visited with President Obama on Dec. 14 to check on how well he’s been representing their interests in Washington. Three of the top execs, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, and Richard Parsons of Citigroup, missed the meeting, saying that the fog of war delayed their flights. President Obama apologized for the Washington climate and assured them that the checks were in the mail.
Drone Off
Endorsing Predator air strikes on Pakistan in a Dec. 8 editorial, the New York Times advised that they be carried out with “no publicity” since they are “hugely unpopular” with the locals. Pakistanis are objecting to what they claim are unsightly “We’re Coming to Kill You” billboards that CIA-contracted ad agencies have plastered along Waziristan goat tracks. The media campaign is expected to be suspended at the completion of the mass distribution of the “You Die” potholders that have become ubiquitous in Baluchi kitchens.
Winning Prize Lost
Accepting his Nobel peace prize, President Obama eloquently reserved his right to make war. Meanwhile, it was announced that he didn’t make the running for the Clausewitz prize, awarded to those who win wars. Sam Sun Tzu, a spokesperson for the Clausewitz committee, said that the U.S. quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan made Obama’s defense of war equivalent to the Chicago Cubs declaring their right to win pennants.
Ingrate Expectations
A member of the Honduran military junta that seized power from the elected government last summer criticized President Obama for failing to publicly endorse the coup. “All we got from the White House was a wink, a nod and tech support," complained Col. Torturo Suplicio. “Hillary and her people were a lot more forthcoming. You would think that Obama would let us crash a state dinner for crushing the threat of constitutional social democracy in our part of the world. Some people are just ingrates.”
Fee Market Advances
The financial industry, celebrating its total 24/7 access to the U.S. Treasury, is getting spiffed for another gold-plated gala. With the expected passage of “health care reform,” Americans are taking a giant step towards a Fee Market society in which they will be obliged to pre-pay a financial company to obtain medical services--and eventually to go to a supermarket, gas up the car or take in a movie. As with health care, these companies will provide no useful service, but simply collect these fees to fuel obscene compensation packages for their executives. Americans have voiced a preference for Fee Markets over socialistic systems in which people pay for goods and services directly or through their taxes without incurring separate fees.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Media for Morons
Stupid Sells
Even in such hard times that the 7-11 is looking like a luxury boutique to the ever growing minions of misery, we abide a politics that limit us to a minimum of ideas and even fewer solutions.
It’s worse than that. How many countries do you know of where stupidos form an influential, if not thoughtful, constituency? This week, the Washington Post allowed Sarah Palin, who promises to get back to us on all matters of substance, to weigh in on the Copenhagen confab. “My daddy told me about that snuff,” she reputedly said. “I hope they have enough spitoons.”
Meanwhile, NPR, America’s topical anesthetic, dispatched anchor Robert Siegel to share some warm and fuzzies with Texas teabaggers. Siegal, who reserves his snide asides for those challenging conventional wisdom, was all empathy when it came to the blitherings of these yahoos, who are to conservatism as Groucho is to Marxism.
If you have some memory cells left, you’ll recall that last summer the vidiot box was awash for days with images of these irate and inane rubes besieging pols at town meetings with mispelled banners and malapropic maledictions. Siegel may be short those cells. Instead of remembering those images, he pretended some vague and distant negative characterization of the teabaggers. Catch this exchange with Lorie Medina, a leader of the group :
SIEGEL: One association that your detractors from afar have with the Tea Parties is rowdiness. It's being willing to shout down other people.
Ms. MEDINA : Yes, definitely, definitely anger. I think some people were scared. They're scared about where the country is going, and so I think it was a lot of emotions that erupted this last summer. And I think if the politicians think that that was the end of it, I think they've got another thing coming.
SIEGEL: Is Barack Obama a lightning rod for all this? I mean, does he infuriate the people who...?
Ms. MEDINA: Yes.
SIEGEL: Yes. Why? What it is about him that annoys people so much?
Ms. MEDINA: You know, it's like I wake up every morning, and there's something new on the news that's upsetting that I read about that he does. I mean, if you said, Lorie, list for me everything that he has done that has upset you since he's become president, I don't think there's any way I could list it all. There's so much. You know, the fact that he apologizes for our country every time he goes overseas. I don't know that I've ever heard him say anything good about America. If you look at the way he speaks, the way you - he talks about our country, if you look at the programs and the things he tries to put into place, it really appears that he does not love our country like most Americans do and like past presidents do.”
Now, let’s review. NPR’s All Things Considered put its senior anchor and presumably a sound tech on a plane to Texas, paid their expenses, plus those for editing the recordings, and then inflicted the drivel they gathered on its millions of listeners. The money media get away with this by claiming that their job is not to ignore idiocy and look for truth but simply to report the news. Of course, they decide what the news is. Or rather, those decisions are made to please the same corporate sponsors who coincidentally write off the permanently lunching teabaggers as a public relations expense.
Even in such hard times that the 7-11 is looking like a luxury boutique to the ever growing minions of misery, we abide a politics that limit us to a minimum of ideas and even fewer solutions.
It’s worse than that. How many countries do you know of where stupidos form an influential, if not thoughtful, constituency? This week, the Washington Post allowed Sarah Palin, who promises to get back to us on all matters of substance, to weigh in on the Copenhagen confab. “My daddy told me about that snuff,” she reputedly said. “I hope they have enough spitoons.”
Meanwhile, NPR, America’s topical anesthetic, dispatched anchor Robert Siegel to share some warm and fuzzies with Texas teabaggers. Siegal, who reserves his snide asides for those challenging conventional wisdom, was all empathy when it came to the blitherings of these yahoos, who are to conservatism as Groucho is to Marxism.
If you have some memory cells left, you’ll recall that last summer the vidiot box was awash for days with images of these irate and inane rubes besieging pols at town meetings with mispelled banners and malapropic maledictions. Siegel may be short those cells. Instead of remembering those images, he pretended some vague and distant negative characterization of the teabaggers. Catch this exchange with Lorie Medina, a leader of the group :
SIEGEL: One association that your detractors from afar have with the Tea Parties is rowdiness. It's being willing to shout down other people.
Ms. MEDINA : Yes, definitely, definitely anger. I think some people were scared. They're scared about where the country is going, and so I think it was a lot of emotions that erupted this last summer. And I think if the politicians think that that was the end of it, I think they've got another thing coming.
