The Karman Turn

2011-06-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Three Short Takes

War And Peace
The NY Times has revealed yet another war being conducted by Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama. “The extent of America’s war in Yemen has been among the Obama administration’s most closely guarded secrets...” said the paper of record. The Times also reported that “as things get more and more chaotic in Yemen, the space for the Americans to operate in gets bigger.” The Nobel medalist in the White House is currently overseeing four public wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya and a number of clandestine ones from Latin America to Asia. Peru is likely to be added to the list now that its people have elected a leftist president by a narrow margin. The Guinness Book of Records has yet to list the most number of wars fought by a peace prize recipient.

Wimpy Europeans
At Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995, the Serb general Ratko Mladic reportedly committed the worst war crime in Europe since World War II by ordering the massacre of nearly three times the number of innocent civilians who died on 9/11. He was finally arrested in recent days and will stand trial at the Hague. Apparently, there is no sentiment in Europe to shoot him in the face, dump him in the ocean, and then joke about it on late night tv.

Funny What Doesn't Get Played Up
Which one of these current sex stories have you heard little or nothing about?
1. Congressman Anthony Weiner admits to cyber flashing women he didn’t know after first engaging them in political palaver.
2. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and a leading candidate for the presidency of France, accused of sexual assault on a hotel housekeeper.
3. Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister of Italy, now on trial for committing “bunga-bunga” with an under-age prostitute.
4. Arnold Schwartzenegger, former Governor of California, admits to fathering a child by a woman working in his family home.
5. Moshe Katsav, president of Israel, sentenced in March to seven years in prison for serial rape.

2011-05-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

On Memorial Day
My city of New Haven doesn’t feel a need to guard our municipal security by keeping police precincts in Atlanta, Los Angeles or Omaha. My state of Connecticut doesn’t maintain statal security by assigning troopers to Alaska, Montana or Arkansas. Neither do the mayor of New Haven nor the governor of Connecticut project themselves as national leaders
By contrast, my country’s leaders assert that our national security requires military bases just about everywhere on earth--plus weapons pointing down from the Heavens as well. And our president never stops proclaiming our “global leadership” despite the fact that no world-wide election has ever given cause for such a claim.
These declarations about national security and cosmic captaincy are preposterous. Except for the local compradors, barkeeps and whore masters, few foreigners want an American base in their backyard. By the same token, few are willing to accept "leadership" by the pols, spooks and generals of a different and distant land. Their reaction runs from resentment to resistance. The inevitable result is endless crisis and war.
When Americans die in those wars, it is in service to our empire of power and pelf such as those of the Romans, the Ottomans, Brits, etc. Because our national myth will not admit to that, we dissemble about their deaths. We dare not say they fell to procure oil contracts or even to ensure our “national interests.” It’s more comforting, even though corrupting, to pretend they died for their country or for the freedom of others.
The profits of empire enrich only a chosen few, while the costs of empire in blood and taxes are paid for by the many. Nevertheless, even in this era of austerity, Americans remain willing to buy the myth and pay its price, no matter the amplitude of deaths or deficits. The conventional wisdom holds that we no longer pay attention to our constant wars because they are fought by a professional military rather than draftees. But that doesn’t explain the indulgence that we, and particularly proponents of small government, grant to the Pentagon despite its ginormous record of corruption and incompetence. Americans have long since grown cynical about Wall Street, but still excuse and even adore an equally rapacious “defense” establishment. Maybe if we put our bankers and brokers in uniform, they’d be more lovable as they rob us blind.

2011-05-13T12:54:00.000-07:00

Human Rights, Ha Ha
Imagine that in his more sober moments between binges and bimbos Charlie Sheen was wont to lecture us on probity and decorum. Wouldn’t that be a fun thing? At least as chucklesome is the irony of Washington’s mendacious moralizing on human rights. In recent days, the Obama administration has been slagging the Chinese on that score. Beijing is, to be sure, guilty as charged. But China’s leaders have the right to their cynicism about the provenance of the accusations. Indeed, if I were the Chinese foreign minister and Hillary Clinton started hectoring me about human rights, I would simply read the following list by way of reply:
Batista in Cuba, Duvalier in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, Rios Montt in Guatemala, Lopez Arellano in Honduras, Pinochet in Chile, Stroessner in Paraguay, Noriega in Panama, Perez Jimenez in Venezuela Galteri and Videla in Argentina, Mendez in Uruguay, Rojas Pinilla in Columbia, Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, the Greek colonels, Mobuto in Congo, Savimbi in Angola, the apartheid regime of South Africa, Idriss in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia, the Saud family in Saudi, Hussein and Abdullah in Jordan, Saleh in Yemen, Al Khalifa in Bahrain, Saddam in Iraq, the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, Diem and a succession of generals in Vietnam, Chiang in China, Marcos in the Philippines, Rhee and Park in South Korea. And that’s without mentioning the Bush family’s profitable dealings over the years with A. Hitler and the bin Laden clan.
Those are just a sampling of the long list of murderous monarchs and martinets that Washington has installed, armed, advised and otherwise underwritten in recent times. I haven’t checked Tacitus in a while, nor have I recently read an account of the British Empire. But just off the top of my my head, I would venture that no nation in history has sponsored more dictators in more places than we freedom-loving Americans.
You can add to that the facts that the U.S. has by far the biggest prison population on the globe, and that, uniquely among first world countries, it treats torture as a debatable public policy option rather than a criminal evil. Indeed, we are the first country to globally franchise pain parlors.
One reason China is finding so much success in the world economy is that it trades with everyone, good and bad, and dispenses with the cynical and sanctimonious lectures that our empire inflicts on an increasingly hostile and mocking world. How about our leaders either put up by cleaning up their own act or simply shut up?

2011-05-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

The Two bin Ladens
As far as I know Osama bin Laden was killed only once. Nevertheless, revises of his demise are still issuing daily from Washington. He was armed, he wasn’t armed. He either did or didn’t use one of his wives as a shield. There were continuous fire fights at the compound or only one. Only one woman was wounded or one woman was killed. And what about the children?
Every sentient American should be aware that their leaders lie about everything all the time. Information for them is not meant to inform, but to placate or provoke. The offing of Osama was organized as much as a theatrical offering as it was a commando raid. The changing versions we get daily thus may be seen as the revisions of a play during tryouts. With the Osama drama, we’re still in New Haven. That doesn’t mean we will ever get a final script. The JKF assassination produced three contradictory official versions. All have lived comfortably side by side for all these years. Go see the excellent film “The Conspirator” and learn that the circumstances around Lincoln’s killing remain vexed.
What we do know is that there were two Osama bin Ladens. One is a stock super terrorist out of Fox Channel’s “24” series. He’s the mastermind who slips away till next week while Jack Bauer tortures his henchmen--always at the very last minute--in order to save West LA from damage worse than that wrought by Charlie Sheen.
Then there’s the real Osama, the one who’s rarely revealed in the popular culture. He’s the scion of a wealthy family fascinatingly on friendly terms with the Bush clan--but apparently not fascinating enough for the media to take a look at that relationship.
And what of his religion? If you substituted Jesus and God for Mohammed and Allah, his pietical preference wouldn’t be much different from any hardscrabble holy roller down in dear old Dixie, But here again the media is hardly interested in examining why Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalisms actually have more in common than in conflict.
Consider his military doctrine. Little has been said about the fact that it mirrors ours. The Pentagon, attacked on 9/11, was obviously a military target, while the World Trade Center, home to the largest domestic CIA base and enormous corporate economic power, was a command and control center. Had we attacked such locations in Iraq, Iran or wherever, the civilians killed in whatever number would have been written off as “collateral damage.” Likewise the hijacking and destruction of civilian airliners with all their passengers becomes terrorism depending on the nationalities involved. One of the anti-Castroites who bombed a Cubana airliner, killing 73, just died a peaceful death after a long life while his leading co-conspirator is enjoying his dotage in Miami, feted as an heroic old soldier by his erstwhile CIA buddies. Repeated calls for their extradition to face terrorism charges were simply ignored by our nominally anti-terrorist government.
First world nations like Spain and Britain have much experience battling serious and persistent forms of terrorism. Their tools were primarily civilian: intelligence gathering and police work. London never bombed Dublin or invaded the Irish Republic. Madrid didn’t burn Biarritz with white phosphorus or torture and disappear thousands of Spanish and French Basques. Neither nation vastly increased its military budget to meet its particular threat.
It’s plain by now that first the Bush and now the Obama administrations cynically used 9/11 and terrorism to further militarize and dominate the Middle East while turning the U.S. into a quasi police state. The first goal has failed miserably. The unanticipated Arab spring has shattered U.S./Israeli plans for the region. Washington favored the local dictatorships, so that any turn towards popular rule and democracy can only be to its detriment. A new battle for the Middle East is just beginning. This one will not pit the empire against a few thousand feudal fanatics of the Al Qaeda stripe. Unless America realizes that the odds have dramatically turned against its corporate crusaders and pulls back its desert legionaries, we will find ourselves saying, yes, bin Laden is deservedly dead, but that's just one down and a billion to go!

2011-04-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

Slavery and Treason, Really?
I’m happy to see on this sesquicentennial that some of us are finally admitting that the Civil War had something to do with slavery. Back when I was a kid in the 50’s, the conflict starred Scarlett O’Hara and Uncle Remus and was all about tradition, chivalry, romantic rebels and devilish Yankees. Millions, mostly in lower America, still buy that nonsense. Thanks to the civil rights movement, Roots and some good and popular scholarship, lots of us came to understand that the war was fought, in Lincoln’s simple but perfect truth, because the nation could no longer exist half slave and half free.
We never liked to talk about slavery because it revealed the hypocrisy of our central freedom myth. So we pretended that the chains and whips in our historical attic could be forever ignored. Meanwhile, the more shameless of us actually held that slavery was not so bad. After all, they smirked, it Christianized heathen.
That reluctance is still there. All across the south this spring, fat white men are donning gray and clumsily pretending to be young and lean Johnny Rebs--only with fire crackers for minie balls and no blood and blacks to remind them of the horror of this country’s greatest killing fest. But to their annoyance, there are now lots of voices ruining their fantasies by bringing up slavery and sedition.
The latter is another skeleton in our attic that we are only beginning to acknowledge. Forget about terrorism or communism. The greatest treason and existential threat we ever faced came from fellow Americans determined to destroy these United States and supplant it with a slave empire stretching west to the Pacific and south to Latin America. Such was the founding ambition of those who created the Confederacy. To realize it, they trampled our flag and and made war on the United States. It took 600,000 dead to end that imperious impetus.
Americans at the time detested that betrayal. Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, Judah Benjamin and their confederates were condemned as treacherous and anti-American.They fled or were jailed when their cause got lost in gore. For decades afterward, Yankee politicians made hay by waving “the bloody shirt,” which meant denouncing the sedition of the south and the rise of the KKK after the war.
But over the years something odd happened. Northerners gradually forgot about the conflict while southerners rewrote its history to make themselves the victims of what they dubbed The War of Northern Aggression. They claimed to be merely affirming “states rights” when the Yankees viciously set upon them. Never mentioned was that the particular state right they had in mind was owning, buying, selling, working, whipping, raping and killing other human beings.
Dang if the upholders of bondage didn’t win their propaganda war, mostly thanks to indifference and racism in the rest of the country. For Americans, the Civil War became summed up in the romanticism of Gone With The Wind. More outrageously, the south began to hold itself up as the most patriotic corner of the country. Its politicians became vital, if not dominant, in Washington (five of our last ten presidents hailed from formerly Confederate states). It supplied officer cadre and endless bases to the U.S. military which it had formerly so murderously despised. When reactionary, imperial, racist and yahoo opinions flooded our media, they were often delivered in the dulcet drawls of Dixie.
So here we are today perfectly indulgent of those who still sympathize with ancestors who would have destroyed the United States. And though all stripes of progressive reformers continue to be labeled “un-American or, more commonly nowadays, ‘European’ or ‘soft on Canada,’ no one dreams of questioning the Americanism of those unashamedly harboring warm spots for secession, segregation and, yes, even slavery.
One of the great frauds in this land is that right wingers are considered super patriots. Quite the contrary. When they’re not whistling Dixie, they’re championing an economic system that has long since shed any pretense of patriotism and now calls itself multinational. That sounds right furren to me.

2011-03-29T07:26:00.000-07:00

The Cells Effort
Though we call ours a free country, the truth is that we Americans keep more people unfree than any other nation. Roughly 2.3 million of us are, in the immortal lyric of Hank Snow, in the jailhouse now. That’s far more in total and per capita than China, a no-nonsense dictatorship with five times our population. As far as democracies go, we Americans are five to ten times more likely to call a cell home than Europeans.
There are a couple of ways you can look at this grotesque statistic. If all these folks belong in the clink, that makes America the most criminal country that ever was. Since we are also among the most pious of people, that number doesn’t say much for the supposedly benign effects of religion. On the other hand, if all those people don’t belong in the jug, we have the most energetic police state in existence.
There is, in fact, a third reason. The basic direction of these United States is to transform human activity, in so far as possible, into commercial transactions. Whereas communists believed in a utopia of happy workers dancing around the May Pole, the American dream is to get rich lending people money to buy tickets to the May Pole event. Thus it’s not surprising that our entrepreneurs came up with the insight that prisons were little more than cheap hotels with bad food whose doors only locked from the outside. Why they asked, in free market funk, should the socialistic state have a monopoly on these hostelries? Thus the private prison industry was launched.
Lobbying and loose money soon persuaded local pols that corporations could run jails more cheaply than could governments. Of course, that was pure bait and switch. The corporate outfits ran up their prices as soon as they got in. And, of course, what every business needs is customers. With jails, you can’t advertise weekend packages or letting the kids stay for free. You can only keep prodding the government to lock up ever more human beings.
Arizona is a case in point. It passed a law making it easier for cops to jam up likely illegals. In practice, this meant anyone who looked Mexican. This created a firestorm of protest by those being singled out--as well as anyone else still subscribing to justice, decency and the American way. Soon, it was reported by NPR and others that the law was less about preserving jobs or appeasing anti-immigrant yahoos than profiting Arizona’s private prison companies. In fact, it was literally drafted by those companies and handed to the governor to read to the legislature.
Things went hunky dory for a while, with the unlucky being given 20 years for jay walking and mopery. There was even a judge in Pennsylvania (now himself heading for the cooler) who was getting kickbacks for sentencing junior high kids to hard time in a private reformatory for not doing their homework. The correctional con artists were swimming in spondulicks. Then the recession hit and the states ran shy of revenues. Police were laid off, arrests dropped, and, horror of horrors, the states started freeing inmates to save money. The prison profiteers, who had planned on ever-rising incarceration rates till presumably half the country was being paid minimum wages to guard the imprisoned other half, took it on the lamb. Towns that had invested in now empty for-profit jails found themselves straining to pay off their bonds. Just like the housing bubble, the big house bubble had burst. No doubt it will bounce back, given the degree of our greed and the fact that we have hundreds of millions of potential prisoners.
For the first half of this country’s history, business profited from keeping people in chains. It was called slavery. Now they profit from keeping them in cells. It looks very much like the same thing here in the self-proclaimed land of the free.

2011-02-28T17:09:00.000-08:00

Good times on the Vineyard. Yours truly, Suze, Jill and Enzo

Suze Rotolo Bartoccioli
We were friends forever, if you can say that about fifty five or so years. Platonic but passionate, personal but political. Occasionally hitting clinkers but always in tune. Laughter was our bread and wine. If you didn't know her, read this remembrance by someone who knew her well, or better still her book, A Freewheelin' Time.
Suze not only gave me her lifelong friendship, but brought me that of Enzo and Luca as well. Next to my own Jill and Alex, I’ve received no greater gift. She was a golden girl at sixteen and grew wiser but never older. As another old friend of hers once wrote, she was forever young.
Ciao, bella.

2011-02-16T11:25:00.000-08:00

Obama, Obama, Pants On Fire
You know that politicians have contempt for the citizenry when they shamelessly tell big fat lies that can be easily checked. And you know that the media are naught but whores when they fail to check them.
Which brings us to the case of Raymond Davis. What all sides agree is that Davis, a veteran special forces operative, shot and killed two Pakistani motorcyclists in Lahore on January 27. After that, disagreement begins. Though Davis packed two handguns, intelligence gear, a civilian U.S. passport, a variety of business cards, and described himself as a “consultant” employed by a private firm, the U.S. Government declared him to be a consular officer entitled to immunity under the Vienna Treaty governing diplomatic relations among countries and demanded his immediate release. But the Pakistani authorities have so far demurred and kept him in the clink, looking forward to a trial. Basically, the U.S. claims that Davis was defending himself from an assault by the two bikers, who were also armed with hand guns, while the Pakistanis hold that Davis committed “cold blooded murder.”
The plot is right out of “24.” The question is whether Davis is Jack Bauer? Pakistan is among the most anti-American places in the universe. Its media is currently awash in spy speculation about what Davis was actually up to and why Washington is so antsy to spring him. It should be noted that there’s little need for spy fiction here, since the real thing in the form of our our massive “covert” intervention, not to mention Indian intrigues, have made Pakistan the world’s sneaky business Mecca of the moment.
If you want to delve into the dirty details, Dave Lindorff at Counterpunch is doing some of the most thorough-going reporting on the story. See his Feb 8 and Feb 10 pieces. For a Pakistani take, peruse this.
Having given you some background about a yarn you may not have known about, let’s get to the reason for the headline on this blog. Commenting on the Raymond Davis contretemps at his Feb 15 news conference, President Obama said: “If our diplomats are in another country they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution.” What a whopper!
What the 1963 Vienna treaty on consular relations (which we signed) actually says on this subject is: “Consular officers shall not be liable to arrest or detention pending trial, except in the case of a grave crime and pursuant to a decision by the competent judicial authority.” (Section 2, Article 41)
If you consider alleged double murder a grave crime, either our president has been misinformed or is deliberately misinforming us about a treaty any school kid can check out. What Pakistanis are saying is that the U.S., is arrogating to itself the right kill anyone anywhere under the cover of diplomatic immunity. The failure of our money media (and that includes NPR) to do basic reporting on this story is yet another indication of their corruption. As I.F. Stone, one of our greatest investigative reporters, used to warn us, the pols and the press lie about everything all the time.