SIEGEL: Is Barack Obama a lightning rod for all this? I mean, does he infuriate the people who...?
Ms. MEDINA: Yes.
SIEGEL: Yes. Why? What it is about him that annoys people so much?
Ms. MEDINA: You know, it's like I wake up every morning, and there's something new on the news that's upsetting that I read about that he does. I mean, if you said, Lorie, list for me everything that he has done that has upset you since he's become president, I don't think there's any way I could list it all. There's so much. You know, the fact that he apologizes for our country every time he goes overseas. I don't know that I've ever heard him say anything good about America. If you look at the way he speaks, the way you - he talks about our country, if you look at the programs and the things he tries to put into place, it really appears that he does not love our country like most Americans do and like past presidents do.”
Now, let’s review. NPR’s All Things Considered put its senior anchor and presumably a sound tech on a plane to Texas, paid their expenses, plus those for editing the recordings, and then inflicted the drivel they gathered on its millions of listeners. The money media get away with this by claiming that their job is not to ignore idiocy and look for truth but simply to report the news. Of course, they decide what the news is. Or rather, those decisions are made to please the same corporate sponsors who coincidentally write off the permanently lunching teabaggers as a public relations expense.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Been There, Bombed That
Keeping Score On Our Wars
I once worked with a woman who showed up late every morning with a different excuse. She finally got canned after telling the boss that her hair hadn’t dried yet.
I was reminded of her while listening to Obama the other night giving us yet another excuse for a bigger and better war in Afghanistan. Such speeches are always the same except for the name of the nation in which we have decided to kill people and break and take their stuff. Since my childhood, and excluding World War II, the list has included the Philippines, Greece, Korea, China, Lebanon, Angola, Congo, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Mozambique, Guyana, Panama, Grenada, Serbia, Somalia, Venezuela, etc.
To be fair, some of those were only air strikes, raids or government overthrows rather than full-bore invasions. If you go back in history to the days when we grabbed off a big hunk of Mexico, invaded Canada thrice, stole Spain's empire, nabbed Hawaii, had our Marines collecting on sovereign loans for our bankers, and our war fleets opening new markets in Asia, you can add a couple of dozen more. And if you tote up our global military interventions over the 233 years of our history, we make the Romans, whose empire lasted 500 years, look like homebodies.
Washington’s excuses for all these armed excursions are inevitably implausible since they're cover stories. Our empire makes war for imperial reasons, then pretends in public that its motives are defensive and/or idealistic . Like my colleague’s excuses, those motives keep changing. There’s been Manifest Destiny, the white man’s burden, christianizing the heathen, teaching the wogs a lesson, war to end war, antifascism, anticommunism, restoring order, nation-building, combating drugs, and lately antiterrorism.
If tardiness was the common thread in my co-worker’s dismissal, greed is the glue that holds our wars together. No matter the reason we’re fighting this time, a few of us are making money on war all the time. So steadily profitable has war become that conservative commentator John McClaughlin says that we have entered upon “an orthodoxy of continuous war.”
Interestingly, if you read through Obama’s speech, he doesn’t give much indication of what victory might look like. At best, there’s hope that the Taliban can be routed and that the thieves market in downtown Kabul can maintain the pretense that it’s a national government. There’s also the usual blather about throttling al Qaeda. This reminds me of the joke about the fellow who comes to see Jerry Lewis claiming that he’s found the cure for muscular dystrophy. “Are you absolutely sure?” asks Jerry. “Absolutely!” replies the visitor. Jerry then produces a gun and shoots the guy dead.
More interesting than Obama’s war speech this week was the release of a Senate Report affirming that the Bush administration let bin Laden and and his cohorts escape from Tora Bora. Why not? There would have been no reason to continue their war if if there was no more al Qaeda!
Such revelations are barely news anymore. The imperial impulse has implanted itself so deeply in our souls by now that we assume that the other 95 percent of the world is there for us to buy off, borrow from, or bomb, as we see fit. Like political campaigns that grew from an election season cottage industry to a non-stop billion dollar business, so our wars are becoming just another permanent economic sector, like sneaker retailing. Wars are good business, as we used to say in Vietnam days. Invest your kid!
I once worked with a woman who showed up late every morning with a different excuse. She finally got canned after telling the boss that her hair hadn’t dried yet.
I was reminded of her while listening to Obama the other night giving us yet another excuse for a bigger and better war in Afghanistan. Such speeches are always the same except for the name of the nation in which we have decided to kill people and break and take their stuff. Since my childhood, and excluding World War II, the list has included the Philippines, Greece, Korea, China, Lebanon, Angola, Congo, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Mozambique, Guyana, Panama, Grenada, Serbia, Somalia, Venezuela, etc.
To be fair, some of those were only air strikes, raids or government overthrows rather than full-bore invasions. If you go back in history to the days when we grabbed off a big hunk of Mexico, invaded Canada thrice, stole Spain's empire, nabbed Hawaii, had our Marines collecting on sovereign loans for our bankers, and our war fleets opening new markets in Asia, you can add a couple of dozen more. And if you tote up our global military interventions over the 233 years of our history, we make the Romans, whose empire lasted 500 years, look like homebodies.
Washington’s excuses for all these armed excursions are inevitably implausible since they're cover stories. Our empire makes war for imperial reasons, then pretends in public that its motives are defensive and/or idealistic . Like my colleague’s excuses, those motives keep changing. There’s been Manifest Destiny, the white man’s burden, christianizing the heathen, teaching the wogs a lesson, war to end war, antifascism, anticommunism, restoring order, nation-building, combating drugs, and lately antiterrorism.
If tardiness was the common thread in my co-worker’s dismissal, greed is the glue that holds our wars together. No matter the reason we’re fighting this time, a few of us are making money on war all the time. So steadily profitable has war become that conservative commentator John McClaughlin says that we have entered upon “an orthodoxy of continuous war.”
Interestingly, if you read through Obama’s speech, he doesn’t give much indication of what victory might look like. At best, there’s hope that the Taliban can be routed and that the thieves market in downtown Kabul can maintain the pretense that it’s a national government. There’s also the usual blather about throttling al Qaeda. This reminds me of the joke about the fellow who comes to see Jerry Lewis claiming that he’s found the cure for muscular dystrophy. “Are you absolutely sure?” asks Jerry. “Absolutely!” replies the visitor. Jerry then produces a gun and shoots the guy dead.
More interesting than Obama’s war speech this week was the release of a Senate Report affirming that the Bush administration let bin Laden and and his cohorts escape from Tora Bora. Why not? There would have been no reason to continue their war if if there was no more al Qaeda!
Such revelations are barely news anymore. The imperial impulse has implanted itself so deeply in our souls by now that we assume that the other 95 percent of the world is there for us to buy off, borrow from, or bomb, as we see fit. Like political campaigns that grew from an election season cottage industry to a non-stop billion dollar business, so our wars are becoming just another permanent economic sector, like sneaker retailing. Wars are good business, as we used to say in Vietnam days. Invest your kid!
Monday, November 30, 2009
A Decade End Review
Checking Out Our Big Ideas
Our leaders have come up with some big ideas in recent years. Virtually all have been bought by ordinary Americans, and many are still being paid for in one way or another. Nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century, I thought it a good time to review some of these brainstorms.
FREE TRADE was the idea that we would be able to buy tons of cheap Chinese stuff at Walmart if we merely gave up our good-paying manufacturing jobs and went into hellacious hock to foreigners. It has worked out perfectly--for the Chinese!
DEREGULATION was the idea that if you let greedheads run our financial system without rules and regs, it would not only make everyone rich but automatically correct itself if, by any chance, something went wrong. Though the system then drowned in a cesspool of corruption, that seems no reason to sour on the basic premise of capitalism that the worst people for the worst motives will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
COUNTERINSURGENCY is not what happened at the mall on Black Friday, but is rather a euphemism for conquest. Its main idea is that, using translators, we can get perfect strangers in distant countries to help us kill their own people and run their countries for them. The idea has a spotty record, with its worse recent showing in Vietnam. Two things in its favor are that Americans, particularly SimCity players, love to organize other people’s places, and that since it’s being done overseas and thus out of mind, counterinsurgency offers fabulous opportunities to steal both from foreigners and from our government.
HEALTH CARE REFORM is the idea that if you oblige people by law to buy inadequate insurance from financial companies who make their money by denying health care, they will not only be healthier but somehow save money. This is considered superior to socialistic foreign systems where people go to doctors and hospitals when they get sick.
GREEN is the most dazzling sales tool since the first marketer figured out that you could get people to spend money simply by using the word Save in ads. Just call them Green and you can sell white elephants, red tag items, and blue light specials.
USURY is finally acceptable after centuries on religion’s moral shit list. The Bible dumps on it bigtime, and in 1179 Pope Alex III and his cardinals decreed that it be punished by excommunication. No matter, usury now comes with every credit card in your pocket and personal loan you make. Organized religion, obsessed with matters sexual, seems to have taken a vow of silence on this particular sin. Banks are charging such ridiculous interest rates that loansharks are biting themselves. It won’t be long before Shylock’s House of Vig opens a branch on your block.
FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE is an old idea in a new kevlar helmet. Schemes to take over the world were once evils ascribed to the Soviet communist empire and villains in James Bond movies. Now they’re the official mission impossible of the American empire. This bit of Pentagonese means what it says--that the U.S. and its ‘interests’ should dominate the whole world, including the oceans and the skies, not to mention the oil fields. The other 95 percent of humanity hates FSD, but Americans are either ignorant or approving of it. One of the great questions for history is why the American people, who know nothing and care less about the world, are so willing to empty their wallets and volunteer the lives of their kids to boss it around?
Our leaders have come up with some big ideas in recent years. Virtually all have been bought by ordinary Americans, and many are still being paid for in one way or another. Nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century, I thought it a good time to review some of these brainstorms.
FREE TRADE was the idea that we would be able to buy tons of cheap Chinese stuff at Walmart if we merely gave up our good-paying manufacturing jobs and went into hellacious hock to foreigners. It has worked out perfectly--for the Chinese!
DEREGULATION was the idea that if you let greedheads run our financial system without rules and regs, it would not only make everyone rich but automatically correct itself if, by any chance, something went wrong. Though the system then drowned in a cesspool of corruption, that seems no reason to sour on the basic premise of capitalism that the worst people for the worst motives will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
COUNTERINSURGENCY is not what happened at the mall on Black Friday, but is rather a euphemism for conquest. Its main idea is that, using translators, we can get perfect strangers in distant countries to help us kill their own people and run their countries for them. The idea has a spotty record, with its worse recent showing in Vietnam. Two things in its favor are that Americans, particularly SimCity players, love to organize other people’s places, and that since it’s being done overseas and thus out of mind, counterinsurgency offers fabulous opportunities to steal both from foreigners and from our government.
HEALTH CARE REFORM is the idea that if you oblige people by law to buy inadequate insurance from financial companies who make their money by denying health care, they will not only be healthier but somehow save money. This is considered superior to socialistic foreign systems where people go to doctors and hospitals when they get sick.
GREEN is the most dazzling sales tool since the first marketer figured out that you could get people to spend money simply by using the word Save in ads. Just call them Green and you can sell white elephants, red tag items, and blue light specials.
USURY is finally acceptable after centuries on religion’s moral shit list. The Bible dumps on it bigtime, and in 1179 Pope Alex III and his cardinals decreed that it be punished by excommunication. No matter, usury now comes with every credit card in your pocket and personal loan you make. Organized religion, obsessed with matters sexual, seems to have taken a vow of silence on this particular sin. Banks are charging such ridiculous interest rates that loansharks are biting themselves. It won’t be long before Shylock’s House of Vig opens a branch on your block.
FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE is an old idea in a new kevlar helmet. Schemes to take over the world were once evils ascribed to the Soviet communist empire and villains in James Bond movies. Now they’re the official mission impossible of the American empire. This bit of Pentagonese means what it says--that the U.S. and its ‘interests’ should dominate the whole world, including the oceans and the skies, not to mention the oil fields. The other 95 percent of humanity hates FSD, but Americans are either ignorant or approving of it. One of the great questions for history is why the American people, who know nothing and care less about the world, are so willing to empty their wallets and volunteer the lives of their kids to boss it around?