2011-02-02T06:41:00.000-08:00

The Awful Specter of Multi-polarism

As with Christianity, the only thing worse than hearing democracy questioned is having it practiced--source unknown

The ire in Tahrir Square is full of ironies, not the least of which is the American president who inspired such hope in the Middle East with his Cairo speech calling around this week to leaders in the region to stanch the uncontrolled surge of democracy in the Arab world. --Maureen Dowd, NY Times, Feb. 2, 2011

It’s enough to warm an old lefty’s winter-chilled heart. We are being treated to a rare outbreak of revolution. Or what the Chinese call ‘interesting times.’
The Arab world has finally had its fill of suffering and seething and is exploding into rebellion from the Mahgreb to Suez. Thus it joins Latin America, where, to varying degrees in recent years, countries from the Caribbean to Cape Horn have broken free of the imperio yanqui and begun the useful task of unifying their continent.
Revolution, of course, is like marriage: you never know how it’s going to pan out. But since most of us would still be serfs without them, I’m willing to welcome their occurrence. Unfortunately, living in a country where counter-insurgency (i.e., opposition to revolution) is considered as sacred a duty as hedge fund management, this is hardly the place to celebrate the uprisings that Washington spends billions on suppressing. You would have to go to France for that.
So far, one big lesson from Tunisia and Egypt is that that our idiot pols and media have gotten history dead wrong again. For the last decade they’ve been demonizing Arabs and other Muslims as medieval maniacs plotting fresh 9/11s in their caves and casbahs. And we bought it, hookah, laffi and scimitar. The reality is that the majority young of the Arab world actually want to move into the modern world. To the extent that that they hate America it’s not because we’re free, as the fool Bush constantly claimed, but because the U.S. is propping up the dictatorships that keep them from being free.
We can assume that at the moment the Obamists are laboring as hard as they can to shore up Mubarak and his gang or, failing that, to make sure that its replacements are the most reactionary and compliant of available compradors. The only juice Washington has is in its billion bucks a year aid program (mostly military and some food) and its buddy-buddy contacts with Egypt’s officer corps and the killers and fingernail pullers of the security apparat. That may not be enough, especially since the young draftees in the army are the same people as the youthful demonstrators. The two groups are already fraternizing and the troops are not likely to mow down their contemporaries to keep Mubarak in power.
I don’t have the foggiest about how the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions will play out. But I don’t think the Islamists will take charge: their limited influence in the region has been insanely magnified by our empire to serve its purpose. But whether democracy or Bonapartism will prevail is another story.
Whatever happens, the regional awakenings from Caracas to Cairo and Beirut to Burma, along with the rise of China, India and Brazil, are rearranging the world. Communism, then terrorism used to be the wash-your-mouth-out with-soap words in Washington. They are being replaced by an even more frightening pejorative: multi-polarism. It raises the specter of a world where the U.S. is no longer global top dog but just another big country with “interests” that are getting less interesting by the day.

2011-01-20T08:04:00.000-08:00

Diplomatese and Dictatorese

Because of the greatness of the Shah, Iran is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.--Jimmy Carter toasting the Shah in Tehran, December 31, 1977, a year before the Shah's bloody dictatorship was overthrown in a popular revolution.

This proposed sale [of $281 million in weapons] will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a friendly country that has been and continues to be an important force for economic and military progress in North Africa. --The Obama Administration’s 2010 request to Congress for military sales to the now fallen murderous Tunisian kleptocracy.

Political talk and diplomatese bear only a vague relationship to everyday English. Consider this object lesson I served up a couple of years back:
Jeffrey Dahmer rules over an anthropaphagusian autocracy with Charlie Manson as his secretary of defense. He accepts Wall Street investments and hosts a U.S. military base. He buys lots of pots and pans and knives from American firms. The administration characterizes him as “moderate” and a “valuable ally” in the war against terror.
Jesus Christ returns, bringing Heaven to a small corner of earth. The Empyrean economy is share and share alike. Jesus declines both U.S. investment and military alliance. The administration brands him an “extremist,” a “dictator,” and a “dangerous obstacle” to the war on terror.
Now, if you can get into that sort of Oz head where words mean only what your superiors want them to mean, there’s a job for you in Washington. In particular, you would have to keep from laughing your ass off when you heard Barack Obama lecturing the president of China on human rights. You would have to put out of mind that the only use for the billions in weapons we supply to thugs like Tunisia’s Ben Ali is to protect their dictatorships from their own people. You would have to forget that the U.S. is to torture as FedEx is to packages
Citizens informed by the money media know that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is a dictator. Didn’t he lift the broadcast license of a tv station (that's still in business on cable, satellite and internet) just for taking part in a coup against the elected government? Doesn’t he arrest people simply for trying to assassinate him? Doesn’t he keep running for office as if he were Teddy Kennedy? Sure, we’ve all been coached on calling Chavez an autocrat, even though he keeps winning honest elections and even though the political opposition in Venezuela is louder, nastier and freer than anything we would permit here.
But how much did we know about our former comprador, Zine Al-Abadine Ben Ali, now enjoying refuge from justice in our medieval satrapy of Saudi? Did you know, for instance, that he’s a graduate of U.S. Army schools at Fort Bliss, Texas, and Fort Holabird, Maryland, where his major was intelligence and military security?
Did we know that “in 1999 Fulvio Martini, former head of Italian military secret service SISMI, declared to a parliamentary committee that ‘In 1985-1987, we (in NATO) organized a kind of golpe (i.e. coup d'etat) in Tunisia, putting President Ben Ali as head of state, replacing President Habib Bourguiba.’"
Did we know that during his confirmation hearing in July 2009 as U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia, Gordon Gray reiterated the West's support for the Ben Ali regime, telling the Senate Foreign Relations committee, "We've had a long-standing military relationship with the government and with the military. It's very positive. Tunisian military equipment is of U.S. origin, so we have a long-standing assistance program there."
There’s nothing special about Ben Ali, except perhaps that his wife and in-laws apparently qualify for the Imelda Marcos award for over the top venality. He’s just one of countless tinpot tyrants who have sullied Washington’s payroll over the decades. For all of our ado about democracy, there’s no doubt that future historians will remember our nation as the the world’s non pareil dispenser of dictatorships. I could begin to list them here, but you would get bored and my fingers would tire.
Meanwhile, we've got to assume that nail-biting is growing to epidemic proportions at the Pentagon and in Langley and Foggy Bottom. If Washington got so worked up by a couple of thousand of atavistic Islamists, imagine the worry about the Tunisian revolt going viral with millions in the Middle East demanding real democracy, meaning the overthrow of the despots whose torture chambers we franchise as if they were fitness centers.

2011-01-05T08:43:00.000-08:00

See No Simians
It looks like no one in charge made a New Year’s resolution to clear those 800 pound gorillas out of the White House. There they lie amid the overpowering stench that we refuse to even wrinkle a nose at.
We’ll call one of these beasts our expiring economy. Our national consensus holds that we should depend upon the free market rather than the government to restore prosperity. Just let corporations do their thing without having to fret taxes and regulations, we’re told, and we’ll soon be farting through silk again. Really? The ape on the ottoman poses a question we dare not ask ourselves because we don’t want to know the answer. To wit: What if the free market believes that there are more profitable places on earth to make money than in the these United States? What if they've decided to create more jobs overseas than here? What if we just become one big Michigan or upstate New York?
Side stepping that reality as if it were a simian stool on his new presidential seal carpet, President Obama instead offers platitudes about becoming more “innovative” and "out-competing other countries around the world."
“Become more innovative? Out-compete? Who or what is he talking about?” asks former labor secretary Robert Reich. “Big American corporations are innovating like mad all over the world, with research and development centers in China and India And their profits are soaring. They're sitting on almost $1 trillion of cash. But they won't create jobs in America because there's not enough demand here to justify them.”
Demand, meaning people with the inclination and money to buy stuff, is the product of steady jobs and decent salaries. Both of those notions have been cast into disrepute by our current politics. We are told instead that austerity, meaning the shedding of jobs and cutting of pay packets, are the solution to our ills. And lots of us are stupid enough to believe it. Meanwhile, for our businesses, like say IBM, the action has moved on to Bahia and Bangalore.
The other primate in the parlor that we refuse to acknowledge is our failure at arms. It’s now a decade since the world’s most expensive and deadly military launched what used to be called a punitive expedition against the feudal Pashtun tribe in Afghanistan. At best, hedges our commander in chief, it will be another four years before we can think about getting ready to retire from what has become an exercise in self-punishment.
The pundits have already declared Iraq the worst foreign policy decision in U.S. history. With that slot filled, Afghanistan will have to settle for being the stupidest. But those superlatives aren’t actually so. We have merely repeated the Brit disaster in the same part of the world a century ago that prompted Kipling to pen, Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown. For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles and weareth the Christian down.
Amazingly, there’s still minimal outcry against this futile fight with the feudals. So long as their kids are not drafted, Americans have apparently become as willing to abide endless multi-trillion dollar wars as they are for being constantly in hock. So if you take the White House tour don’t forget your hip boots, nose plugs and a couple of bananas.

2010-12-16T12:43:00.000-08:00

Psst, Peace

President Chavez [of Venezuela] is my new best friend
--President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia

We occasionally hear scoops about secret wars, like the ones Washington is currently running from the Philippines to the Horn of Africa. But how often do we hear about something even more threatening to our empire: secret peace?
One just broke out in Latin America that must have Obama and Hillary gnashing their teeth. Colombia and Venezuela, historically one country but lately at each other’s throat, have kissed and made up. That’s been big news south of the border but remains all but classified in the U.S. because it’s bad news for Washington’s never-ending divide and conquer plans for the region. What’s more, it jars the propaganda assumptions of the media.
Colombia, which specializes in cocaine and conservative regimes, has long been Washington’s favorite in Latin America. It’s reputation on the continent is that of a “death squad democracy,” where political campaigns feature rightists gunning down leftists. This has occasioned surviving leftists to take up guerrilla war against the state and support themselves by coca dealing. Their 60 year insurgency has given Washington an ongoing opportunity to lavish billions on favored contractors and mercenaries by “aiding” and “advising” the Colombian military’s battle against blow and bolsheviki.
Colombia was also supposed to come in handy as a forward base in Washington’s continuing scheming to overthrow the leftist government that the neighboring Venezuelans have disobediently dared to elect and reelect. Obama pressed the Colombians to give over seven more bases to the Pentagon, with their personnel exempt from local law. In other words, Americans could “tune up” or “take out” any Colombians, not to mention Venezuelans, at their whim.
Under increased threat, Venezuela brought up troops to the border. It also broke diplomatic relations with Colombia and, more importantly, cut off billions in trade. Meanwhile, the Colombian supreme court declared the base deal unconstitutional, while the country elected a new president who, unlike his predecessor, paid more attention to the howls of businesses going broke because of the trade rupture than to the stratagems of the Pentagon and CIA.
Diplomats on both sides of the border went to work. Relations were reestablished, the trade ban lifted, and agreements were forged on a host of mutual issues. President Chavez of Venezuela and new President Santos of Colombia had a couple of friendly meetings. The talk turned from war to peace. And Santos even proclaimed Chavez his "new best friend."
Colombia is still right and Venezuela still left. But most importantly both are still offspring of Bolivar. Right and left, they have come to understand that they have more to gain by being good neighbors to each other than by beating each other up at the service of the expiring imperio yanqui.

2010-12-09T11:26:00.000-08:00

We Told You So
Two years ago, the Dems won the presidency and both houses of congress by big majorities. The result has been that the minority Reps remain in de facto control of Washington and have moved the country farther to the right while the Dems are dismissed left and right as wimps and woosies.
Presiding over this debacle is capitulator-in-chief Barack Obama. Lots of folks are disappointed in him. But not here at Karman Turn. We had him figured right from the git-go. So join us for a brief jaunt down memory lane back to June 2009 when our pres told us all about what he was all about.

Click here to hop back there

2010-12-02T06:14:00.000-08:00

Our Pecuniary Pecking Order
The other day President Obama announced a freeze on the salaries of fed workers. They’re lucky compared to the hundreds of thousands of state and local government workers getting the boot. At the same time, Wall Street reported record profits and rich bonuses.
I’ve never been a fan of capitalism. But I have always believed that since it’s the prevailing system everyone should get to play by its first rule that you grab everything you can and the hell with everyone else. Certainly, that’s exactly what Wall Street and corporate America do. Hedge fund managers and insurance execs take home billions for not producing a single useful item or service. No one dares place a limit on their pelf. That would be un-American and socialistic. But that privilege of unlimited accretion is allowed to just a few. If organized workers used their solidarity to demand sky high wages, our rulers, as they have done countless times in the past, would sic the dogs on them.
In fact, we Americans have very strict, and often inane, notions about how much money different groups of us should be allowed to make. As noted, Wall Street and big business get the no-limit license. So do showbiz, sports and government contracting. When we hear about people in those ranks being preposterously paid, we envy them and take pride in a country that allows them such success. But when the poor and working classes manage to wangle a few extra bucks out of the system we turn spiteful and claim that their sloth and greed is what’s ruining America.
Take these two examples: A poor man scuffles by on Uncle Sam’s handouts. Since he appears able-bodied, we condemn him for sponging on us and demand the government stop the sops to him and his ilk. Now imagine a trust fund brat who's never worked a day in his life, but takes in millions of the Uncle Sam’s bucks in the form of interest on government bonds he’s inherited. At worst, we’ll call him a playboy. Few would resent the money he’s siphoning from Uncle Sam or fume that people like him were adding to the national debt.
These antic attitudes are part of what has given these United States the most extreme concentration of wealth anywhere outside of banana republics where a few families own entire countries. The numbers are staggering. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have more bucks than circulate in teeming continents. Yet this debilitating constipation of cash bothers just a few lefties and academics.
Tea Baggers, the noisiest political bunch at the moment, are running around bitching that there’s still too much “sharing of wealth,” meaning that ever more concentration is called for. This despite the fact that the estimable Messrs Gates and Buffet have repeatedly offered that they already stow more than enough swag and are even willing to pay higher taxes.
Out there in Christendom, a different view prevails. Many adhere to Anatole’s France’s view that behind every great fortune there is a crime. Therefore, the wealthy are not particularly admired or trusted, while the lesser classes have a greater sense of solidarity. They think the world would be a better place if the rich had less and the rest more. And even though more equitable societies boast happier people, that sort of talk is tantamount to treason on this the savage side of the Atlantic.

2010-11-19T14:07:00.000-08:00

A Detour To Dallas
Forty seven years back. A crisp autumn Friday. Just about one p.m. I was shaving. Getting ready to work the night trick across the Hudson at a paper in Bergen County. I covered four towns. My favorite was the sliver of grungy waterfront under the shadow of the George Washington Bridge called Edgewater. It was loaded with interesting insular characters who had never been across the half mile of river to Manhattan because they had no reason or desire to go there. So much for the lure of bright lights. Mounted on the wall behind the police chief’s desk was a tommy gun, a souvenir from Prohibition days when bootleggers stashed their goods in the caves tucked under the palisades in Edgewater.
Friday nights were easy because there were no town meetings to attend. I’d just copy the blotters at the four police headquarters. I’d write them up at the office and do a few obits, social notes and stuff. With luck, I was out of Jersey by eight or so and heading down to the Village in my zippy Corvair (the model later made notorious by Ralph Nader as a “one-car-accident”).
It was just about one, and me with my face foamed, when WINS delivered the bulletin: a shooting in Dallas involving the president! In no time, they were talking about a Cuban connection. A CBS reporter I knew called to ask if I had run across a certain Lee Oswald in Cuba? That September I had gotten back from a lefty student trip to the island that was supposed to last two weeks but had stretched out to two months. No. I never met any Oswalds, there or here.
I got to Jersey about dinner time and did my rounds. There was only one subject of conversation and one common mood: a bewildered sadness and uncertainty. Everyone was benumbed.
Along with the rest of the country, I spent the weekend in front of the tube. I had one eye on my Sunday Times and one eye on the set the morning Ruby shot Oswald. Looking back, I got exactly the same feeling as when the second World Trade tower was hit. Something big, hidden and awful was happening. There was obviously more to this than two discrete dementos.
But soon enough the media was pounding into us that Oswald had shot Kennedy for no good reason and Ruby had then shot Oswald for no bad one. We were told that the interesting, if not downright sinister, biographies and associations of those two characters, were unimportant to the case. The all but perfect incompetence of the Dallas cops (who never took down a statement from Oswald because it was Friday and the stenographer had gone home) was just another pointless coincidence. The non-stop message was trust the government, there was less here than meets the eye. Nothing to see, folks. Move along.
First, we got the FBI report from J. Edgar: No conspiracy, no magic bullet. Then the Warren Commission report: no conspiracy, but yes, a magic bullet. Finally in the 70s came the House Select Committee report: conspiracy likely, but forget about it. Ever since, the country has been divided between a large majority of citizens (now dying off) who still smell a rat, and a small but powerful government/media elite armed with spray cans of air freshener.
Just about all the principals in the JFK assassination are long gone. Some files have been thrown open but lots of secrets are still kept (about Lincoln’s assassination as well). This is not to cover anyone’s ass, but to maintain the myth that it’s not necessary in America to read Shakespeare or Acton or Gibbon or the chronicles of the Romans. That’s because we have nothing to learn from history. We are blessed in that our leaders, like our country, are exceptionally good, and therefore incapable of the crimes, conspiracies and cover ups that mark the power arrangements everywhere else on earth. Who would claim otherwise but some wacko conspiracy theorist?
In February of ‘64, just a couple of months after the assassination, I was driving across country with Bob Dylan, Victor Maimudes and Paul Clayton. Like morbid tourists, we detoured into Dallas looking for Dealey Plaza. We finally inquired of some passing duffer. “Oh, you mean where they shot that sonofabitch Kennedy?” he said with a big grin.
They?