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The South Side Comes to South America
Hyde Park in Honduras
I had started to think of Barack Obama as a one-term president. Then a particular quality he's lately displayed gave me the idea that he’ll find a way to win a second one. Probably it’s the Chicago politician in him, but Obama seems to have a warm spot for rigged elections. He just signed off on one in Afghanistan as crooked as Beelzebub’s tail. To top that, he’s okayed a forthcoming vote in Honduras in which I’m sure the late Mayor Richard Daley, and maybe even Benito Mussolini, will cast their ballots.
As I write this, Hillary is in Kabul rubbing kaftans with war lords and heroin traders at President Hamid Karzai’s inaugural. No doubt she’ll use the occasion to tell them to clean up their acts. And no doubt her message will be laughed off as equivalent to the Corleones preaching probity to the Sopranos.
Meanwhile, in Tegucigalpa, the Obamists have heartened the putchists by agreeing to recognize as legitimate the forthcoming November 29 presidential election that the rest of the world dismisses as farce.
If you recall, last summer the Honduran military, a cadet of the Pentagon, busted into President Zelaya’s residence, put guns on him and shipped him off to exile in his pyjamas. The junta appointed a new President named Micheletti whose “every proposal was written or approved by the American” at his side, according to the NY Times. That chaperone would be Bennet Ratcliff, a Clinton operative. Meanwhile, Lanny Davis, personal attorney to the Clintons and a Dem power player, showed up as the junta’s mouthpiece in Washington.
Reaction begets action. Hondurans have taken to the streets in defense of the democracy they voted for rather than the fascism imposed by the generals, the business elite, and their U.S. sponsors. For this, they’re being gunned down, beaten, tortured, disappeared, and arrested by the thousands. Media daring to defend legitimacy are likewise being stomped and silenced.
George Orwell observed that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” Accordingly, the U.S. media has all but ignored Honduras, or otherwise lied about it. They blame the legitimate president for the coup, saying he was too leftist, too Chavista, and too interested in succeeding himself (that last an outright whopper). His terrible crime is asking what kind of government the Hondurans want. That’s not in the program, according to U.S. ambassador Hugo Llorens, who frankly stated that “we can’t have a constitution that allows the ‘people’ to be involved in government.”
Latins are livid with rage and loathing. They fought for decades to write finis to the regimes of colonels and death squads, with their CIA and Mossad handlers smiling in the shadows. To think that Barack Obama, of all Americans, is trying to bring them back is all the proof they need that the gringos remain incorrigible imperialists, who, in the words of Bolivar known to every Latino, will forever plague the continent in the name of freedom. The countries of Latin America have agreed unanimously to not recognize the Honduran coup or the election the golpistas are concocting to provide themselves with a democratic fig leaf. The European Union is likewise unanimously appalled. Both the EU and the Latins agreed to cut trade with and aid to Honduras.
That leaves Washington all by its lonesome. There’s a price for it. With Honduras declared a pariah and trade with and aid from the rest of the world sharply reduced, American taxpayers will be the ones keeping Honduras afloat. Among the things we’ll be paying for is the repression needed to beat down the majority of the population favoring real democracy. Once again, my government is busy killing and torturing people who have ideas like mine.
Obama’s counterattack in Honduras is obviously aimed at the outbreak of independence and democracy south of the border. It’s of a piece with his dispatch of warships to prowl Latin waters, his addition to U.S. bases in Colombia, and his spooks' continued coup plottings elsewhere (one was just broken up in Paraguay). A restoration of “full spectrum dominance” of the resource rich continent remains U.S. policy. It's now more vigorously pushed by Obama than it ever was by Bush. It will fail, but it will make another big mess in the world.
Since we’re not permitted the option of peace, I’d rather see the U.S. at endless war with the obscurantist medieval cousins of Palin, Beck and company in Afghanistan and Pakistan than raining down death and dictatorship on Latin America’s fresh-minded and hopeful democratic project.
I had started to think of Barack Obama as a one-term president. Then a particular quality he's lately displayed gave me the idea that he’ll find a way to win a second one. Probably it’s the Chicago politician in him, but Obama seems to have a warm spot for rigged elections. He just signed off on one in Afghanistan as crooked as Beelzebub’s tail. To top that, he’s okayed a forthcoming vote in Honduras in which I’m sure the late Mayor Richard Daley, and maybe even Benito Mussolini, will cast their ballots.
As I write this, Hillary is in Kabul rubbing kaftans with war lords and heroin traders at President Hamid Karzai’s inaugural. No doubt she’ll use the occasion to tell them to clean up their acts. And no doubt her message will be laughed off as equivalent to the Corleones preaching probity to the Sopranos.
Meanwhile, in Tegucigalpa, the Obamists have heartened the putchists by agreeing to recognize as legitimate the forthcoming November 29 presidential election that the rest of the world dismisses as farce.
If you recall, last summer the Honduran military, a cadet of the Pentagon, busted into President Zelaya’s residence, put guns on him and shipped him off to exile in his pyjamas. The junta appointed a new President named Micheletti whose “every proposal was written or approved by the American” at his side, according to the NY Times. That chaperone would be Bennet Ratcliff, a Clinton operative. Meanwhile, Lanny Davis, personal attorney to the Clintons and a Dem power player, showed up as the junta’s mouthpiece in Washington.
Reaction begets action. Hondurans have taken to the streets in defense of the democracy they voted for rather than the fascism imposed by the generals, the business elite, and their U.S. sponsors. For this, they’re being gunned down, beaten, tortured, disappeared, and arrested by the thousands. Media daring to defend legitimacy are likewise being stomped and silenced.
George Orwell observed that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” Accordingly, the U.S. media has all but ignored Honduras, or otherwise lied about it. They blame the legitimate president for the coup, saying he was too leftist, too Chavista, and too interested in succeeding himself (that last an outright whopper). His terrible crime is asking what kind of government the Hondurans want. That’s not in the program, according to U.S. ambassador Hugo Llorens, who frankly stated that “we can’t have a constitution that allows the ‘people’ to be involved in government.”
Latins are livid with rage and loathing. They fought for decades to write finis to the regimes of colonels and death squads, with their CIA and Mossad handlers smiling in the shadows. To think that Barack Obama, of all Americans, is trying to bring them back is all the proof they need that the gringos remain incorrigible imperialists, who, in the words of Bolivar known to every Latino, will forever plague the continent in the name of freedom. The countries of Latin America have agreed unanimously to not recognize the Honduran coup or the election the golpistas are concocting to provide themselves with a democratic fig leaf. The European Union is likewise unanimously appalled. Both the EU and the Latins agreed to cut trade with and aid to Honduras.
That leaves Washington all by its lonesome. There’s a price for it. With Honduras declared a pariah and trade with and aid from the rest of the world sharply reduced, American taxpayers will be the ones keeping Honduras afloat. Among the things we’ll be paying for is the repression needed to beat down the majority of the population favoring real democracy. Once again, my government is busy killing and torturing people who have ideas like mine.
Obama’s counterattack in Honduras is obviously aimed at the outbreak of independence and democracy south of the border. It’s of a piece with his dispatch of warships to prowl Latin waters, his addition to U.S. bases in Colombia, and his spooks' continued coup plottings elsewhere (one was just broken up in Paraguay). A restoration of “full spectrum dominance” of the resource rich continent remains U.S. policy. It's now more vigorously pushed by Obama than it ever was by Bush. It will fail, but it will make another big mess in the world.
Since we’re not permitted the option of peace, I’d rather see the U.S. at endless war with the obscurantist medieval cousins of Palin, Beck and company in Afghanistan and Pakistan than raining down death and dictatorship on Latin America’s fresh-minded and hopeful democratic project.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
It Worked So Well The Last Time
Crusade of the Crazies
Good sense is good sense, but stupidity is infinite in its variety. As soon as you think a thing could not be dumber, you discover something else more idiotic.
My vote for inanity of the week goes to the yahoos using the Fort Hood shooting to dump on the Dems. Their demented diegesis is to declare holy war on Islam and then brand Obama and his like cowards and traitors for not joining their cuckoo crusade. How’s that for a plan?
They’ve begun by massing on their talk show circuit armed with readings of Allah’s admonitions to slay all infidels but violate only their non-porcine livestock. These Koranic quotes prove, the righties say, that we must eradicate the minions of Mecca before they put us all to the scimitar and rebuild the caliphate on the mountain of our bones.
The last time such trash talk got out of hand was in 1295, when Pope Urban II called upon wander- and loot-lusting Christians to quit their castles and cots and march off to Antioch and Jerusalem to “destroy that vile race [the Seljuk Turks] from the lands of our friends.” They say the blood from the battles rose as high as a horse’s flanks, while the rapine and pillage stood unequaled until the era of Goldman Sachs.
The Crusades waxed and waned for two centuries before Saint Petering out. The outcome? Eight hundred years later, Muslims number a quarter of humanity, while in Christendom the great cathedrals see more tourists than worshipers.
What’s both fascinating and frightening is not just that our conservative cohort is happy to provoke mischief far beyond its capacity to comprehend or control (such as calling for a war with one and half billion Muslims who have nuclear weapons at their disposal in Pakistan), but that our body politic nevertheless insists on indulging these idiots.
As I’ve noted before, we live in a land where you can get as ridiculously right wing as your paranoia will permit and still be considered a solid citizen. But try to inch to the left of, say, Barney “the banker’s buddy” Frank and you will quickly be Howard Deaned into supplication.
By the bye, I hear that Lou Dobbs has quit CNN to don Peter the Hermit’s rags and lead Rush’s rabble east to glory.
Did You Know?
We’re a free country--but we imprison more people than any other country.
We’re a peaceful country--but we have fought more wars in more places than any other country.
We’re a democratic country--but we limit ourselves to the narrowest range of political options available to democracies.
We're a free enterprise country--but our economy is characterized by oligopolies.
We’re a rich country--but we're the greatest debtors in the history of the universe.
Good sense is good sense, but stupidity is infinite in its variety. As soon as you think a thing could not be dumber, you discover something else more idiotic.
My vote for inanity of the week goes to the yahoos using the Fort Hood shooting to dump on the Dems. Their demented diegesis is to declare holy war on Islam and then brand Obama and his like cowards and traitors for not joining their cuckoo crusade. How’s that for a plan?
They’ve begun by massing on their talk show circuit armed with readings of Allah’s admonitions to slay all infidels but violate only their non-porcine livestock. These Koranic quotes prove, the righties say, that we must eradicate the minions of Mecca before they put us all to the scimitar and rebuild the caliphate on the mountain of our bones.
The last time such trash talk got out of hand was in 1295, when Pope Urban II called upon wander- and loot-lusting Christians to quit their castles and cots and march off to Antioch and Jerusalem to “destroy that vile race [the Seljuk Turks] from the lands of our friends.” They say the blood from the battles rose as high as a horse’s flanks, while the rapine and pillage stood unequaled until the era of Goldman Sachs.
The Crusades waxed and waned for two centuries before Saint Petering out. The outcome? Eight hundred years later, Muslims number a quarter of humanity, while in Christendom the great cathedrals see more tourists than worshipers.
What’s both fascinating and frightening is not just that our conservative cohort is happy to provoke mischief far beyond its capacity to comprehend or control (such as calling for a war with one and half billion Muslims who have nuclear weapons at their disposal in Pakistan), but that our body politic nevertheless insists on indulging these idiots.
As I’ve noted before, we live in a land where you can get as ridiculously right wing as your paranoia will permit and still be considered a solid citizen. But try to inch to the left of, say, Barney “the banker’s buddy” Frank and you will quickly be Howard Deaned into supplication.
By the bye, I hear that Lou Dobbs has quit CNN to don Peter the Hermit’s rags and lead Rush’s rabble east to glory.
Did You Know?
We’re a free country--but we imprison more people than any other country.
We’re a peaceful country--but we have fought more wars in more places than any other country.
We’re a democratic country--but we limit ourselves to the narrowest range of political options available to democracies.
We're a free enterprise country--but our economy is characterized by oligopolies.
We’re a rich country--but we're the greatest debtors in the history of the universe.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Salang, It's Been Good to Know You
Click on picture to enlargeKarman and companions. Salang Tunnel, Afghanistan, 1972.
Then the world's highest tunnel at 10,000 feet.