2010-11-09T06:45:00.000-08:00

The Mendacious Mavens of the Middle
When the McCain-Palin campaign was looking a for a “leftist terrorist” to pin on Obama, the best they could come up with was college professor Bill Ayers, a 66-year-old erstwhile extremist who’d been keeping his nose clean for the last 40 years.
Back in the 60’s I bopped off to Cuba and wore my larynx out yelling revolutionary slogans. I’m now 71 and would happily accept a return to the glory days of the People’s Republic of Eisenhower. I try to keep up with the left, or what’s left of it, and haven’t noticed any nutty notions in decades. The vast majority of my former comrades have either given up on politics or attend the occasional peace rally. Those who remain activists are overwhelmingly safe and sane social democrats just now figuring out that Barack Obama never was and never will be one of them.
That’s not to deny that a few tattered fringistas from the 3rd, 4th or Positively 4th Street Internationals don’t erupt on the scene now and again. Hey, Jerry Brown is back in Sacramento! My point is that America’s meager left, across the spectrum from Hubert Humphrey pro-war liberals to raging Maoists, has long since gone the way of the Whigs. And the movement hasn’t been refreshed by much new blood since Wall Street figured out how to make money and tamp down youthful dissent by putting all the college kids in permanent hock with tuition loans.
So when I hear anyone nowadays condemn “extremists of both left and right,” as Jon Stewart repeatedly did at his big rally about nothing much in Washington a couple of Saturdays ago, I know I’m dealing with the clueless and/or mendacious.
Who besides senior citizen Bill Ayers and the even older Noam Chomsky do they have in mind? What ultra outrage are they referencing? The Battle of Seattle was over a decade ago. The last really big peace march was back in 2002. No, I take back the clueless option. Those who pretend that America is somehow annoyed, let alone threatened by, leftist extremists on a par with Glenn Beck or the various gun-crazy militias running around in the woods are full of shit! And they know it.
Whether in politics or personal life, positioning oneself mid-way between two supposed extremes is usually a cheap ploy rather than a considered judgment. We even have a name for for it: playing both sides against the middle. Politicians, our lowest form of life, find it useful for conning the widest possible range of constituents. Newspeople, the next lowest, are forever trying to convince their audiences that truth lies in the middle for the same reason. I go along with Texas populist Jim Hightower, who likes to say, there's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos.

For a hilarious but just as serious take on this issue, I commend you to Bill Maher's most recent New Rules video.

2010-11-03T12:53:00.000-07:00

What the Electaprise Means
Whether under Reps or Dems, the American polity has been rolling rightwards for the last 30 years. That pilgrimage to penury continued last night. The reason for it is simple. The U.S., unlike other countries, does not have a left. It has a right wing party and one that believes in getting along by going along. So politically our country remains on a one-way trip. John Stewart, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow aren’t going to change that.
Maybe this is a good time to define our terms. There are millions of shapes and shades of politics. But they all boil down to two notions. Some believe that wealth and power should be concentrated amongst themselves. Others believe it should be spread around. Thanks to the seating arrangements in the French parliament two centuries ago, we call the former rightists and the latter leftists. We have the right to thank for palaces and plutocrats and the left for democracy and the middle class.
Moving to the right doesn’t just mean that conservative politicians run the government. That’s the least of it. Moving to the right in this day and age means the continuing replacement of what’s public by what’s private, meaning none of the public’s business. It means we take orders from corporate bosses--an increasing number not even Americans--instead of leaders we elect. It means that corporate profit rather than peace, prosperity or public benefit becomes the focal point of just about everything we do. It means we turn from a nation into a multinational.
The evidence of this swirls around us in the windblown posters from yesterday’s election. That event, formerly a civic duty and now a commercial enterprise, posted revenues in the five billion dollars range. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, anonymous investors the world over are now invited to get their bids in for the solon of their choice. The NY Times has called the endless attack ads that have become a staple of our electaprises “a goldmine” for local tv stations. By now, virtually all of us watch those stations over a cable network. Because we have a conservative polity in place, those cable companies are not constricted by the onerous regulations they have in other countries, like socialistic France.
For instance, the French have a law against cable monopolies. There are lots of competing companies and you can easily move from one to another. Costs for a package including highspeed internet, unlimited telephony to 60 countries, and 100 or so cable channels run to 40 Euros a month. We wouldn’t stand for that in conservative America. We make sure that every town has its own private monopoly cable company and are willing to pay for the privilege.
In any event, yesterday’s electaprise shouldn’t change much. The Obama administration was already aggressively following through on most Bush (meaning conservative) policies, particularly in re the economy and the empire. Expansionary policies and peace have been ruled out as too lefty. That means more war and more austerity. If your kid can’t get a job, there’s always the military. They will teach him or her that in conservative and corporate America, just as in the service, unquestioning obedience to authority is all.

2010-10-18T11:41:00.000-07:00

Double Header
It’s campaign season, which means that the beast with two heads is out bestenching the ozone again. The fiercer head with the sharp fangs and empty eyes is called Rep and the confused, toothless one is Dem. The beast is always among us, but becomes particularly predatory at election time. That’s when the two heads pretend they have two minds and snap at each other like Jack Russell terriers. I’ve been watching this happen for most of my three score and ten. It’s not much of a spectacle, and is getting more penny dreadful with each rendition.
What’s new this time around is that the relentless transformation of our elections from public exercise to private initiative is now complete. Thanks to the infamous Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, anyone anywhere in the world with big bucks is allowed to anonymously invest in our government leaders. So now when we say we have the best congress money can buy, that means renminbi, rials and rupees as well as greenbacks.
Our conservative friends suffer hypocrisy on this score. For decades they portrayed themselves as super patriots and argued that good old business was more American than bad old government. Then globalism erased the distinctions between homegrown and foreign corporations. Would the yahoos follow the logic of their free enterprise faith and now argue that China National Oil Corp., Dubai World and Credit Suisse were also more patriotic than hapless and hated Uncle Sam?
The answer to that one came with the Gulf oil spill. The right took British Petroleum to its heart and stoutly defended BP against what it reviled as ruinous regulators and evil environmentalists from Washington. The fact that BP was UK did not stop Rand Paul, the Republican senate candidate in Kentucky, from calling criticism of it “un-American.” Neither did it discourage Newt Gingrich from offering that Obama’s treatment of poor BP made the U.S. a “Venezuela type” country.
The beast head named Dem is yapping at the Rep head for soliciting secret swag from foreigners. Of course, it’s not barking too loudly since it’s guilty of the same sin. The invitation for foreigners to join our highly profitable election enterprise is yet another sign of the demise of our empire. In the early stages of imperialism, the center rules its subject states; in the latter stages the subject states corrupt the center. Any day now, I can see a bipartisan bill offered up in congress providing that our votes be counted by Swiss bankers.

2010-10-05T08:39:00.000-07:00

The Debt Dodge

Unless politicians are prepared to dig into the pockets of middle- and upper-income families, experts say, the demands from bond market investors to get government finances under control can be satisfied only by cutting back even further on benefits for the poor and needy.

Nobody’s perfect. That’s why the truth accidentally pops out of our kept media from time to time. The truth revealed in the above quote from the NY Times is that bond investors own the world and that we are in their thrall.
The richies and the righties have successfully sold the stupidos on the notion that debt will be the death of us. Everyone and their tea-brained uncle is shrieking and hollering about how our engorging arrears means the ball and chain for future generations. Our kids’ kids and their kids will have to feed on gruel and sleep on stones, in the words of Emerson, “to pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.”
But, of course, the creator is not our creditor. Our debt is owed to bond investors. They trade in that debt in order to profit by it. Some hold it for years and some for months or days. Some hold it for mere microseconds. We no more know who owns our debt at any given moment than we know how many grains of sand our feet kick up when we walk on a beach.
What we should know, but are rarely told, is that credit and debt have replaced the mass production of goods as the chief means of taking money from everyone and giving it to the wealthy. In fact, we should no longer call ourselves capitalist because ever more of what we once called capital has been turned into debt. The French have a fine old word known to all economists for people who live off the interest from debt: they call them rentiers.
Our rentier, nee capitalist, class has two great fears common to its ilk everywhere. The first is inflation. Their ultimate nightmare is a repeat of Germany in the 1920s when people needed a wheel barrow full of bills to buy a crust of bread. If the value of the dollar falls to, say, a penny, debtors will pay off their loans with near worthless bucks. At that point, the creditor class will start driving their Maseratis into abutments.
Their other nightmare is repudiation. What if debtors just refused to pay up? It’s happened recently with sovereign debt. Argentina and Ecuador repudiated part of their paper, the latter when it was discovered by the new reform government that certain loans the country had taken out were illegally drawn. The Ecuadorans saved themselves $3 billion.
On the Daily Show the other night, Jon Stewart, a cretin when it comes to matters foreign, mocked Europeans for their massive demonstrations in opposition to government austerity programs. Why, he asked, weren’t those crazy furriners modeling themselves on the Tea Baggers and protesting public spending instead?
Despite being a smart as well as smart alecky bunch, it has apparently never occurred to Stewart and his writers that not every middle class in the world is as stupid and suicidal as ours. The millions who marched in Europe understand perfectly well that the debit crisis is really a trick to make the rich richer at our expense. Unlike us, they are prepared to repudiate the righties and the richies. They're already fighting back. Ten million marched in Spain the other day. In U.S. terms, that was 100 million people. If we could turn out one-tenth that number, the bond traders would go into another business.

2010-09-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

The Absolute in Moderation
Suppose the Brits had won the Revolutionary War. Suppose King George III imposed one of his German cousins on us as monarch. Suppose that King Karl I of Upper and Lower Canada and the Royal Colonies of America spoke English with a Prussian accent and much preferred Berlin to his palace in Philadelphia. Suppose Karl appointed America’s government, including members of the legislature. Suppose even mentioning freedom of speech, let alone practicing it, got you into deep doodoo with the Royal Constabulary--chains and chopping blocks kind of doodoo.
This scenerio came to mind as I was watching several amiable interviews last week with the charming King Abdullah II of Jordan and his lovely consort, Queen Rania, who were in town for the General Assembly opening. Abdullah is a real favorite in America. He was schooled and militarized here and at Sandhurst in Britain and speaks in an attractive combination of colloquial American and polished British English. His dad, the late King Hussein, was likwise popular in in the states. Hussein even had an American wife whose good works and snazzy wardrobe were regularly publicized by Barbara Walters and such.
Though the Jordanian monarchy claims a line back to Mohammed himself, this particular branch was installed by the Brits to see to their interests in the territory of Trans Jordan, one of the countries they invented when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. If you recall your Lawrence of Arabia stuff, the Brits got the Arabs to fight against the Turks in World War I by promising them independence. They, of course, betrayed that promise and installed various puppet rulers around the Middle East whose glance turned more to Mayfair than Mecca.
Whenever members of the now pro-American Hashemite house appear before our politicians or on our media, it’s polite that a certain word never be mentioned. That also goes for the Saud family as well as the various emirs and sultans of the Gulf states. The word is democracy. Their nations don’t have it and they don't like to talk about the fact that they prefer absolute dynastic rule instead.
If we applied dictionary definitions to our usages, these royals would properly be termed despots. But then we supposedly freedom-loving Americans would be asking ourselves why we pal around with their like. To avoid such embarrassment, we abandon Funk & Wagnalls and call them moderates instead. Except to tea baggers and other yahoos, moderate is a nicely anodyne word. I mean, who’s opposed to moderation?
We constantly urge people in that part of the world to abandon extremism and model themselves on these moderates. They shrug, not particular caring whether moderates or fanatics stone the adulterers and lop off the limbs of thieves.
Meanwhile in the genuinely democratic nation of Venezuela they had genuinely free and fair elections on Sunday which handily returned the pro-government parties to power with a 70 percent turnout. Nevertheless, Washington labels Venezuela “extremist” and “undemocratic.” It accuses its president, who has twice the domestic popularily of Obama, of being a detested dictator who steals elections by buying the votes of the poor majority with jobs, schools, health care, housing and such.
It should be obvious that the reason that King Abdullah of Jordan is a “moderate” but President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is an "autocrat" is the the former accepts American “leadership” while the latter insists that Venezuelans lead Venezuela. Mr. Funk and Mr. Wagnalls must be spinning in their sarcophagi.

2010-09-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

Virgin on the Absurd

Nine years ago today, we saw the world stand still. We saw the innocence of a nation crumble to the ground. We saw the face of evil form in plumes of smoke and ash. It was Sept. 11, 2001---NY Times columnist Charles M. Blow

A Jewish mother is sending her frail son off to war. “Don’t over exert,” she admonishes. “Kill an Arab and then take it easy." “But mom," he answers,“what if they kill me?" “Why should they,” she asks, “what have you done to them?”--from Uri Avnery, wise old Israeli politician and writer

One of the differences between human beings and the United States of America is that humans lose their innocence only once. America’s innocence, like the remote that falls between the sofa cushions, is forever getting lost and refound.
My father’s generation was taught that America lost its innocence when Prohibition engendered lawlessness and dissipation. My cohort was said to have misplaced its virginity in Dallas and Danang. Then, says Blow, it got misplaced yet again in the rubble of the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
I guess it’s marvelous that we Americans think so highly of ourselves that whatever screwing we give and get only temporarily deprives us of our purity. Now if we could only make the other 95 percent of the world who see us as Tony Sopranos only fatter rub their eyes and perceive Cinderella instead.
Were we a cosmopolitan and adult people, we would have treated 9/11 with the same stoicism with which the Brits suffered the Blitz or the IRA bombings. We would have calmly regarded that attack as yet another battle in our long see-saw war to control the Middle East and its resources. We might have remembered the USS New Jersey hurling 2,700 pound shells dubbed “flying Volkswagens” into the perched villages of the Levant. Or the tens of thousands killed by the chemical weapons we supplied to our then pal Saddam Hussein for our joint war on Iran. Or Israel’s wars of punitive annihilation that we provisioned.
We would have reckoned that we got in our shots, and with 9/11 they got in one of theirs. So let’s bind our wounds and head back into battle. If we Americans want global leadership and cheap gas we have to pay some price, don’t we? Instead, the politicians and the bullshit mills of the media churned out yet another version of the virgin being assailed. Evil ravaged goodness merely because it was good. “They hate us for our freedom,” as Bush endlessly intoned. So we must destroy evil lest it rob of our innocence yet again. And not just any evil, but the one that resides east of Suez, bows to Mecca, and sits on oil deposits.
Back in World War II, Harry Truman made a national reputation by heading a Senate investigation into war profiteering (it was considered a crime rather than a smart career choice back then). During Vietnam, Senator Fulbright held revelatory hearings on how we got into that war. Our Iran-Contra adventure raised questions for which congress sought answers. Interestingly, no one in power today seems interested in investigating the Allah awful mess we have gotten ourselves into between Baghdad and Kabul. Few even want to hear about the subject: Obama’s speech on replacing combat in Iraq with a euphemism for same was rated one of the dullest and least listened to of his presidency.
Ground Zero has become the cross on our shield and we are settling into a new round of crusades. The last series of such endeavors went on for two centuries. The fact that we're insolvent shouldn’t slow us down. After all, Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless led several thousand paupers in the first Crusade. They looted Belgrade as if they were CIA contractors in Kabul before the Seljuk Turks cut them to pieces.

2010-09-01T08:56:00.000-07:00

Obama Drones On About
U.S. Global "Leadership"
Mafiosi refer to their organization as cosa nostra, our thing. Our politicians refer to our empire as ‘our leadership.’ By the third paragraph of his let's pretend we're leaving Iraq speech on Tuesday night, President Obama was warning “the world that the United States of America intends to sustain and strengthen our leadership in this young century.” In other words, that despite having gotten cuffed around in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention Latin America), he intends to beef up the empire. That's, of course, if China lends him more ducats for drones.
Since the most durable lesson of history is that people everywhere prefer their own kind rather than foreigners as leaders, Obama’s intention is a formula for endless conflict and war with one bunch or other of the 95 percent of human beings on earth who owe no allegiance to the United States and its succession of undressed emperors.
As that 95 percent has noticed, America has surrendered its manufacturing edge and frittered away its finances. That means its ‘leadership’ now consists mainly of a military power competent at dealing death and destruction, but utterly incompetent and corrupt when it comes to pacifying, governing and exploiting the survivors of its violence.
Ironically, this is an affirmation of the conservative belief that government just screws things up. The crazy contradiction here is that though the conservatives want to starve the government at home, they are ever eager to sprinkle endless billions on its ‘nation building’ efforts overseas. But that’s not actually a contradiction, since those billions are really being doled out by Uncle Sam to its contractors and mercenaries. In effect, the Pentagon and CIA have become little more than brokers for an increasingly corporate and private military. The right wingers love that. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has become to drones what Martha Stewart is to duvets.
The privatization of once public institutions like schools and armies relieves them of their original purpose, whether it be educating kids or winning wars. The new purpose becomes profit. From that perspective, Iraq and Afghanistan may be losers for the empire but are winners for their investors. But the war bubble is no more sustainable than the housing or stock bubbles. It’ll blow up one day, too. The only question is whether the explosion will be literal or figurative.