The Bull From Kabul
Uncle Sap just paid God only knows how many millions for a presidential election in Afghanistan. This was an exercise in stupidity equivalent to peddling veggie burgers at the cattlemen’s convention.
All sentient observers agreed that the balloting ranked with the Balloon Boy scam in utter inane fraudulence. Admitting that the election was “messy,” President Obama nevertheless congratulated his satrap, Hamid “the Haberdasher” Karzai, the evident author of the fraud, on his singular victory (singular because Abdullah ditto, the only other viable candidate, quit from the stench).
But it was not all Allah Be Praised. Pres. Obama also admonished the natty Karzai to crack down on crime and corruption. This was equivalent to telling Jeffrey Dahmer that he could still invite young men to dinner parties, but should try to prepare vegetarian dishes.
It was also a case of glass White House hypocrisy. The pelf extorted by the war and dope lords of Afghanistan (including, it is bruited, Karzai’s brother) amounts to the drip from a leaky bucket compared to the tsunami of swag cascading into the hoards of crooked U.S. contractors. For example, have you heard that our military in Afghanistan is paying $400 a gallon for gas?
As I’ve earlier blogged, I don’t get our involvement in Afghanistan. The Al Qaeda excuse is ridiculous--like fire bombing the zoo to kill a rogue elephant. The big geopolitical rationales, such as securing pipeline routes, encircling the Russ, Han and Persians, shoring up the Pakis, and generally manifesting our full spectrum dominance, are beyond the means of our debilitated forces and denuded treasury. And the claim that we want to redeem Afghan womanhood would sound more plausible were we not so lovey-dovey with the equally medieval and misogynistic Saudis.
Afghanistan is obviously a fabulous venue through which those contractors can plunder and pillage our treasury. But so would a number of more hospitable lands in temperate climes where we could more comfortably rape the cattle and run off the women.
What I do know is that Afghanistan will be the ruin of Obama. If he goes in heavy, he’ll lose heavy. If he goes in light, the generals and their congressional claque will have him for lunch.
How do I know? I was in Afghanistan for a worried week back in October 1972 (see picture above). By today’s standards, in which making up shit is given equal weight to scholarship, that makes me almost, sort of, maybe, possibly an expert.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The Alternative Isn't Pretty
Peace With Persia
Iranians regularly attend mosque where they proclaim “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” Their president regularly claims that the Jewish holocaust never happened and that Israel must be erased from the map as were the USSR and the Union of South Africa. On the other side, many Israelis are actually hubristic enough to believe that 70 million Iranians are eager to nuke Israel and thereby commit mass suicide and destroy their 5,000-year-old civilization for the 30 minutes of schadenfreude they might relish before retaliatory Israeli and U.S. nukes lift them to paradise.
Meanwhile, Israel regularly threatens to bomb Iran if it gets near getting the bomb. The White House regularly warns Iran with war if it keeps developing the bomb. And U.S. intelligence keeps repeating that Iran gave up its bomb program in 2003.
Ah, that we were merely talking about threats. A couple of years back, Bush got congress to vote $400 million to effect regime change in Iran. That means overthrowing their elected government by outside force, a longtime but spotty specialty of ours. The recent suicide bombings of high-ranking Revolutionary Guards officers in the disputatious Baluchistan border region of Iran by a faction that Seymour Hersch of The New Yorker and Brian Ross of ABC News have named as CIA assets seem to indicate that Obama is still spending that appropriation.
This admix of provocation and posturing has been going on for 30 years. I’d be happy to see it continue for another 30 or 50 or 100 years if it meant avoiding a big and brutal war.
Iran is governed by a nasty right-wing theocracy of the sort that Christian yahoos dream of establishing here. It treats its own people stupidly and brutally. Given all that, it’s an anarchist hippie love commune compared to our kissyface ally, the medieval hell hole of Saudi Arabia. What’s more, Iran is one of the more peaceful nations on earth. The present regime hasn’t attacked another country in its three decades in power. Indeed, Iran, nee Persia, has not attacked anyone in 250 years. For most of that time it has been on the receiving end of imperial aggression, having most recently been invaded in 1980 by Saddam’s Iraq in cahoots with Reagan’s America.
True, the Iranians sponsor various armed factions in their neck of the woods. But who doesn’t? Israeli rented satraps ran a rump state in Lebanon for 22 years. Our Pentagon contractors wallow in pig heaven from profitably arming every every macher and mullah from Haifa to the Himalayas
Iran could end this standoff tomorrow. It has only to announce that it’s giving away its oil to Exxon and Chevron, its security services to Israel, and its military to Pentagon contractors to rebuild and rearm it with zillions of dollars worth of American weapons. Media bad-mouthing of Iran would end as abruptly and totally as it did when Nixon showed up in Red China, which up until that day had been portrayed as the most evil regime in the history of the universe.
The cuter Ayatollahs would show up on Comedy Central, Leno and The View. Ahmadinejad would start dating Britney Spears. Nobody in America would henceforth give a hoot about whether Iran really had nukes. The poor devils the ayatollahs tortured and killed would be depicted as troublemakers deserving their fate.
The crisis would also end if Washington and Wall Street accepted the reality that after 30 years Iran was not about to surrender its oil to Henry Kissinger’s clients and revert to an obedient component of the empire. But though Obama talks about talking to Tehran, he, like Bush, apparently thinks he can still threaten and terrorize the Iranians as well. Not likely.
There’s a new line-up of forces in the world that can’t be stopped by Predator drones or clones of Teddy Roosevelt. The U.S. is insolvent and energy short. Iran and its proleptic partners, China, Russia and Venezuela, are rich in both real and black gold. Washington can’t even handle 14th century Afghanistan let alone an energy and economic alliance of that proportion. I hope Obama gets around to figuring out that it’s time to make peace with the Persians. Otherwise, he could easily get us into something we really hate and fear: a fair fight.
Iran has legitimate aspirations that need to be respected--
but those legitimate aspirations do not include control over
the oil that the United States and other industrial countries need.
--Henry Kissinger, Washington Post. 9/16/07
the oil that the United States and other industrial countries need.
--Henry Kissinger, Washington Post. 9/16/07
Meanwhile, Israel regularly threatens to bomb Iran if it gets near getting the bomb. The White House regularly warns Iran with war if it keeps developing the bomb. And U.S. intelligence keeps repeating that Iran gave up its bomb program in 2003.