2010-08-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

Playing Ball
As is my habit, I was avidly reading the business page when I came across this headline:

I.R.S. to Drop Suit Against UBS Over Tax Havens

UBS? Hadn’t I read those initials in another story of a different sort just a day or so ago? Sure, UBS, or Union Banque Suisse. It’s one of those reclusive repositories where the really rich stash their spondulicks away from busybody tax collectors, divorce lawyers and such.
The story referred to earlier attempts by Uncle Sam to get the names of UBS’s American clients. Now Washington was backing off. “The statement by the I.R.S,” said the NY Times, “puts to rest a serious headache for UBS, the world’s largest private bank, and for Switzerland over offshore private banking services that enabled wealthy Americans to avoid taxes.” Phew, I felt relieved. Then I remembered that I didn't have a Swiss bank account.
I recalled that there was another story the same week mentioning UBS. What was it? Then, it came to me. It was raining on Martha’s Vineyard so the vacationing President Obama had to play basketball in the gym at the Oak Bluffs school because all the outdoor courts were being pelted. He went to shoot hoops with a couple of his buddies. One of them was Robert Wolf, a bond guy who must be sharp, having risen to the job of CEO of UBS Americas.
Later in the week, with the sun back out, Obama played golf at Mink Meadows. Along with the president, the foursome included Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York City and a zillionaire financial news mogul, Vernon Jordan, the wealthy director of the Lazard global banking group and a longtime intimate of presidents, and, again, Robert Wolf of UBS. The stock market cheerleaders at CNBC were making jokes about the president having a new pal on Wall Street.
I assume that when our president gets together with the gods of finance, apart from the usual manly banter, sports talk and the occasional blue joke, the talk is about restoring the economy, putting the jobless back to work, and other serious and uplifting matters. I can't imagine that the conversation would drift to something like getting the I.R.S. to go soft on a company headed by a BOB (buddy of Barack). Even thinking such a thought would make me all but one of those crazy conspiracy theorists. You know, they’re the nuts who believe that when people of wealth and power meet in private, they sometimes advance their own selfish interests rather than strive for the common good.
No, I’m sure that the two stories about UBS are purely coincidental. And I'm sure that President Obama, Mr. Wolf, and all those folks in Washington and on Wall Street want you to be sure, too.

2010-08-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

9/11 Nine Years On
Charles Peguy, the French Catholic writer, said that things begin in mysticism and end in politics. Had he been an American, he might have written that things end in business.
It’s nine years since 9/11. No equivalent outrage has recurred. Amazingly, its principal progenitors are still on the loose. The CIA's "harsh interrogators" have turned those they have caught into such zombies that they dare not present them in court. Meanwhile, the CIA and Pentagon dispute whether Al Qaeda has been droned down to scores or mere dozens of effectives. In any case, an American has less chance of being killed by terrorists than of being run over by a Kaiser-Frazer or winning the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.
While conundrums and conspiracies still becloud 9/11, what is clear is that the event has added a whole new profit sector to our economy. An extraordinary series in the Washington Post tells us that since 9/11:

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.

Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

Those mind-blowing facts reminds us that our country fights its wars in an interesting way. Rather than adjusting our strategies to the nature and capabilities of our enemies, we align them with the business trends of the moment. Back when we were the world’s leading manufacturing power, we emphasized turning out endless quantities of tanks, planes, warships and such. By the height of the Cold War in the 1960s we had built enough nukes to zap mother earth into cosmic dust many times over. Those who suggested that too much was enough (remember the Nuclear Freeze Movement?) were branded enemy agents.
The computer revolution came along at roughly the same time that our capitalists figured they could make more money by sending manufacturing jobs overseas and speculating in paper assets instead. So our military started making fewer but more costly weapons stuffed with foreign-fashioned electronics. And just like private business, the Pentagon also began farming out jobs. The classic KP potato peelers disappeared, replaced by the civilian wage slaves of huge private contractors like Halliburton who charged the tax payer Maxim’s prices for serving up MRE chow.
9/11 brought an emphasis on intelligence. Not the human kind in which information is combined with judgment, but rather the military kind in which vast amounts of data are mined and refined into futuristic attacks on medieval tribes. So part of the the military was rejiggered to resemble Wall Street trading desks, with ranks of lap top commandos poring over the latest “secret intelligence” to provide targets for the old hat part of the military that still sallies forth to kill people and break things.
As we saw by the Wiki leaks, our wars by software appear no more able to produce coherent victories than our hardware ones like Vietnam. Imperial wars always run into the same problem: already being home and having nowhere else to go, the enemy usually outlast their more easily bored would-be conquerors. A greater worry is where Washington is going to direct this secret, massive and mushrooming "intelligence" behemoth after its finishes its polysci proctology of the Pushtuns. What more can Uncle Sam possibly want to know about us that we haven't already flashed on FaceBook and such?
(For a shorter version of the Washington Post series check this recent New Yorker piece)

2010-08-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

The Yawns of August

West Tisbury, Mass.

Big things are happening--but who cares? Our country is losing its economy and its empire. Few nations outside of the banana belt have managed to concentrate wealth and power so intensely. The time when one guy owns everything is a lot closer than the time when everyone owns something.
Our platinum-weighted military is unable to outfight feudal foes. Still, its bloated budget and pointless wars remain sacrosanct. There are 2.4 million of us in jail. That’s far more, in total and percentage wise, than any other nation, including China, a dictatorship with a population five times ours. If all those Americans belong in jail, we are the most criminal society in the universe. If they don’t, we’re a police state.
The fact that we have 16-17 percent real unemployment doesn’t stop us from shipping ever more jobs overseas. The increasing millions losing their homes doesn’t stop us from running the same old real estate scams. And, by the way, we’ve advanced from the fattest to the most obese of the human tribes.
The global economic mess has folks revolting from Thailand to Thessalonika. Europe is riotous. Fed up Latin Americans are opting out of our empire. Our former clients everywhere have turned surly and, worse, disobedient. The world out there is a
churning, bubbling maelstrom.
Here? Not so much. Despite all the strurm und drang across the planet, the USA remains the Alfred E. Newman of nations. Folks are taking insecurity and poverty in stride. A few weeks ago when the Reps blocked further unemployment insurance payments, outrage was limited to a couple of congressional liberals Where were the jobless themselves? God only knows.
Back in the Great Depression neighbors organized against evictions by surrounding foreclosed homes and moving furniture back in as quickly as the sheriffs dragged it out. I don’t see any of that, or of much other protest on the housing front.
Despite our endless and wasteful wars, the peace movement has peacefully gone to sleep. The people who were angry about such things as the Patriot Act and other attacks on civil liberties are nowhere to be seen now that Obama is enforcing the same Bush policies.
We’re told that lots of liberals are disillusioned by Obama’s failure to even attempt the change they imagined that he would bring. I don’t buy it. But even if it’s so, so what? Where do liberals have to go? They are self-declared serfs of the Democratic Party. And that means forever being terrorized by those to their right and terrorizing those on their left in the name of the “lesser evil.” Nothing new here.
The only interesting politics happening in the country are on the right. The Ron Paul Libertarians are terrific on ending our imperial wars and restoring constitutional rights. A few of the tea baggers are actually irked at rule by big banks and corporations. Unfortunately, they appear to be outnumbered by the knucklehead wing of conservatism, those who want to play with guns, not pay taxes, and vote Jefferson Davis back into office.
Right, left or whatever, none of these tendencies threaten business as usual, let alone promise change. The world may be interesting, but we’ll check it out on You Tube after our nap.

2010-07-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

The Great BS Machine

West Tisbury, Mass.

The business of public relations, an American invention, is about a century old. One of its earliest manifestations came when John D. Rockefeller hired Ivy Lee, one of the first flacks, to clean up his reputation after the notorious 1914 massacre at his coal mine in Ludlow, Colorado. Miners there went on strike. Rockefeller goons and troops burned them out of their encampment, killing women and children. Old man Rockefeller was already in bad cess because of his pitiless business practices. Roasting little kids made him the nation’s bogeyman. Ivy Lee changed that. Soon the papers and newsreels were filled with images of the sere, crow-beaked old John D. handing out shiny dimes to photogenic urchins.
About the same time newspaper owners were discovering that something called “objectivity” might make them richer. All through American history, blats and broadsheets had been the clarions of parties, pols and special pleaders. You bought the paper that reflected your opinions and dumped on others. With the rise of giant consumer industries, a need for mass advertising arose. The solution was mass publication newspapers that rose above favoritism by having their stories written by “professional” news people rather than partisan hacks. Naturally, these newspapers were never quite so “objective” as to bite the hands that fed them by getting tough on the sins of big business since they had become big businesses themselves.
Thus the great American bullshit business was born. Ever since, the national take on reality has been produced, edited, Photoshopped and cosmetized. Raw information is treated like uncooked chicken gizzards: something that will make you sick if you even touch it. The honchos at NPR, CNN and such regularly warn us that we need them as “responsible gatekeepers” to make the news digestible.
So complete was the government-corporate control of information, that it had become all but sacrilege to challenge it. The greatest sin, as Gore Vidal liked to say, was giving up the game. By which he meant revealing the truth to those who weren't supposed to know it.
I used the past tense because the net has changed all that--at least technically. Sitting at a laptop on my back porch on an island in the Atlantic I can potentially reach as many people with my take on the news as any media conglomerate. By the same token, I learn things about the world every day from the net that that no money media editor would dare to publish, lest it rile some pol or plutocrat.
So, thanks to the net, our gatekeepers have lost the lock and hinges to the gate, allowing naked reality to wander into the backyard and disport itself before our amazed eyes. The latest and most notorious intruders consist of the Afghan war reports revealed at wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010. Not to brag, but they confirm, underline and tie in pink ribbons the things I’ve been writing about the subject for the last couple of years.* Namely, that the culture and politics of that part of the world are beyond the ken, let alone the manipulation of our empire, and that therefore our designs on it are as doomed as Elphinstone's regiments of foot at the Khyber Pass in 1842.
I have enormous admiration for Specialist Bradley Manning and the crew at WikiLeaks who gave us reality instead of rhetoric on Afghanistan. I hope it will match the impact of the release of the Pentagon Papers that exposed the fraud of Vietnam. But it may be too late. I fear the great American bullshit machine has accustomed us to pointless wars, corruptly, criminally and incompetently fought. Proof of the same may merely produce more useless indifference rather than useful ire.

* War's Costly Toll (Booth), June 10, 2010
Traveling With Hillary, March 19, 2010
Keeping Score On Our Wars, December 3, 2010
Salong, It's Been Good To Know You, Oct 4,2009

2010-07-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

Two Scenarios
Two Years Later
I published the blog below on July 19, 2008. Unfortunately, Scenario 2 appears to have prevailed. I went astray in predicting protest (good) followed by repression (bad). The paucity of the former has so far obviated the latter. I was also amazed that, given the new political mood in Latin America, Obama was stupid enough to alienate a whole continent by signing off on the vicious coup in Honduras whose Washington-advised leaders are currently practicing old-fashioned death squad democracy in all of its grizzliness. Our media continue to ignore Honduras's growing list of victims on the well-established principle that it’s not newsworthy, let alone a violation of human rights, for rightists to kill and torture leftists. And, of course, no one could foresee environmental catastrophe on the scale of the Gulf kill. Apart from that, I think, unhappily, that Scenario 2 allows me to don the swami’s turban.

* * * * * *

Scenario 1. Obama wins. The landslide majority that elected him along with a lopsided Democratic congress demand the change he promised. They want immediate action on jobs and the economy. They want the troops out of Iraq and America out of the empire business. Their to-do list also includes energy, health care, the environment, schools, and infrastructure. Obama and the Dems respond positively. They signal their bona fides by initiating withdrawal, citing mounting Iraqi calls for us to clear out. Obama announces global base closings to save money and show foreigners we have no imperial designs on them. In what is called the Obama Overture, he assures democratic Latin leaders that efforts to overthrow their governments will cease to be replaced by cooperation on ending the poverty that drives millions north.
At home, Obama launches a Real Deal of fresh initiatives on the Four E’s--the economy, the environment, energy and education. He says it's time to catch up with the rest of the first world on health care. Some of his proposals seem more practical than others. But people are inspired and energized by the sense that Washington is finally on their side. Hard times gradually give way to a more rational and balanced prosperity that emphasizes broad well-being over personal consumption. The world seems a bit safer and Americans more hopeful. Obama and the Dems easily win reelection in 2012. We become Denmark with Rockies.

Scenario 2. Obama wins. The people who voted for him demand the change he promised. They expect things to happen, but nothing much does. It becomes more and more apparent that Obama, despite his brains, youth, cool and promise, is just another face for business as usual.
People feel betrayed. The angriest among them take to the streets. Obama quickly unleashes the repressive apparatus built up over the Bush years to punish the troublemakers. Mass roundups, disappearances and fear of torture or worse scare potential protesters into quiescence. The economy sinks further, imperial wars get nastier, the country grows dismal and surly. And, of course, the rich get richer. Comes the 2012 election and Obama is excoriated for the mess. An extreme right wing Republican (possibly an Alaskan yahoo) promising order and military victory, wallops him in the election. We enter a dark age of fascism.

2010-07-01T12:45:00.000-07:00

Vergessene Helden
(Forgotten Heros)
Now that July 4th has become a barbeque bash and America a counter-revolutionary corporatocracy, it’s time to switch over from adulating the Minute Men to a celebration of the proud predecessors of our forces from the private for-profit security sector now standing terrorism alert from the savannahs of Somalia to the karsts of Kyrgyzstan.
They are our up-and-coming first line of offense against those who would keep their countries for themselves. When these Velcro-belted warriors delve into their scrapbooks and pause to reflect on the history of their profession, they too harken back to the fateful summer of 1776.
It was on August 15 on Staten Island that the Hessians first trooped onto our shores. They were immediately flung into combat at the Battle of Long Island and acquitted themselves with honor. The contract combatants were part of a larger force of Brits whose mission was to suppress terrorism and restore law and order. Insurgents had destroyed food stocks, even tossing tea into the sea in Boston. They were rampaging through the countryside and killing loyal troops.
Over the next seven years, nearly 30,0000 private enterprise fighters from Hesse would see battle in the war on terror from Trenton to Yorktown. Thousands would succumb to disease--more than died in combat. Upwards of six thousand would settle here and raise families. Thousands of others would return to their beloved Hesse.
In truth, not only Hessians but Russians, French, Poles and other Europeans served the cause of King George III, America’s sovereign. The colonial insurgents used the name Hessians to denote mercenaries of whatever provenance. People on both sides of the Atlantic had different values in those days and were appalled by the use of hired soldiers. The rebellious colonists were particularly outraged that their monarch was using foreign troops to restore order.
In Europe, “Frederick the Great, a man not over-scrupulous in his own measures, viewed it as an abominable traffic in human lives, and it is said that whenever any of these hirelings passed through his territory he levied on them the usual toll for cattle, saying that they had been sold as such.”
Attitudes are much changed today. We’ve gotten over that particular difference with the king. Not only have we Americans moved from a draft military to a paid one, but business interests have found it to their profit to increasingly substitute for the government when it comes to making war. Given the direction of events in Afghanistan and Iraq, it looks like our future wars will be purely entrepreneurial endeavors. So lets hoist a July 4th brewski to King George and his hired Hessians who paved the way.

2010-06-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

The Locals Win Again
The cashiering of Rambo McChrystal and his replacement by the bazaari Petraeus, announces that our Afghan adventure is no longer a war but has become, as is common in that part of the world, a haggle.
The collapse of the war part, like that in Iraq, marks yet another failure for the world’s most expensive murder machine. In both places, the conundrum was the same: kill abundantly and makes lots of new enemies or kill selectively and make fewer of them. A third option, making loyal compradors and satraps of the inhabitants, was no more possible than Salt Lake City accepting domination by an occupation army of Upper West Side atheists.
The great universal of human history is that people everywhere want to be ruled by their own kind. Interestingly, some are more or less admandant than others. My father came from Dubrovnik, the “pearl of the Adriatic.” It remains among the most perfectly preserved and gorgeous medieval towns in Europe. One reason, according to local folklore, is that its citizens kept siete bandiere in the attic. If the Venetian fleet appeared on the horizon, up went the Venetian flag. If it were the Turks or the Austrians, their respective banners soon carried on the mistral breeze. The burgers of Dubrovnik, known as the city-state of Ragusa in those days, waited on the dock, wearing smiles and bearing tribute. Thus, the town was never sacked, let alone having its cattle raped and its women rustled.
On the other extreme, the peoples of western and central Asia enjoy a multi-millenial rep for conquest and resistance to same. The clear lesson of history is don’t mess with them. But we Americans prefer not to mess with history. So we keep getting ourselves into easily avoidable disasters like Iraq and Afghanistan. When our imperial wars go bad, they occasion internal ones. The battle raging today in Washington is between those retaining enough sense to haggle our way out of Kabul and those who want to keep the highly profitable show on the road, even if we have to pay tribute to local warlords. The demission of McChrystal and the rerise of Petraeus signals that the sensibles have won, at least for the time being.
The winner of our Iraq war was Iran. Today’s Times tells me that Pakistan will be the winner of our Afghan war. This is for the obvious reason that those with the greatest incentive to provide advice and aid to war-shattered nations are their largest and closest neighbors.
For the last decade, a major goal of the Pentagon has been to prevent the rise of regional powers that might locally challenge the U.S. claim to total global domination. First under Bush and now with Obama, Washington has managed a perfect failure in this endeavor. We have entered the multipolar age. The proof is that regional powers like Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Brazil, not to mention hemispheric hegemons like China and Russia, are not only growing in influence, but see no need to challenge us. They can simply ignore us while we self-destruct.

Note to my reader (not you, honey, the other one): I am running late on the blog owing to my continuing research into the American health care system. I spent the first half of this week checking on the cardiac services at Yale New Haven Hospital. I got two new stents as souvenirs of my visit. That’s a grand total of nine since 1998. I made sure to have my card punched so that the 10th one is free. With so much metal in my ticker, I plan to introduce myself at future formal events as Pierre Coeur de Fer.

2010-06-14T08:28:00.000-07:00

Soon, The Triple A Threat
I thought we were stuck in a rut.
The last time I took a look, eighteen months ago, our “national security” threat board had turned senile. It was thirty years, for example, since our leaders first warned us that Iran was minutes away from getting a nuke and zapping Israel and Iceland to boot. Cuba’s “threat” to the hemisphere was fifty years old. Fidel Castro had long since emulated me by retiring to blogging. The North Korean “danger” had been around for 60 years, but it was hard to pin the aggressiveness rap on a country known to the world as a hermit kingdom. It looked like we’d be doing dotage with our same old enemies, glaring at each other from wheel chairs on the porch of the assisted living facility.
But never stumble in front of the wheels of history. We suddenly seem to be on the way to acquiring two new and rambunctious foes. Brazil, with nearly 200 million feisty Brazilians and a wealth of natural resources, is off the ranch and gone mustang. So is Turkey, which strategically straddles Europe and Asia and is home to 70 million hard-working and increasingly independent-minded Turks.
The Brazilians have been subverted by the dangerous notion that being the biggest and richest country on a huge continent means they don’t have to take orders from an insolvent empire so degenerate that has to pay protection to secure its gouty military from the depredations of feudal tribes.
As for the Turks, they were long considered “one of the United States’ most pliable allies” who “reliably followed American policy” in the Middle East. But that’s all changed. “Regional powers want to have a say in regional and global politics. “This is our neighborhood,” say the Turks, and we don’t want trouble. The Americans create havoc, and we are left holding the bag.”
This is a knee in the jewels to official Washington dorktrine which holds that “the US. must prevent “potential competitors from challenging our leadership” or “even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
If that’s not enough agita, there are increasing signs that China, our cosmic creditor, is moving beyond disobedience to defiance. The Obama administration’s efforts to “give Beijing a larger stake in solving international problems” is not working out. Instead, Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, charges that Beijing is pursuing polices “designed to protect China’s workers and firms at the expense of China’s trading partners” (that means us).
Putting your own country’s interests ahead of those of the American empire is, to be sure, the ultimate sin in Washington. Assassinations, coups and outright invasions are the usual penalty for such breaches. The trouble is that they’re easier to pull off in tiny Honduras than in big countries like Turkey and Brazil, let alone humongous ones like China.
Not yet overpowered by the stench of oil in the Gulf is the scent of blood in the water--this time from the imperial shark itself rather than from its prey. The great beast is old and wounded and the littler fishes are feeling more secure. The scariest word in Washington is “multipolar.” It means a world of many more or less equal players rather than one run by Goldman Sachs and such via their errand boys in the White House, Treasury and Pentagon.
Hard times are here and business and government are making drastic cuts. Thus far this trend has yet to reach the empire, whose budgets still soar no matter the diminishing return on investment it's suffering. Spending ever more spondulicks to boss around ever fewer subjects is not good business. This would then be a perfect time to discreetly step back from our declining global “interests.” Not capitulation, but starting with a little here, a little there. For instance, Obama could begin to make good on his fine words to the peoples of Latin America and the Middle East that the U.S. will actually respect their sovereignty. They’re in the process of sending us packing anyway. It would be dignified to gracefully heed their invitation to tend our own garden rather than be weeded out of one country after another.
Besides, not even I have a wacky enough sense of humor to start making fun of the threat notices the media are no doubt already preparing for us about the “evil Amazon-Anatolia Axis!”

2010-06-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

War's Costly Toll (Booth)

With consummate skill they [the Damascenes] proposed a variety of arguments to some of our princes and they promised and delivered a stupendous sum of money to them so that the princes would strive and labor to lift the siege--William of Tyre on the betrayal by the Christian princes at the Siege of Damascus, 1148.

One of my favorite old Monty Python bits has a couple of cheap crooks extorting the Colonel Blimpish commander of a British military base. “You don’t want anything to happen to your tanks and artillery, do you?”
Too absurd to really occur, right? Wrong!
In the last week the NY Times has devoted two full page stories to a swag bag of real life replays of that Monty Python sketch. The stage is Afghanistan. And the cockney crooks have been replaced a small army of Afghan and American miscreants.
Prominent among these, according to the Times, is an illiterate warlord named Matiullah Khan, who’s been raking in millions from the Pentagon for “protecting” American military convoys and bases. If you think the George Washington Bridge toll is a ripoff, consider that Mr. Matiullah charges the U.S. Treasury $1,800 bucks for every truck he allows to pass. Apparently that’s a bargain because other “security contractors” demand up to $2,500 per rig.
The payoffs flow from a $2.2 billion pot of our tax money dubbed Host Nation Trucking. “American officials award contracts to Afghan and American trucking companies”... “and leave it to the trucking companies to protect themselves.” “The money is so good, in fact, that the families of some of Afghanistan’s most powerful people have set up their own security companies to get in on the action.”
There’s nothing new here. When we first invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, I advised folks to turn off CNN and delve into books about the Crusades. Not only are they fascinating and action-packed, but they reveal war-fighting techniques useful for us infidels to bone up on.
One is that your enemy doesn’t have to be your enemy all the time. He can casually change roles, from foe to friend to neutral middle man. One minute he’ll be trying to lop your noggin off and the next beseeching you about a good baksheesh on figs or eunuchs.
Pelf plays as prominent a part in warfare east of Suez as do weapons. “For months,” writes Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins, “reports have abounded here that the Afghan mercenaries who escort Americans and other NATO convoys through the badlands have been bribing Taliban insurgents to let them pass.”
“We’re funding both sides of the war,” a NATO official said. “People think that that the insurgency and the government are separate, and that is not always the case,” another NATO official in Kabul said.
Put another way, it looks like Uncle Sam is also bailing out the Talibank.

2010-06-04T11:22:00.000-07:00

Israel at Sea

In that same day, the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt, unto the great river, the river Euphrates --Genesis, 15:18

Twice in official state documents David Ben Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister], announced that the state was created "in a part of our small country and "in only a portion of the Land of Israel." He later noted that "the creation of the new State by no means derogates from the scope of historic Eretz (Greater) Israel ."

The headline above refers to something beyond last monday’s murderous maelstrom in the Mediterranean. Let’s begin with a commonplace. Israel’s acolytes never stop asking: doesn’t Israel have the right to exist? My answer is, “Sure, what are its borders?” They are certainly not fixed, like the line, say, between Vermont and Quebec. Rather, they are described by Zionists as "to be negotiated." In fact, Israel is an expansionist state both by aspiration and by action. Since its founding in 1948, it has invaded and seized land from all of its neighbors. Those additions are populated by five million people who are afforded no rights by their occupier. Israeli writer Yitzak Laor put the situation this way:
"We are the masters. We work and travel. They can make their living by policing their own people. We drive on the highways. They must live across the hills. The hills are ours. So are the fences. We control the roads and the checkpoints and the borders. We control their electricity, their water, their milk, their oil, their wheat and their gasoline. If they protest peacefully we fire tear gas at them. If they throw stones, we fire bullets. If they launch a rocket, we destroy a house and its inhabitants. If they launch a missile, we destroy families, neighborhoods, streets, towns."
Over the four decades of its existence, Israel has used the often vicious and self-defeating resistance of its captives as an excuse to portray itself as a victim while making their lives all the more miserable. There is a plan to this. After the 1967 Six Day War in which the Israelis conquered parts of Syria, Egypt and Jordan, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan offered a suggestion to the welter of Arabs that had come under its rule. “You can live like dogs,” he said, “or you can leave.” That plan has not changed in the last 43 years. “The message,” says Yitzak Laor, “is always the same: leave or remain in subjugation under our military dictatorship. We are a democracy. We have decided democratically that you will live like dogs.”
Israel is a settler nation, redolent of the United States in the early 19th century. The U.S. was able to destroy its indigenous population and overrun a continent because its numbers were huge compared to theirs. Israel lacks such advantages. Its indigenous people are almost equal in number to its Jewish settlers. What’s more, Israel is surrounded by tens of millions of the kith and kin of those its seeks to eliminate as part of its expansionism. Most of the world’s Jews choose not to live in Israel, meaning there are not enough potential settlers to populate the lands seized. Immigration by gentiles would dilute the requisite Jewish nature of the state. Finally, demographics are on the side of the conquered, who are multiplying at a greater rate than the Israelis.
As a result, Israel has been unable to digest its gains. It was obliged to return the Sinai with its oil resources to secure a fitful peace with Egypt, its biggest neighbor. Unable to defeat a tenacious 22-year resistance, it finally retreated from the ten percent of Lebanon it had grabbed. In 2005, it ended its costly ground occupation of Gaza. Instead, it sealed the territory from the outside, turning it into what the president of Turkey calls an “open-air prison.” Rather than its troops kicking in doors, Israel relies for control on what it calls keeping the Gazans “on a diet.” In other words, starving them into submission.
Thus Israel cannot recreate Eretz Israel, and, worse, has increasing difficulty in holding on to the territories it has already seized. Most vexing of all, its Jewish population is riven by bitter differences between the Haredi (orthodox) and secular communities. So antagonistic are these groups that Israel’s housing minister has proposed their physical separation. This would mean double apartheid: that between Jews and Arabs and that between Jews themselves.
After a succession of increasingly hard right governments and wars characterized by over-the-top violence and ruthlessness, Israel has been been losing friends in the world. Even old allies like Turkey are dropping away. An important article by Peter Beinart, a conservative American Jew, bemoans the failure of the pro-Israel lobby to prevent the serious erosion, particularly among young American Jews, of unquestioning support for Israel. Like its now departed close ally and role model, the Union of South Africa, Israel is becoming increasingly isolated in the world. Who knows whether it will react by loosening up or digging in its heels? All we do know for sure is that the "dogs" are not going away.

2010-05-31T05:26:00.000-07:00

BP Bashing "Un-American"
If the oil kill in the Gulf was gushing from the site of a Venezuelan rig, we would already be bombing Caracas. If it came from Mexico’s Pemex or France’s Total, we’d be mocking their incompetence in quasi-racist terms. But since it is the dirty work of British Pollution, a premier UK multinational that we treat as one of our own, we get instead the usual tepidity from Barack Obama and no less than a defense of BP by Rand Paul, the Kentucky GOP’s Libertarian senate hope. Mr. Paul avers that the Obama administration’s underwhelming impatience with BP is “un-American.” Yes, to repeat, he says it is “un-American” to criticize a foreign conglomerate.
The pundits explain that, being new to politics, Paul has yet to master the requisite dexterity at dissembling and, on too many occasions, actually says what he means. And what he meant was that to be a patriotic American requires a forbearing attitude towards any outfit with Inc. (or the foreign equivalent of same) at the end of its name. Globalization and multinationals have been around long enough that even the most ardent yahoo's adoration of private enterprise now extends from Royal Ahold to Royal Saudi,
That’s because corporations of whatever provenance do wonderful things for America (with occasional mistakes, to be sure, like the rape and pillage of the financial system or the grand Gulf defecation) while government gets in the way and messes things up. Surely some hard-driving BP executive who was chosen CEO by a dozen or so fellow board members in a conference room in London deserves more respect and deference than a politician who was elected president with 60 million votes of mere citizens.
When conservatives make their pitch to the public, they posit a too big, bossy and bureaucratic government that stifles initiative and crushes the individual. The problem is that what they want to replace it with are too big, bossy and bureaucratic corporations that stifle initiative and crush the individual. It’s not a good trade off, if only because government is a national institution that flies our flag and whose leaders we vote for. Corporations have no nationality and are run as dictatorships--what the boss says, goes.
One wonders why intelligent people like Rand Paul haven’t figured this out? Then again, maybe they have. Maybe they are nothing more than corporate shills pretending to be be freedom-loving individualists. Why else would any real American worry about hurting the feelings of British corporate honchos?

2010-05-20T10:38:00.000-07:00

Killing Through The Centuries
In Catch 22, General Dreedle, annoyed by Major Danby’s moaning, orders that he be taken out and shot. Dreedle’s son, Colonel Moodus, whispers to him and he replies in surprise: “‘You mean I can’t shoot anyone I want to?’ He pricked up his ears with interest as Colonel Moodus continued whispering. ‘Is that a fact?’ he inquired, his rage tamed by curiosity”
The reason General Dreedle couldn’t shoot anyone he wanted to has to do with western civilization. Once upon a time, kings and generals could kill people and start wars at their whim. Over centuries the rule of law and popular consent gradually replaced Caesar’s thumbs up or thumbs down. We in the west became civilized.
Nothing lasts forever. Back in June 2002, in a prep rally for the forthcoming Iraq war, President Bush declared that he could attack any country he felt like merely on his assertion that it might do us harm at some future time. This was enshrined in what is now known, and apparently accepted by Obama, as the Bush Doctrine.
George’s fiat pissed on the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Considered one of the basic advances of western civ, it was an agreement by European powers, tuckered out after the Thirty Years War, to establish the principle of sovereignty and quit attacking each other over religion. So much for that notion--at least in the U.S.
Four hundred years before Westphalia, King John of England was forced by his barons in 1215 to sign a document stripping him of many of his ‘divine’ powers. Called the Magna Carta, it codified the notion of habeus corpus. It held that the king couldn’t just disappear you in the middle of the night on his say-so. If he thought you had committed some infraction, he had to produce you, bring charges and let a trial decide your guilt or innocence.
Barack Obama is currently micturating on that bedrock attribute of western civ. He has announced, more by deed than word, that he can Dreedle by drone anyone anywhere. This didn’t make much news because Bush had been doing the same thing on a lesser scale. It hit the headlines only when the Obama administration publicly targeted a U.S. citizen. Bit of a sticky wicket that.
“The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy,” said the NY Times. No doubt those uneasy legal authorities are afraid of losing their jobs. If the ruler can kill at will, courts and lawyers become irrelevent. So does western civ.
At the same time, we learned the Obummers have new weapons in the works “capable of reaching any corner of the earth from the U.S. in under an hour...with accuracy capable of picking off Osama bin Laden in a cave.” Or even, I might add, a passel of peaceniks in Berkeley.
Progressive Democrats, no less than conventional pundits like Thomas Friedman, are disappointed in Obama for his timidity. They see his promises of change dribbling down the drain of business as usual. Would that it were mere business as usual. Every day it gets to look more like Byzantium as usual.

2010-05-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

From Antibes to Athens
The Cannes Film Festival--happening right now--has long served as one of our gaudiest exemplars of excess. Quaffing kirs at 100 Euros a pop on the terrace of the Hotel du Cap. Zillion dollar yachts bobbing at anchor in Golfe Juan. Wheeling flocks of swifts that, on second glance, turn out to be fleets of Citations, Gulfstreams and Dassaults heading into Nice-Cote d’Azur.
Indecent indulgence? Not so much. This year our pols and media have stamped the stigmata of sybaritism on a hitherto unremarked cohort. Hedge fund managers? Nah. Bond traders? Guess again. Michelle Obama’s couturier? Not hardly. Lindsay Lohan’s bail bondsman? You’re getting close.
The real out-of-control spendthrifts, we are told, are Greek civil servants. Mail carriers redolent of Midas. Trash collectors a la Trump. Buffet-like bureaucrats. The land that first gave us democracy has brought itself into debtocracy. Instead of piling on an Acropolis of arrears to benefit the rich, which is perfectly acceptable business as usual, the Greeks committed the unpardonable capitalist contravention: letting the poor and middle classes share in their ill-advised cornucopia of credit.
For this they must be punished, severely and ceaselessly. The penalty is penury. Greece’s government workers and ordinary citizens must be made bereft of their bennies. The national standard of living has to become more Cote d’Ivoire and less Cote d’Azur. Greeks must learn that before babies are fed, let alone jet skis fueled, the banks and bond houses must be made whole.
The universe has not fallen into hock because Joe Six Pack or Alex Ouzo decided one day to spend beyond their means. It happened because the the richest people on earth, with powers that make Zeus look like a mere conjurer, decided that the manipulation of money stood to be more profitable than the manufacture of goods.
Debt is not incurred; it’s sold just like junk food. If you are the treasurer of a sizable organization, be it public or private, you will be chauffeur-driven to distraction, not to mention free lunch, by battalions of bond peddlers. Each will ply you with pithy Power Points on how your outfit (and, wink, wink, even you) will profit by purchasing yet a newer and more exotic form of debt. If you’re honest, you will shoo them away like flies. If you are flexible, a Porsche would be a fun weekend car.
By the same token, if you are a feckless freshman settling in at Frobisher State, the credit card vultures will alight on you shoulder, gifting you free tees and power juices in exchange for your financial thralldom. Now multiply those solicitations by the millions and scatter them over the earth.
Both debt and junk food deliver instant gratification at the cost of long term misery. And, after enticing you into destitution, distension or disease, both damn you as a knave for falling for their scams.
Our media is currently reveling in the Greek tragedy. They limn it as an object lesson that welfare states go broke and that the lesser classes must learn to live with less, lest, in the words of today’s NY Times, they find themselves in “investors’ line of fire.”
It’s hardly a secret that the big hedge funds have gone from shorting companies to shorting countries. This is the new piracy that has replaced the rapine and pillage of yore. And though there are still rich pickings in Europe, we Americans remain the fattest target in more ways than one. Even after a couple of years of stealing our jobs, looting our pensions, and making a yoke of our nest eggs, Wall Street still sees some meat on our bones. Social Security, of course, is the big jackpot. Bush couldn’t privatize it; it’s more likely that Obama can. We’ll be told we have no choice unless we want to end up in the souvlaki with the Greeks. Don't believe it.
To me, the best thing about the Greek example is the combative spirit of their workers. They know enough economics to understand that they don’t have to take the hit, at least not alone. They can alter the terms of their retrenchment. They can join the Latin Americans in telling the IMF to piss off. In short, they can fight back.
So can we. But not with tea bags.