Ah, that we were merely talking about threats. A couple of years back, Bush got congress to vote $400 million to effect regime change in Iran. That means overthrowing their elected government by outside force, a longtime but spotty specialty of ours. The recent suicide bombings of high-ranking Revolutionary Guards officers in the disputatious Baluchistan border region of Iran by a faction that Seymour Hersch of The New Yorker and Brian Ross of ABC News have named as CIA assets seem to indicate that Obama is still spending that appropriation.
This admix of provocation and posturing has been going on for 30 years. I’d be happy to see it continue for another 30 or 50 or 100 years if it meant avoiding a big and brutal war.
Iran is governed by a nasty right-wing theocracy of the sort that Christian yahoos dream of establishing here. It treats its own people stupidly and brutally. Given all that, it’s an anarchist hippie love commune compared to our kissyface ally, the medieval hell hole of Saudi Arabia. What’s more, Iran is one of the more peaceful nations on earth. The present regime hasn’t attacked another country in its three decades in power. Indeed, Iran, nee Persia, has not attacked anyone in 250 years. For most of that time it has been on the receiving end of imperial aggression, having most recently been invaded in 1980 by Saddam’s Iraq in cahoots with Reagan’s America.
True, the Iranians sponsor various armed factions in their neck of the woods. But who doesn’t? Israeli rented satraps ran a rump state in Lebanon for 22 years. Our Pentagon contractors wallow in pig heaven from profitably arming every every macher and mullah from Haifa to the Himalayas
Iran could end this standoff tomorrow. It has only to announce that it’s giving away its oil to Exxon and Chevron, its security services to Israel, and its military to Pentagon contractors to rebuild and rearm it with zillions of dollars worth of American weapons. Media bad-mouthing of Iran would end as abruptly and totally as it did when Nixon showed up in Red China, which up until that day had been portrayed as the most evil regime in the history of the universe.
The cuter Ayatollahs would show up on Comedy Central, Leno and The View. Ahmadinejad would start dating Britney Spears. Nobody in America would henceforth give a hoot about whether Iran really had nukes. The poor devils the ayatollahs tortured and killed would be depicted as troublemakers deserving their fate.
The crisis would also end if Washington and Wall Street accepted the reality that after 30 years Iran was not about to surrender its oil to Henry Kissinger’s clients and revert to an obedient component of the empire. But though Obama talks about talking to Tehran, he, like Bush, apparently thinks he can still threaten and terrorize the Iranians as well. Not likely.
There’s a new line-up of forces in the world that can’t be stopped by Predator drones or clones of Teddy Roosevelt. The U.S. is insolvent and energy short. Iran and its proleptic partners, China, Russia and Venezuela, are rich in both real and black gold. Washington can’t even handle 14th century Afghanistan let alone an energy and economic alliance of that proportion. I hope Obama gets around to figuring out that it’s time to make peace with the Persians. Otherwise, he could easily get us into something we really hate and fear: a fair fight.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Volcker Too Dem for Dems
Why Republicans Have More Fun
If you’ve noticed, Republicans allow themselves a lot more space for self-expression than do Democrats. Reps can fly as far right as their dark fantasies will carry them. So, their cohorts are dense with yahoos bent on refighting the Northern War of Aggression, rewriting the Bible to make it more business friendly, reviving slavery, removing fluoride from school books, and issuing Glocks to all newborns.
They can candidly champion Vlad the Impaler because the extreme right, for all of its wackiness, is business friendly. Indeed, their lumpen legions have traditionally provided cheerleaders and strikebreakers for our corporate sector. Thus our body politic accepts them and our media heed them no matter what nonsense they spew.
By contrast, the Democrats are intensely uptight. The uttermost sin in their ranks is any expression of leftism beyond what it takes to persuade voters that Dems are slightly more progressive than Reps. To put personalities on that policy, Pelosi is presentable but Kucinich is poison. Naderism, or anything to its port side, is the ultimate evil.
The obvious reason is that leftism, as opposed to centrism and rightism, challenges corporate rule. And by leftism, I don’t mean Lenin, Mao, Che and bloody revolution. We’ve moved so far to the right in recent decades that even the business as usual we used to practice is now seen as subversive.
Consider the case of Paul Volcker. A literal and figurative Wall Street giant at 6’8”, Volcker spent a lifetime serving the Rockefeller interests and presiding over the Federal Reserve under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Not exactly a pink resume.
President Obama named Volcker as a top adviser on the economy. The problem is that the advice that Volcker is giving the prez is considered a pinch too old-style Democratic for the Obamacrats. Volcker, like FDR, wants to cut the wild bulls of Wall Street down to size by re-restricting banks to banking and brokerages to brokering. It was under such a regime that we enjoyed 60 years of a thriving industrial economy and few financial follies.
“The banks are there to serve the public,” Mr. Volcker says, “and that is what they should concentrate on. These other activities [i.e., trading trash paper and extreme leveraging] create conflicts of interest. They create risks, and if you try to control the risks with supervision, that just creates friction and difficulties, and ultimately fails.”
For its part, the Obama administration prefers to “let the giants survive, but...regulate them extensively.” Its desultory efforts in that direction are said to be “languishing” in Congress while the monster money houses commit usury as usual and lobby against any reform at all.
When Obama named him to the newly created post of chairman of The President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB), Volcker got an office in Washington. The Times says he “rarely if ever” uses it lately, preferring to remain in New York. Published reports have it that “his influence in the administration is fading.” Volcker’s days in Obamaland appear numbered. You can bank on it--at your nearest Goldman Sachs branch.
If you’ve noticed, Republicans allow themselves a lot more space for self-expression than do Democrats. Reps can fly as far right as their dark fantasies will carry them. So, their cohorts are dense with yahoos bent on refighting the Northern War of Aggression, rewriting the Bible to make it more business friendly, reviving slavery, removing fluoride from school books, and issuing Glocks to all newborns.
They can candidly champion Vlad the Impaler because the extreme right, for all of its wackiness, is business friendly. Indeed, their lumpen legions have traditionally provided cheerleaders and strikebreakers for our corporate sector. Thus our body politic accepts them and our media heed them no matter what nonsense they spew.