2010-05-06T10:03:00.000-07:00

Strange Ideas
The Brits are having elections today. The way they vote is just as weird, socialistic and un-American as they way they take care of sick people.
Imagine if we were subject to the following:
Campaigns are limited by law to four weeks. Worse, spending is restricted to what we would consider pocket change. That means elections remain a so-called civic responsibility. We Americans, of course, have gotten rid of civics, whatever they were. Our elections are a proudly permanent multi-billion dollar industry providing work for tens of thousands of people in politics and the media and contributing to the economy. The Brits are still decades behind on that score. How many of their prime ministers have the practical experience of managing big money from big shots before they take office?
Shockingly, the British system allows for spoilers. They assume that all candidates are entitled to whatever votes they get. By contrast, in our system only candidates of the two major parties are entitled to their votes. Participation by other parties are discouraged by election laws, and their candidates are properly reproved for taking votes from the entitled parties. Thus we eliminate the possibility of unconventional opinion screwing up voters’ sensibilities. Just think if we, like the Brits, ended up with a health care system where insurance execs couldn’t make zillions of dollars a year? Oh, the horror!

Seis de Mayo

We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by the thousands, and pursue them perhaps to their capital; we can conquer and annex their territory; but what then?--Horace Greeley, 1846, on the eve of the Mexican-American War.

Two lifetimes later, we know “what then?” Our brute force conquest of Mexico gave us Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and half of Colorado. It also gave us 110 million neighbors who see no reason to be any more respectful of our border than we have been of theirs.
Indeed, when they cross that border, whether in the oven heat of the Sonora or the muddy bottoms of the Rio Bravo, few feel like they’re really leaving Mexico. Rather, they are entering a lost part of their land that, dios mediante, they may some day reclaim. Why not? Israel is making good on a 2,000-year-old irredentist initiative.
But it’s not dreams of national redemption that have brought millions of legit and illicit Mexicans to the U.S. Rather it is the poverty of too much corn. Bill Clinton was in Haiti the other day, apologizing for the poverty of too much sugar. The empire plays the same game everywhere, though apologies are still lacking in Mexico. Not that they mean much after the damage is done. It’s simple. You target a third world country, then flood it with under-priced mountains of the main commodity it produces. In Mexico, that meant corn, grown by millions of small farmers and processed in local mills serving tiendas that made their own tortillas.
With ultra-cheap corn cascading in from Iowa and Indiana, those Mexican farmers and processors soon went broke. Local food production was replaced by U.S. fast food outlets. The millions who lost their land and their livelihood headed for the overflowing cities in search of scarce jobs.
The human overabundance, like that of corn, kept the price of labor low. Here were millions of Mexicans to work for next-to-nothing in the U.S. runaway factories. Here were millions more to push north across the border, and, by the chump wages paid them, enrich the bottom line of meat packers, agro businesses, hotel and restaurant operators, etc. You visited that new Albanian restaurant in L.A. and found that your meal was cooked by some hard-working chef trying to support a family back in Zacatecas.
Not only could we exploit Mexicans, but we could also demonize them as “illegals” for entering their erstwhile country without an invitation when all they were doing was emulating General Zachary Taylor, the 12th president of the United States.

2010-04-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

Nothing Sells Like Nothing

“...a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: Well, what if we have created a thing which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which no one knows how to price?”--Fabrice Tourre of Goldman Sachs on the ABACUS synthetic collateralized debt obligation offering that he structured for the firm, as quoted in the NY Times

Before capitalism came along economics was mainly conquest. You ravaged and savaged other people, enslaved the survivors, stole their stuff, and lived off the proceeds. As Casper Gutman, seeker of the Maltese Falcon, pointed out, "the Holy Wars were largely a matter of loot."
The notion that you could create wealth by hanging up the pike and making useful items for sale began to catch on in the middle ages. Soon people were creating even more wealth by hiring others to make even more stuff to sell.
There were certain expenses involved that we nowadays call capital--hence the term capitalism. You had to pay for the raw materials, the tools, wages for the workers, etc. Obviously, you could become richer by keeping these expenses as low possible while selling your goods for as much as possible.
The ideal would be a product that cost nothing to make and whose main purpose was to profit its sellers. An impossible dream, you say. For eons human society had been based on tangibles (i.e, a pepperoni pizza) and services (i.e., a delivery boy). How could business escape that straight jacket of substance? How could it achieve maximum productivity and profitability by making nothing out of nothing? That was the ultimate challenge.
It took a son of Gaul who chose America to meet that challenge--something we can all be proud of.
So what is that perfectly nebulous product?
It’s the Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligation or SCDO. It allows underlying credit exposure to be taken on using a credit default swap rather than by having a vehicle buy assets such as bonds.
Who wouldn’t want to own one of those--especially the kids? Hey, Mother’s Day is coming? I know moms are finicky. What if you gave her one and she said she wanted a flower pot instead? No problemo. You could short her ABACUS SCDO. You know, that’s when you sell stuff you don’t own.
A couple of decades back when it became apparent that we were switching from an economy that made tangible items to one based on services, pundits warned that Americans would end up washing each others' cars for a living. Wall Street has since advised us that that was wishful thinking.

2010-04-22T10:20:00.000-07:00

Bigger America? Great!
Bigger U.S.? Not So Fast!
America’s lust for largeness has long appalled and amused the other 95 percent of the world. We’re the land where bigger and better are synonymous. Where a “monster” is not an evil ogre but a food portion. Where fat people in phat clothes need trucks to haul their bloated carcasses between their MacMansions and the Mall sprawl.
We’re the nation that needs to graze everywhere on earth because our appetites have long since outgrown our ample home pastures. We’re the folks who turned The Star Spangled Banner into a multinational anthem. We the ones who made our elections into a multi-billion dollar business where cash flow crowds out civics. We rate movies by box office take and the Superbowl by the price of its commercial spots. We await the quarterly accretions of corporate growth like expectant parents.
They say our economic problem is that we’re not growing fast enough. Imagine, we’re still too small! Maybe devouring Pakistan will help us bulk up.
Then again, the pundits tell us we live in an exceptional land. The exception, of course, is the government--the only institution in all of America that people say is too big rather than not big enough. How the hell did that ever happen?
In fact, our government is smaller than those of first world countries. When we say it’s too big, that’s in relation to the little it does for us. It’s like a Hummer that can’t go faster than 40 mph but guzzles gas anyway.
In those countries with bigger governments, taxes cover health care, education through college, decent pensions, paid vacations, efficient public transportation, etc. Our smaller government spends much of our money on expanding an empire, making war, and seeing to it that the comfortably off are rarely discomfited. But those are areas that advocates of a reduced regime believe should be bigger. Happily, that’s not as true as it once was. Libertarian conservatives, whose ideas seem to catching on among some righties, are solidly anti-imperialist. On that subject, Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky are as close as clams.
The smaller state scam is really an effort to reduce or eliminate the parts of government that serve the needs of ordinary Americans. In particular, to privatize Social Security and Medicare, the last two big government programs whose main beneficiaries are not the military or the wealthy but you and me.
Listen to the constant cry that they’re running out of money. Does anyone worry that the Pentagon will go belly up? That they’ll be no bucks to pay for $600 a gallon gasoline in Afghanistan. Or that the Dept of Energy will no longer be able to dish out billions in giveaways to big oil?
The fact is SS can be made solvent for decades to come by way of a small tax hike. Medicare is in truth a god awful mess. A cash cow for crooked providers, it will take an army of Savonarolas to clean it up.
These are useful things to keep in mind as the campaign mounts to make the government smaller by making us poorer.

2010-04-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

Real 'Death Panels'
In fact our government does have them. But they have nothing to do with health care or the blitherings of Sarah Appallin. They consist of high-level committees ensconced deep in the bowels of our national security apparat that decide which of the world’s 200 or so governments should be euthanized for the convenience of our empire. These politicide panels then determine whether the fatal dose should be administered by war, assassination, coup d’etat, destabilization and/or economic strangulation.
Their most recent application was Honduras, where last summer the elected president was removed at gunpoint and death squads were loosed on legitimists, leftists and such. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton celebrated this ongoing bloodbath as a victory for democracy.
Still topping the list for what is bureaucratically dubbed ‘regime change’ are Iran and Venezuela. They got up there by insisting that the vast oil and gas deposits under their lands belong to them and not to Exxon, Chevron or Shell.
Funny, our pols and pundits are forever predicting future “resource wars” with nations scrambling for everything from aluminum to zinc. But they never admit to the ones already happening. Its 31 years now that we’ve been scheming to take back “our” oil in Iran and 10 that we’re plotting to do the same in Venezuela. We don’t admit to the obvious, of course. Rather, we accuse the two countries of seeking nukes, having aggressive designs on their neighbors, oppressing their people and, to be sure, committing the ultimate sin of “anti-Americanism.”
What we omit is that if they turned over their oil to us they could do all of those things with our blessings--and that we’d give them good prices on weapons and torture instruments to boot.
Iran and Venezuela have very different governments. The former is a theocracy like our good buddy Saudi Arabia. Unlike the Saudis, Iran overthrew its pro-Washington royal family back in 1978. It also allows more freedom, especially for women, than do the medievals in Mecca.
By contrast, Venezuela is a raucous democracy. The poor and middle class majority have wrested power away from the old elite and are working to develop bottoms-up governance against vicious opposition from that elite and its Washington patrons. Few nations today have as open and interesting politics.
What the two share in common is peace. Venezuela has never fought a foreign war, while Iran hasn’t attacked anyone in 250 years, or since the course of history put the 5,000-year-old Persian civilization out of the empire business just as it was admitting the nascent United States.
I mention Venezuela this week because its people have just celebrated the eighth anniversary of their victory over one of our ‘death panels.’ In April 2002, a cabal of local military and business types, coordinated, advised and backed by our CIA, Naval Intelligence and such, seized power in Caracas, taking the president prisoner and commencing a reign of terror.
They issued a single decree that read like the CliffsNotes for Fascism 101. It shut down the courts, the legislature and all other elected institutions from the local to national levels. It promised new elections within a year--but gave the cabal veto over candidates.
Meanwhile, the coup’s cops began firing on protesters and rounding up supporters of the legitimate government. The Bush administration lost no time in recognizing the new “government” and praising it for “restoring democracy.” The rest of world all but universally condemned the coup and demanded restoration of the elected government.
Washington and its compradors had badly misjudged. Literally millions of Venezuelans poured into the streets in defense of their real democracy. They were backed by loyal military, who quickly retook the Miraflores (Venezuela’s White House) and freed the president from his island prison. It was all over in less than 48 hours.
The result: the right wing opposition in Venezuela was utterly discredited as dictatorial rather than democratic. The lawful government was strengthened. Latins learned yet again that when Uncle Sam talks about democracy, it means bullets rather than ballots.
The battle goes on. The empire won last summer in Honduras (we’ll see for how long). But attempted coups in Bolivia and Paraguay were thwarted. Venezuelans will be voting in September for their congress. Your tax dollars and ‘death panels’ are still hard at work destabilizing and demonizing the elected government in the name of democracy.

PS-An Irish film crew made a terrific documentary on the 2002 Venezuelan coup that, amazingly, covered the occupation of the presidential palace by the coup plotters. It's called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and is viewable at You Tube

2010-04-07T05:26:00.000-07:00

Down Memory Lane
With the Tea Baggers
If you were 260 years old, which is the average age of a tea bagger, and had been a stone conservative all your life, you would have believed, or at least professed, the following things:
* That King George III was our proper sovereign.
* That Washington, Adams, Franklin and that bunch deserved the noose.
* That, having unfortunately become independent, America should have a king rather than a president.
* That, having regretfully become a republic, America should restrict the ballot to white men of property.
* That blacks, Indians, women and children were property.
* That human slavery was God’s way.
* That opposition to slavery was the devil’s work.
* That the extension of voting rights to white men without property put America on the road to ruin.
* That human slavery should be extended to the new states in the west and reimposed on Latin America and the Caribbean.
* That the maintenance of human slavery in the south required attacking the United States of America, destroying its union, killing its soldiers, trampling its flag, and creating a new slave nation.
* That the abolition of slavery marked another awful step in America’s ruination.
* That freed slaves should be retained in bondage by way of feudal share-cropping and strict segregation.
* That free labor should have no rights and that any effort of workers to combine in unions should be prosecuted as conspiracy.
* That child labor kept kids busy and discouraged delinquency.
* That public schools were socialistic.
* That group practice by doctors was socialistic.
* That antitrust laws were socialistic.
* That the government had no right to protect citizens from foul air, bad water, contaminated food or poisonous drugs.
* That the supreme right was private property and the freedom of its owners to do as they wished.
* That any organization with Inc. in back of its name is preferable to any organization with U.S. in front of its name.
* That corporations should have all the rights of human beings but few, if any, of their responsibilities.
* That money talks every time.
* That Woodrow Wilson and his progressive ilk caused most of our current problems.
* That Franklin D. Roosevelt was really named Rosenfeld and was a traitor to his class.
* That fascism was a positive trend in the 1930s and that Hitler and Mussolini were leaders to admire and emulate.
* That the United States should never have entered World War II.
* That Dwight D. Eisenhower was a conscious member of the international communist conspiracy.
* That Joe McCarthy was a saint.
* That taking God out of the schools and putting the N------rs in ruined America yet again.
* That civil rights laws added to the ruin.
* That John F. Kennedy got what he deserved.
* That Ronald Reagan was our greatest president.
* That Saddam Hussein committed 9/11 and that we found his weapons of mass destruction.
* That Wall Street bankers had nothing to do with the current financial meltdown. Instead it was caused by a conspiracy of poor people to destroy capitalism by borrowing money to buy houses they couldn’t afford. This conspiracy was hatched by Woodrow Wilson in the 1910’s and put into motion in the early 1960’s by a couple of radical Columbia University professors scheming with the then four-year-old Barack Obama.
* That Barack Obama grew up to be a Kenyan, an Indonesian, a Muslim, a radical Christian, an atheist, a socialist, a Nazi, an alien and the anti-Christ.
* That even though I think they are socialistic abominations, I keep my Medicare card handy and have direct deposit for my Social Security.

2010-03-30T06:50:00.000-07:00

The Holy See No Evil

...that strange third sex which the Roman church creates by training
men up from boyhood in a world that is not the world of men.*

Despite his formation in the highly disciplined and task-oriented Hitler Youth, it appears that Joseph Ratzinger, the current pope of Rome, is not exactly a no-nonsense executive.
Not just recently, thousands of priests have been diddling--and worse--tens of thousands of little kids just about everywhere in Christendom. Ratzinger was a bishop, then cardinal in Germany where some of this was happening. Before taking the throne, he headed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which until 1908 was known as the Office of the Inquisition.
While holding that post made notorious by Torquemada, his inquiries were mostly about matters of doctrine rather than evidences of defilement. Or so goes the “petty gossip.” When he did occasionally summon a cleric to whatever serves nowadays as a star chamber, it was on suspicion of being less than medieval in his politics rather than being less than mature in his proclivities.
Perhaps blinded by the incense or deafened by the choir, Ratzinger somehow didn’t notice this recrudescence of one of the more egregious corruptions that have shamed Rome at least since Pope Alexander VI made cardinals of the sons borne him by Lucretia, his adolescent daughter. Though church documents evidence otherwise, the Vatican's flacks tell us that the current pope never read the memos, never was briefed by his underlings, never noticed the morose altar boys at mass. He was just another bystander, like the fedeli in Piazza San Pietro at Wednesday audiences.
Whatever his problems at the office, Benedict XVI has been lucky compared to some of his namesakes. Benedicts IV and VI were murdered, the latter strangled on the contract of the antipope Bonifice VII. Benedict V had his staff of office broken over his head by his predecessor, Leo VIII. Benedict IX was deposed and excommunicated for simony. Benedict XII, a notorious torturer, made plans to launch yet another Crusade to the Holy Land. But these were thwarted by the outbreak of Europe's Hundred Years War.
Some are arguing that celibacy is at the heart's of the church's problem with pedophiliac priests. You can pin that on Benedict VIII. It was he who forbid marriage by wearers of the cloth. It was no matter of spirituality but simple economics. Clerics were leaving church property to their offspring, thus reducing Rome's real estate portfolio.
Goaded by the Reformation and the Risorgimento, the church has cleaned up its act since those days. Indeed, it ran a very tight ship for a while. Until 1870, or just two lifetimes ago, the vicar of Rome ruled politically as well as spiritually over the Papal States, nowadays the Italian provinces of Umbria, Le Marche and Emilia-Romagna. The pope would still be governing those regions had not newly united Italy invaded them, defeated the papal army, and eventually reduced the church’s territorial dominion to the 108 acres of Vatican City in Rome across the Tiber. As compared to the Holy See’s current lackadaisical attitude towards the sins of its servants, it was far more severe with recalcitrants back when it exercised formal police power.
Let me leave you with an extended quote from the great Trevelyan on the church’s use of this power, particularly under the reign of Pope Gregory XVI, when the Holy See saw everything and acted with alacrity.

“Anyone supposed to belong to the dangerous class of ‘thinkers’ was shadowed by the police, even if he had nothing to do with politics. The same vague distrust of everything not medieval led Gregory XVI to prohibit the intrusion of railways and telegraphs into his dominions.
The press was under rigorous censorship, which included most books and newspapers of any importance...
The life, freedom and property of no one who was not a friend to the government had any real security in the Papal States. Long lists of suspects were handed about between the officers spiritual and temporal, whose functions overlapped in the most amazing ways. The houses of suspects were perpetually being searched, and their daily goings out and in were watched and reported. If evidence was lacking, cardinals did not stick at ordering trivial circumstances to be tortured into proof, and certainly lower officials had small scruple in obeying the spirit of their instructions.
Strange commands were issued to the citizens of their church-state, sometimes to individuals, or sometimes to thousands at a time; as, for example, that they should keep within doors between sunset and sunrise, or not go out at night without a lantern; that they should, under compulsion, ‘perform their spiritual exercises for three days in a convent chosen by the bishop,’ or confess once a month before an approved confessor. Cruel punishments were exacted for neglect. The situation of a ‘thinker’ driven into the confessional by the police must have had piquancy...
Throughout the Papal States fines were imposed, inns and cafes closed, civil rights withdrawn at the whim of the officials...Worst of all, any man was liable--and liable almost in proportion to his public spirit and desire to improve the lot of his fellows--to see the inside of the secret cells at Pesaro, or the fortress which rises on the grim rock of San Leo in the heart of the wildest Appenines. In times when the government was especially alarmed, the forms of civilized justice were laid aside, as when in 1821, many hundreds of men and women were imprisoned or banished without trial and without accusation; as when in 1824 and 1844, Special Commissions were established, presided over by persons of the worst character, who judged with an indifference to all rules of law, and punished with a ferocity that shocked even the Europe of that day. Tied up by ropes to the walls of filthy prisons, or to the “galleys” of Civitavecchia, or more mercifully executed by gibbeting or shooting in the back, the Pope’s enemies perished and were forgotten.” *

* Garibaldi’s Defense of the Roman Republic 1848-9 by George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1907.

2010-03-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

Socialism: Oui Ou Non?
Consider this anomaly: The yahoos are giving themselves conniptions because Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are supposedly inflicting socialism on America. This despite the banks and brokerages full of fat cats willing to certify that their Dem buddies remain fully faithful to capitalism as a commandment.
Meanwhile, few in France worry that their country is heading for socialism. And that despite the fact that a coalition of actual socialists, communists, greens and other assorted leftists just won a solid 54 percent victory in regional elections.
Some Americans--i.e., stupid ones--would say France is already socialist. That would be laughed off by the capitalists who run France, not to mention the global rich who flock there to luxuriate amid its non pareil bourgeois refinements.
The difference is that socialism is merely a scare word to the ignorant tea-timers who fling it and/or are freaked by it. They might as well be damning the Dems for delivering us to mopery. In France, on the other hand, socialism remains a popular ideal, if no longer a practical destination. The word conjures up heroic yesterdays and better tomorrows. It’s also a threat of sorts. By voting for leftists, French workers are letting their bosses know that they will not not passively accept job losses, wage cuts and benefit reductions. With no electoral left and only a weak labor movement, ordinary Americans lack that muscle available to the French and are obliged to accept being screwed by any outfit with Inc. at the end of its name.
In fact, France had socialist governments back in the 1930s with Blum and again in the 1980s with Mitterand. The former built the foundation of France’s social welfare system, so that for the first time ever ordinary workers took paid vacations. After a brave start, the Mitterand government backed off its most radical reforms, heeding the threat by Wall Street to strangle the French economy.
What’s left of “socialism” today are generous (by American standards) social and civic benefits and a sense of solidarity that accepts frequent strikes and demos as necessary to maintain the decent living standards that French capitalists are forever chopping away at. As I’ve noted before, on this side of the Atlantic the workers are afraid of the bosses while over there the bosses are afraid of the workers.
It’s been like that for a long time, and, I hope, will remain so. Meanwhile, we can pity the poor Gauls, deprived of paying through the nez for health care and college tuition and forced to accept them as public benefits. If you’re out in Yosemite, the Tetons, Cape Cod or the Smokies this summer, you can feel sorry for them in person as they suffer the slavery of "socialism" on their mandatory month-long vacations.
God forbid it should ever happen here.

2010-03-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

Travels With Hillary
I know you’re worried sick because you haven’t heard from me in ten days. I’m happy to report that my exciting mistress, the curvaceous and undulating city of San Francisco, is as sexy as ever. California may be broke, but at California and Polk the crab Louis and sourdough at the Swan Oyster Depot are still as rich as Rockefeller. And the R & G Lounge, where Chinatown meets the Financial District, remains the Heavenly Gate to my stomach.
Of course, I’m not the only one who’s been traveling. Hillary Clinton has been zipping around as well. Unfortunately for the empire, I’ve been getting more respect than she does. Today’s Times tells me that the Russkies gave her a goose nearly as uncomfortable as the barbed colonoscopy that the Israelis administered to Barack Obama via Joe Biden. Prime Minister Putin took the occasion of her visit to Moscow to announce that Russia was going ahead with construction of a nuclear reactor in Iran. This was yet another signal that Washington’s sisyphean efforts to rid the Persian Gulf of 5000 years of Persian influence was going nowhere at a comfortable pace. Previously, Beijing had made it known that it would not sanction Iran, one of its biggest trading partners, just because a deadbeat borrower was looking for a scrap. (More worrisome still, read James Petras’ vital piece about bigger trouble brewing between China and the U.S.) Here was yet another lesson to unschooled Americans that it’s hard to convince people who actually read history to start a gratuitous war against a country that hasn’t attacked anyone in 250 years, and also supplies them with the oil they need to keep warm and move around.
Also in that part of the world, Hillary and the Obama administration have even more Iraqi chickens returning to roost. The recent elections there strengthened the factions least likely to take meetings with the spooks and schemers toiling away at the billion dollar U.S. Embassy in the Green Zone.
Farther east, the war in Afghanistan looks to be on the same time line as the Mesozoic Era. That’s steady income for the Pentagon’s gun runners, but tiresome for the Europeans who, after centuries of playing the Great Game, have grown weary of commuting through the Khyber Pass. The Dutch government collapsed over its support of our Kabul caper. Soon the rest of NATO will be begging off as well.
Days earlier Hillary had been in Brazil, where disobedience, and even insolence, also reigned. Foreign Minister Celso Amorim patiently explained to her that his country was immense, populous and overflowing with resources. Therefore, it had not the slightest reason to take orders from anyone but its own people. Hillary could not comprehend such impertinence. How dare Brazil maintain friendly and profitable relations with such “rogue” nations as Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and Iran against American “interests?” Hillary went home scratching her head and no doubt wishing that Brazil was as tiny and defenseless as Honduras, whose new CIA-installed death squad democracy stands as the Obummers' sole foreign policy success.
I don't envy Madame Secretary Clinton. She's becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of diplomacy.

2010-03-10T06:57:00.000-08:00

When Words Wear Out
Any little kid knows that if you keep repeating a word as fast as you can it turns to gibberish. That applies to our public discourse as much as to the four-year-old driving you crazy by endlessly intoning “poopie.” I’m thinking of three political words at or nearing gibberish status here in America. “Socialism,” “anti-Semitism” and “anti-American” have long since escaped their standard definitions and flown off to fantasyland.
Socialism, according to the online Free Dictionary, is “Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy." An online conservative dictionary says “socialism is a political term applied to an economic system in which property is held in common and not individually, and relationships are governed by a political hierarchy.”
For the sentient, what we nowadays call socialism refers to the mixed economies (part public but mostly private) around the world where socialists or social democrats either hold power or form the main opposition. Germany and Scandinavia are the most typical examples. These countries are free, democratic, prosperous and peaceful. Their people enjoy among the highest living standards and best civic and social services on earth. What’s not to like about Denmark?
Uniquely among first world countries, the U.S. has never had a strong socialist, or even pro-labor, movement. Quite the opposite: America is among the most capitalist and conservative of countries, with both political parties agreeing that prosperity and well-being are best gained by encouraging private business. Public solutions to public problems, such as health care, meet fierce opposition. Even the few broad benefits we've won, such as Social Security and Medicare, remain highly controversial and in danger of dilution and even disappearance.
In this kind of reactionary atmosphere, just about anything that corporate types don’t like, including proposals to keep their books honest, get demonized. And the handy all-purpose pejorative to accomplish this is the word socialism. No matter that in the rest of the world socialism equates to bullet trains taking workers on month-long seashore vacations with the money they saved on not having to pay out of pocket for hospital bills or college tuition. Here in America, it means the devilish schemes of Democrats and bureaucrats to commit Godless evil on the citizenry. Thus the word socialism is so soiled that it can’t be used in polite company, let alone to suggest a policy alternative. Meanwhile, its use as a pejorative is crazily inaccurate, antically applied and wearing out. In a word, it’s become gibberish.
My Merriam-Webster describes anti-Semitism as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” There’s a much longer historical explication at Wikipedia, not to mention your public library. When I was a lad just after WW II, there was quite of bit of anti-Semitism abroad in the land (Check out the 1947 Gregory Peck flick Gentleman’s Agreement to get a sense of it). Typically, businesses, schools, neighborhoods and clubs discreetly or blatantly turned away Jews. For more and deeper reasons than I can explain here, that kind of discrimination happily died out. Where once Jews were obliged to keep to themselves, they have become so interwoven into American life that they worry now about cultural diminution by intermarriage.
Not that anti-Semitism has disappeared. There’s still plenty of it amongst the ranks of Rapture-ready Christians, who believe that Jews, foremost among the unsaved, are deserving candidates for horrible death comes the looming End Time. Weirdly, their particular doctrine holds that until then they must venerate the state of Israel. So they ardently, if temporarily, champion Israel, especially its hard right and expansionist elements. Even more weirdly, Israel and its partisans welcome that support, playing political kissy-face with the bible-thumpers and ignoring their base anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, the word anti-Semitism has taken on a new definition and usage that you won’t find in the dictionary. Instead of denoting hostility towards Jews, it’s become a dirt ball to throw at anyone who makes even a tepid criticism of the policies of Israel. C’est bizarre because Israelis are free to fault America and both Americans and Israelis are free to second-guess their own countries. It’s only when Americans are less than perfectly indulgent of Israel that the noxious tar of anti-Semitism gets flung at them.
Meanwhile, Israel’s penchant for war, expansionism and apartheid have been losing it friends and adding to its adversaries at an ever increasing rate. Thus ever more critics are being labeled anti-Semites, not a few of them within the pro-Israel ranks. With each new, more ludicrous charge, the pejorative loses weight. What was once serious has become cynical on its way to gibberish.
No doubt that there is an excess of enmity for our empire in the world. And civilized bourgeois nations disdain our mindless avidity and trash culture. So there is some actual anti-Americanism around. Maybe even lots of it. But here at home the phrase as used by pols and the media has little or nothing to do with America or Americans. When directed at other countries, as in “Bolivia is anti-American,” it simply means disobedient. And when aimed by yahoos at other Americans it means “Shut up, you’re not allowed to talk!” "Anti-American" is not quite gibberish yet, but it has entered the express elevator in the tower of Babel.

2010-03-03T08:10:00.000-08:00

Gonna Study War Some More
There are two main ways of keeping the peace. One is the Johnny Cash method, or don’t bring your guns to town. Movies teach us that this was popular among pinko marshals like Wyatt Earp in the old west. The other is the NRA idea of selling everyone lots of guns so that any one can either scare off or plug troublemakers.
The problem with John and Wyatt's advice was that one was a singer and the other a law man so that they didn’t particularly care about the fortunes of Samuel Colt up here in Connecticut. On the other holster, the advantage of the NRA notion is that it makes lots of money whether or not it keeps the peace. And if America isn’t about making money, what is it about?
Obviously, Cash and Earp have few fans in Washington. The Pentagon, lavishly indulged by lopsided congressional majorities such as those enjoyed by dictatorships, has become mainly a weapons monger. Thanks to its efforts, U.S. corporations peddle more lethal hardware around the world year after year than any other death merchants. Pig heaven is selling to all sides in a conflict. There was a lot of that in Iraq, where huge shipments of arms vanished on arriving from the States, to show up later in the hands of our nominal enemies. Nothing new about that. The U.S. profitably armed both Iran and Iraq in their 1980-88 war that killed a reported million people.
It’s hardly surprising then that defense secretary Robert Gates, who’s there to remind us that when it comes to war there’s no difference between Bush and Obummer, has been trashing the Europeans for not doing enough arms shopping and sabre rattling. Consider this amazing quote from a speech he gave last week at the National Defense University, a Defense Department-financed graduate school for military officers and diplomats:
“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.”
Gates went on to criticize the Europeans for spending only half as much of their GDP on the military as the U.S. does. He warned that “hostile powers”could be tempted into “aggression” by such puny war budgets.
My first thought on ingesting that inversion of logic and assault on decency is that politicians invoke 2001 and 9/11 to claim they 'changed everything'--in ways, coincidentally, that benefit those making the claim. But, as you and I have noticed, everything is pretty much the same. I didn’t transpose my sock and underwear drawers after 2001 and I didn’t fret more about Muslims with box cutters after 9/11 than I did about Soviets with H-bombs when that was the threat du jour.
Gates doesn’t tell us why peace was okay in the last century but has become dangerous in this one. Neither does he identify the “hostile powers” likely to attack Europe because it doesn’t permit its military-industrial sector to engorge itself as sickeningly as ours does.
My Rough Guide to Rogue Regimes hasn’t listed any new threats to Europe since the Berlin Wall came down. Of course, the Pentagon warns that Persian rockets could hit Luxembourg at any moment, but continentals consider that to be merely a sales promo for Northrup, Lockheed and Boeing.
There’s nothing new about Washington admonishing even historically tranquil states to become sufficiently terrified of whatever dangers the Pentagon invents so that they will purchase U.S. weapons and invite in our forces to protect them from foes foreign and domestic. Reagan’s ambassador to Austria in the 1980s ticked off the locals with suggestions that they abandon neutrality. We’re forever urging quiet little Costa Rica, which has no army, to get itself one--Pentagon outfitted, of course. We’ve made our annoyance clear at the anti-war clauses of the Japanese constitution. No doubt our diplos are working diligently to get the Swiss worrying that neighboring Liechtenstein is a secret aggressor state.
The other side of the coin is threatening perfectly peaceful countries with war so as to gin up profitable arms races. It’s now 31 years that Washington has been claiming Iran is developing nukes to annihilate just about everyone from Oman to Iceland. We’re currently stuffing even more weapons into the Persian Gulf because we say it’s threatened by the Persians, a people who have not attacked another country in 250 years. Venezuela has never invaded anyone or even fought a foreign war. That doesn’t stop Washington and its house media from charging it with scheming to devour Latin America, a fate that the continent can escape only by buying American weapons and accepting ever more U.S. bases on its soil.
The tired ploy of manufacturing crises like those cited above appears to be fading. The vagueness of Gate’s warning about putative "hostile powers" is another sign that our weapons and warfare state has become so natural to us that it's no longer necessary to frighten us with scare stories about evil enemies. Soon wars will be scheduled like tv listings:

Somalia invasion set for next Tuesday.

Bombing of Ecuador to be summer replacement for subversion of Bolivia.

2010-02-26T10:58:00.000-08:00

Obama's Felonious Forum
It’s rare when the public gets to witness an illicit meeting by a criminal syndicate. That’s why this old police reporter was all eyes and ears at Barack Obama’s “Health Care Forum” on Thursday. Here, right on cable for all the world to eavesdrop, was a mob wrangling over territory and loot. But my fascination didn’t last long. For all their dark power, the attendees were a boring lot. Not one had the flash of John Gotti or the quiet authority of Frank Costello. I switched over to TCM and the far more scintillating Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races.
Criminal confab? Attended by the top leaders of our government! What is this nut ranting about? Well, the fact is that just about everywhere in the civilized world profiting on basic health care, as we do here in America, is unlawful, illegal and verboten, not to mention immoral and uneconomical. Thus, so would be meetings furthering this activity.
Non-profit health care? Perfectly OK. Government-provided health care? No problem. Private profit health care for ancillary items like dental, glasses, private rooms? Sure. But profit on treating illness, disease and trauma? No, not allowed. Period.
Those civilized nations see three big reasons for this rule. The first is that the state, any state, reserves to itself the right to take life, and then only by way of due process. Anything else is murder to one degree or another. Allowing private companies to deny health care to their customers simply on the basis of profitability gives them the power of life and death.
The second is that it is not possible to make a free market in health care. Just about everyone would surrender their last penny and go into lifetime hock to keep themselves and their loved ones alive and well. Under capitalism’s sacred law of supply and demand this means that providers of health care will charge whatever the traffic will bear, meaning taking that last penny and IOU from a sufferer. That’s not only immoral, but a formula for impoverishing millions of people.
The third is that, like all businesses, private health care providers expect to increase their market share and profit every year. Given the above mentioned imperative of survival, this means that they can easily grow from their present 17 percent share of our economy to 20 or 30 percent. While those civilized countries were prospering by producing goods and services, our economy would be increasingly based on treating each other for our ills. And there would be no incentive for offering preventive care or adopting healthy habits since they would slow the growth of the dominant sickness sector.
The real, but unspoken, issue at Obama’s felonious forum, was how to control the rapacious growth of health care so that it doesn’t swallow the rest of the economy. GM, for example, says it’s at a competitive disadvantage because every car it makes in the U.S. has an added $1,500 built into the price because of the health care benefits won by its union workers. That same car made in Ontario is $1,500 more profitable because Canadian taxpayers rather than GM bear that cost.
The ills of ordinary Americans have no part in the so-called health care debate of the Washington power players and their corporate pay masters. Sob stories about poor Aunt Thelma who was turned down for cancer treatment by Moneybags Health Insurance are for show. The fight is really about balancing the conflicting interests of different business sectors. Obama takes that very seriously, while the Reps, like nasty brats, think only of ways to screw him and the Dems, no matter the damage it does to the system they claim to revere.
What’s the solution? One is that you get active with one of the many groups promoting a single payer answer, like Health Care Now or Single Payer Action. Another was suggested back in the ‘70s by Gordon Lightfoot when he sang, “The skyline of Toronto is something you’ll get onto...”