By contrast, the Democrats are intensely uptight. The uttermost sin in their ranks is any expression of leftism beyond what it takes to persuade voters that Dems are slightly more progressive than Reps. To put personalities on that policy, Pelosi is presentable but Kucinich is poison. Naderism, or anything to its port side, is the ultimate evil.
The obvious reason is that leftism, as opposed to centrism and rightism, challenges corporate rule. And by leftism, I don’t mean Lenin, Mao, Che and bloody revolution. We’ve moved so far to the right in recent decades that even the business as usual we used to practice is now seen as subversive.
Consider the case of Paul Volcker. A literal and figurative Wall Street giant at 6’8”, Volcker spent a lifetime serving the Rockefeller interests and presiding over the Federal Reserve under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Not exactly a pink resume.
President Obama named Volcker as a top adviser on the economy. The problem is that the advice that Volcker is giving the prez is considered a pinch too old-style Democratic for the Obamacrats. Volcker, like FDR, wants to cut the wild bulls of Wall Street down to size by re-restricting banks to banking and brokerages to brokering. It was under such a regime that we enjoyed 60 years of a thriving industrial economy and few financial follies.
“The banks are there to serve the public,” Mr. Volcker says, “and that is what they should concentrate on. These other activities [i.e., trading trash paper and extreme leveraging] create conflicts of interest. They create risks, and if you try to control the risks with supervision, that just creates friction and difficulties, and ultimately fails.”
For its part, the Obama administration prefers to “let the giants survive, but...regulate them extensively.” Its desultory efforts in that direction are said to be “languishing” in Congress while the monster money houses commit usury as usual and lobby against any reform at all.
When Obama named him to the newly created post of chairman of The President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB), Volcker got an office in Washington. The Times says he “rarely if ever” uses it lately, preferring to remain in New York. Published reports have it that “his influence in the administration is fading.” Volcker’s days in Obamaland appear numbered. You can bank on it--at your nearest Goldman Sachs branch.
(All quotes taken from linked article)
Friday, October 16, 2009
In Our Future
Bubbles and Bombs
There are two lame ass apologias for Obama’s miserable record so far. One is that he’s only been in office nine months. The second, supposedly passed on to a journalist by a White House aide, is that “governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult."
The first implies that Obama has been busy cleaning up Bush’s messes and applying fresh policies whose benefits are yet to be felt. The second implies that political division is slowing his efforts. Both excuses conveniently ignore the reality that Obama had done some awful things over these last nine months. Two of them, that will effect us for decades to come, stand out. The first is that he’s signed off on the completion of Wall Street’s takeover of Washington. If you accept the notion that money rules, our government is now run by the bubble manufacturers Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citi Group and their confreres.
The federal outgo for bailouts and war spending are roughly equal to the income from taxes. That means that everything else that Uncle Sam does is financed by borrowing. That borrowing is brokered through the very same financial houses receiving bailouts. In other words, Goldman Sachs et al get money from us for free and then lend it back to us at interest--on their own terms and to the tune of trillions.
Barack Obama received more campaign money from Goldman than any candidate ever. A revealing AP story tells us that the telephone traffic between treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and the top guys at Goldman, JP Morgan Chase and Citi is all but adolescent in its frequency. Geithner is obviously checking with the people really in charge.
The other travesty is that Obama has apparently acquiesced to what conservative bloviator John McLoughlin calls “an orthodoxy of continuous war.” His Pentagon (or is it the Pentagon’s Obama?) is busy opening new military/corporate subsidiaries around the planet. These bases from the Amazon Basin to central Asia are to be garrisoned by both troops and private contractors. In the early days of our empire, it was the military that cleared the way for business, as in 1852 when Admiral Perry’s warships shelled Tokyo to encourage the Japanese to open their economy to U.S. investors. Today, the two are indistinguishable.
There’s more bad news from the Obama administration, such as its decision to reaffirm the Patriot Act and continue Bush’s attacks on civil liberties. But let’s leave it for now.
On July 19, 2008, I posted a blog called Two Scenarios. The first posited that Obama would sincerely attempt to deliver the change he promised. The second worried that he would be yet another servant of business as usual. It looks like we’ve come up snake eyes.
There are two lame ass apologias for Obama’s miserable record so far. One is that he’s only been in office nine months. The second, supposedly passed on to a journalist by a White House aide, is that “governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult."
The first implies that Obama has been busy cleaning up Bush’s messes and applying fresh policies whose benefits are yet to be felt. The second implies that political division is slowing his efforts. Both excuses conveniently ignore the reality that Obama had done some awful things over these last nine months. Two of them, that will effect us for decades to come, stand out. The first is that he’s signed off on the completion of Wall Street’s takeover of Washington. If you accept the notion that money rules, our government is now run by the bubble manufacturers Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citi Group and their confreres.
The federal outgo for bailouts and war spending are roughly equal to the income from taxes. That means that everything else that Uncle Sam does is financed by borrowing. That borrowing is brokered through the very same financial houses receiving bailouts. In other words, Goldman Sachs et al get money from us for free and then lend it back to us at interest--on their own terms and to the tune of trillions.
Barack Obama received more campaign money from Goldman than any candidate ever. A revealing AP story tells us that the telephone traffic between treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and the top guys at Goldman, JP Morgan Chase and Citi is all but adolescent in its frequency. Geithner is obviously checking with the people really in charge.
The other travesty is that Obama has apparently acquiesced to what conservative bloviator John McLoughlin calls “an orthodoxy of continuous war.” His Pentagon (or is it the Pentagon’s Obama?) is busy opening new military/corporate subsidiaries around the planet. These bases from the Amazon Basin to central Asia are to be garrisoned by both troops and private contractors. In the early days of our empire, it was the military that cleared the way for business, as in 1852 when Admiral Perry’s warships shelled Tokyo to encourage the Japanese to open their economy to U.S. investors. Today, the two are indistinguishable.
There’s more bad news from the Obama administration, such as its decision to reaffirm the Patriot Act and continue Bush’s attacks on civil liberties. But let’s leave it for now.
On July 19, 2008, I posted a blog called Two Scenarios. The first posited that Obama would sincerely attempt to deliver the change he promised. The second worried that he would be yet another servant of business as usual. It looks like we’ve come up snake eyes.
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