2010-02-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

Ronald Reagan Is Smiling

We're the party that wants to see an America in which
people can still get rich--Ronald Reagan, May 4, 1982

Top-Earning U.S. Households
Averaged $345 million in ‘07
--NY Times, Feb. 18, 2010

Taking stock of us from his celestial saddle at Gipper’s Grove way out in Simi Valley, Reagan must be grinning. There’s never been a better or easier time to become ridiculously rich in America. Indeed, the planet has seldom seen such a piling of pelf. Bespoke-suited armies of traders, brokers and bankers have buried the myth that money comes from making stuff or doing things. They are instead proving daily that money can issue from nothing more than money. Or is it vice versa?
The stats on the concentration of wealth in America are mind-numbing. Rather than sending you instantly bye-bye by enumerating some of them, let me just observe that we are quickly approaching a time when the owners of the world can be comfortably entertained on the cocktail terrace of a Ritz Carlton Hotel--more likely one in Shanghai than in New York.
Our conservatives, who learned their economics from Monopoly where one player takes all and everyone else goes bust, see this concentration as the natural order of things. The rich should be rich, the poor poor and the middle class muddling. Anything else confuses the yahoos. So they treat any effort to bring up the penurious majority or restrain the profligate minority as “socialism.” It never occurs to them to ask why top-heavy economies tumble, or why more equitable ones enjoy peace and prosperity?
Not just Palinoids but lots of Americans have specific views on the in-gathering of gelt. Consider the following from the business section of the Feb. 19 NY Times on the decision by a fat cat health broker to raise rates in California by as much as 39 percent:
“But from a business perspective, Wellpoint, one of the nation’s largest insurers and the operator of commercial Blue Cross plans in more than a dozen states, may have few alternatives as a company accountable to shareholders demanding higher earnings” [i.e., higher than the $2.6 billion they raked in last year].
In decades past, business apologists invariably sketched shareholders as a pathetic huddle of widows and orphans dependent upon their paltry dividends for their daily crust of bread. Nowadays, of course, speed-of-light computer trading allows investors to buy and sell shares in fractions of a second--yes, a second. The days of Hettie Green are long past, and one sees few crones and waifs shivering at Broad and Wall. Still, the estimable Times tells us that the profits of these nanosec shareholders must and will come before the accident victim or the cancer sufferer.
If you linked to the Times story on the 400 highest earners you will also have noted, as April 15 approaches, that their average tax came to 16.6 percent. Would that bloggers be so favored

2010-02-09T05:15:00.000-08:00

Conflict As Commodity

Welcome to the world of strategic analysis where we develop

weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist

--Pentagon planner Ivan Selin, 1966

Thanks to Romania, those of you haunted by vague fears might finally get a so-so night’s sleep. It was claimed on a recent day, purportedly in Bucharest, that Romania has agreed to help ward off unspecified threats to indeterminate countries by allowing unproven U.S. anti-missile systems on its territory. With the alleged news, something like a sigh of relief is rumored to have wafted across various lands.
The proposal that Romania stand athwart the moot menace came, it is said, from President Obama. He had previously nixed the installation of a grander but more problematic missile defense in Poland that would have been reliant on radars based in the Czech Republic. That system would have putatively protected northern Europe, including Iceland and the Faeroes, from improbable assault by incipient Iranian rockets.
In writing ads, as I once did, basic products like salt and sugar are classified as commodities, meaning one brand is as good as another, and therefore minimally promoted. War has become a commodity in America. It used to be heavily advertised, with scary images and copy warning us of specific threats from certain countries or ideologies supposedly out to get us.
Gen. MacArthur put this eloquently back in 1957: “Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor--with the cry of grave national emergency...Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet in retrospect these disasters seem never quite to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”
But that was many wars ago. By now the basing of troops and weapons at preposterous cost in remote parts of the world to meet nebulous threats has become quotidian. Resort to violence in yet another country unknown to most Americans is hardly noticed.
The Romanian deployment, relegated to the inside pages of the print press and all but ignored by the electronic media, is just one of such sallies. The Pentagon has established a new Africa Command to conduct “military operations as directed to promote a stable and secure African environment in support of U.S. foreign policy." It’s beefing up its presence in Latin America, patrolling the coasts with a revived Fourth Fleet, and adding bases in Colombia and Peru. The original message of purpose it sent to Congress contemplated “full spectrum operations” against “anti-U.S. (i.e., disobedient) regimes”.
All agree that the country is insolvent, but almost all also agree that pumping up the Pentagon budget, no matter our economic plight, has become like breathing. Endless scandals about botched and lost wars, incomprehensible incompetence, and revelations of vast corruption have as much effect on Americans as blowing spitballs at tanks.
Conservatives, who say they hate the government because it’s too big, bossy and bureaucratic, nevertheless adore and indulge the military, which happens to be the biggest, bossiest and most bureaucratic part of the government. Liberals worried about being branded “wimpy on defense,” likewise give the Pentagon carte blanche. Thus we vote war budgets with lopsided majorities typical of tinpot dictatorships.
Is it Iran that annoys us this week? Are the Russkies riling us? The Venezuelans vexing us? The Chinese challenging us? The names hardly matter anymore. Let's just say that the other 95 percent of the world is filled with disobedient ingrates who can only be stopped by stuffing the Pentagon's maw with money we don't have.

Pique in (and at) Peiping

2010-02-05T06:49:00.000-08:00

Too Big To Boss

A small debt produces a debtor, a large one an enemy
--Publilius Syrus, 1st century Roman aphorist

It’s good, I guess, that one place where the free market is still thriving is the deadbeat sector of our economy. Tune into commercial radio and you’ll be hosed by an infinite assortment of boiler room bandits promising to relieve your debt load. Whether you owe ten large to the IRS or your viscera to Visa, they promise to use their “special” and “secret” programs to lift you out of the hole and make you whole. Just dial the 800 number and you’ll soon be sauntering down Solvency street.
Our government, the biggest deadbeat of all, doesn’t have an 800 number it can call to escape penury. All it can do is to keep borrowing more bucks to cover the vig on those it already owes. This means importuning yet another handout from the Han.
Among ordinary mortals, debtors are afraid of sharks. They worry about being able to walk again after missing a payment. Certainly, they avoid antagonizing their creditors. Things are different at the highest reaches of power. While our treasury department is busy mooching from China, our Pentagon is using that money to muscle it. It’s as if I borrowed bucks from you to buy a gun to stick in your face.
The Chinese are ticked about Obama selling $6 billion in arms to Taiwan, the anomalous island entity that Washington recognizes as a de jure but not de facto province of China. Back in the Cold War, the U.S assumed a security role there analogous to, say, China protecting Hawaii from us.
Pundits see this gun-running to Taiwan as payback by Barack for Peiping’s “unhelpfulness” and “recalcitrance” on issues from Iran to trade and climate change. (Washington uses such terms, along with several others, including the always evocative “anti-American,” as euphemisms for disobedience. In other words, the Chinese are not doing as they’re told.)
The question is what the U.S can do about a willful China--apart from engorging its own military contractors? The answers range from nothing much to nothing at all.
It became obvious from early in George II’s reign that our empire was looking as enfeebled as Dracula confronted with a crucifix. The imperium’s great power was based on the three M’s of manufacturing, money and the military. But its glory days have long passed. Manufacturing has shrunk to 11 percent of the economy as foreign producers expand and domestic companies ship factories and jobs overseas. The mighty U.S. dollar plummets (but not this week) as Americans go into hock to buy stuff no longer made in the States. More concerned with contracts than combat, our bloated military is debilitated by corruption. Its incompetence has left Iraq a bloody mess. After nearly a decade it has yet to best a bunch of feudal cave dwellers in Afghanistan.
All of this is quite obvious to our Cathay creditors. So is the belt of military bases that the Pentagon is endeavoring to wrap around China’s girth. You’ve got to wonder if the Forbidden City honchos are amused or irked at their money being used to intimidate them? Are they’re anticipating the day when Chinese bases will encircle the U.S?
The sliver of the American media that pays attention to events beyond Tiger Woods’ libido has apparently received guidance from on high and has begun covering the new coolness between the colossi. They are discomfited by China’s insolence. They fear a trade war. A few even foresee eventual military confrontation. Others say it’s a teapot tempest that has to calm down because both sides have too much to lose.
The smarter ones, of course, are studying Mandarin.

2010-01-28T07:38:00.000-08:00

The Power of Babble
These are frightening times in Washington. Despite his brave talk in the State of the Union, Obama and the Dems have been terrified into backing off their health care and other initiatives. No matter how much they concede to the Reps, they get only the back of John Boehner’s unnaturally bronzed mitt in reply. What’s the ominous threat that has them gasping in their Guccis?
Filibuster, that’s what! The scary spector of Republicans endlessly bullshitting on the floor of the Senate. Will they have to dam Capital Hill to protect against this torrent of verbal diarrhea? Will Harry Reid have to buy ear plugs? Will Jim Lehrer doze off ? Oh, the horror!
Let’s face it, our president had to surrender. Otherwise it would have meant Mitch McConnell droning through the Louisville phone book. If that doesn’t petrify you, how about James Imhofe babbling on about his grand kids?
It’s a turkey and egg question: Do our politicians feed us such preposterous nonsense because they’re contemptuous of us or stupid themselves?
Maybe it’s just that I was younger and more gullible, but I seem to recall that back in the day the solons fed us far more plausible lies. They scared us silly about Russia and China. But those were the two biggest countries on earth with real armies and nukes pointed our way. Now Washington gets our fear factor boiling by endlessly warning us of a few hundred medieval cave dwellers who gained their deadliest success at terrorism armed with no more than box cutters.
More stupid examples:
--The Pentagon says we have to spend billions to protect Iceland from a possible missile attack by Iran.
--The president says we’re taking all of our ‘combat’ troops out of Iraq by this summer. Since Blackwater, KBR and their ilk have profitably taken on just about all of the non-combat stuff in the military, what will our non-combat forces be doing?
--Obama also tells us we’re going to save zillions on health care and cut the deficit by making people buy insurance from financial companies whose only goal is to make more money this year than last year.
--The current and former treasury secretaries testify that it was necessary to save the system not by sending the banksters who wrecked it to jail but rather by making them richer than they were before.
Harry Truman warned us to never kick a fresh turd on a hot day. Would that our present pile of politicians even come close to that sort of simple and honest advisory.

###

A Serious Moment--I just heard that Howard Zinn died in California at 87. He spent his life telling us the truth about ourselves. If you have yet to read A People's History of the United States, do it. If you have kids, make sure they read it. He was a writer and a fighter. We lost one of our best.

Sarah's Sighing

2010-01-20T09:47:00.000-08:00

Scott’s Personality Parade
Start out with a people globally renowned for knowing little and caring less about the world--except that they should run it. Limit them to a narrow choice of politics consisting of conservatives who seriously believe in a bunch of selfish and self-destructive nonsense, as opposed to weak-willie liberals who long ago gave up the politics of the greater good for those of the lesser evil.
Make sure they learn little in the way of history and critical thinking so that they can keep making the same mistakes forever. See to it that they remain ignorant of economics and consumer savvy so that they can keep being conned and rolled forever. Amuse them with a mercenary media that specializes in treating the trivial importantly and the important trivially. Then never stop telling them that their country is the greatest--even if they’re too dumb to find it on a map.
What you end up with is the American voter. The right can pull up polls showing that the electorate hate the government and want it shriveled to insignificance. The left’s polls indicate, au contraire, that Medicare, Social Security and other government programs are highly popular. Take your pick.
In parliamentary democracies, people vote for parties, meaning policies. Ignorant of ideology, Americans vote for personalities. They see no problem in revering both liberal Dem FDR and rightwing Rep Reagan. Or with going from Teddy Kennedy to his political opposite, Scott Brown. All four had big personalities that counted for more than what they believed about boring stuff like the empire and the economy. Forgetting that basic truism, the arrogant Mass Dems put up a dud to oppose a stud. Game, set and match.
Dems, Reps and the media are blowing smoke about the significance of Brown being the 41st vote necessary to block the Obama health insurance giveaway in the senate. Let it waft on the winds. As prestigious pundit Jon Stewart noted, George W and the GOP got everything they every dreamed of out of the Senate on straight 51 to 49 majority votes. It was the Dems who invented the myth of filibuster-proof 60-vote majority to pre-excuse the failure of their wishy-washy initiatives. Thusly, I have a hunch that the White House and the Dem congressional leadership are not that upset about the Brown upset. It gives them that much more cover for colluding with the Reps.
I can, however, imagine who is pissed as heck: Sarah Palin! She’s going to have pose nekked to catch up with the hunky Brown in the presidential beauty parade that he just joined.

Sarah and Osama

2010-01-13T11:30:00.000-08:00

The Poverty of Punditry
A new political tell-all book reiterates that Sarah Palin knows as much about the world as George W's pet goat. This as Fox News announced that Sarah the sagacious would soon be elucidating for the nitwit network (I heard she beat out Noam Chomsky for the job*).
To get the spin twirling, Bill O’Reilly invited her to refute the imputations of ignorance. He advised Sarah to say that the authors' claim that she couldn’t tell North from South Korea was “a lie.” After a moment of fumbling and further prompting by O’Reilly, she crossed her fingers behind her back and agreed it was a lie.
Of course, he never asked her to settle the question by citing a difference or two between the Koreas. To be fair, I don’t think it was because he was covering for a fellow yahoo and Fox kit. Few, if any, mediatricians would have asked that obvious question.
Substance is rarely news in the news. It’s too dangerous. The job of our media is to create yarns suitable for selling stuff and keeping the public dumb and docile. The bare truth has a tendency to shock some people out of their torpor and is therefore regarded as volatile. So, if you watch and read carefully, you’ll notice that the media are far more often telling us what people say about events than about the events themselves.
Consider the fact that Osama bin Laden has been our diablo deluxe for a decade or more. In all that time, I can’t recall one of his rants being translated and transmitted by the major media. What, in his own words, is his weltanschauung? Or his particular gripe with us? He’s given us all this grief, why not give him 30 minutes to explicate the explosions? When I was a kid every public library kept Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in English, on their shelves. To find anything about bin Laden from bin Laden you have to brush up on your Arabic and dig into the nether reaches of the net. Instead we get pundits who don’t know a saalam from a salami telling us that Osama and his acolytes hate us because we’re a free and successful people. They’re pissed because we’re perfect. That’s all you need to know.
If a direct appearance by bin Laden sparked our curiosity to the level of interest we had about Stalin, or more likely Saladin, questions might be raised. Like, what about the business and personal relationships between the Bush and bin Laden clans? That would make a great “24” plot. Or what makes bin Laden so popular with the Arab masses? Meaning what exactly do they have against us? That might bring up our military occupation of their lands and our violation of their holy places. Or our stealing their oil. Or our picking and propping up their potentates for them. We don’t want to get into all that, do we?
In olden days, the ink-stained wretches of the press were smart enough to be cynical. In other words they knew they were bullshitting their readers. By contrast, Sarah is safely entering upon editorialism at at time when it’s a tossup whether the IQs of those in front of or behind the screen at Fox are closer to room temperature. She’ll stand out, if only because she’s not the blond shade of bimbo.

(*credit for that line goes to John Fugelsang)

2009-12-30T11:52:00.000-08:00

(click on image to enlarge)
A Couple of Car Rentals
I had occasion to rent two cars in recent weeks. The first was a one-hour Zipcar to run an errand while my old Passat was in the shop. The second was a ten-minute van rental. The Zipcar cost $8 for the hour. The van was a little higher. It came to $943, which is $5,658 on an hourly basis or $135,792 for a full 24 hour day rate.
Of course, the van was chauffered and had the word Ambulance written backwards on its front end. It transported me nine-tenths of a mile from my health plan to Yale-New Haven Hospital, where the driver and the other EMT on board checked me in and then joshed a bit with their colleagues in the lobby of the ER before heading off to their next run.
I’m sure the owners of the ambulance outfit can cite the enormous expense of running such an operation and would claim only modest, if any, profit. Hell, they might even be right--but I doubt it.
There are lots of things that separate our health care system from those of real first world countries. The most glaring are the numbers: they’re way out in the exosphere. Near a grand for a shorty ambulance ride! Drugs at $200 that cost $20 in Canada! Surgeries for a few thousand in Europe that are billed here at tens and even hundreds of thousands! U.S. health insurance execs with ‘compensation packages’ soaring into the hundreds of millions! Multi-billion dollar annual profits by the major health care players!
None of this will change when Obama’s health care bill goes into effect. The preposturous numbers will rise to humongous numbers, and then to whatever superlative comes above that. Indeed, the bill was written to insure that progression.
These, of course, are bubble prices, with no relation to reality. But there is no bubble in health care. Never was and never will be. Demand to stay alive and well is constant. Given that reality, the rules of the free market dictate that those who can keep us keeping on on this side of the River Styx can charge whatever the demand for survival will bear.
It’s openly admitted that 45,000 Americans cross that stream every year because they didn’t have the money to stay alive. If four or five of them had been killed by terrorists, we’d spend billions bombing bedouins into oblivion. But to croak from being broke, who cares?
Such deaths hardly exist in the real first world. There people are terrorized by socialistic governments that never send them stupendous bills for hospital stays, but instead pay for everyone’s good health by way of their own taxes. There a jiffy ambulance run priced at a grand would meet gasps of disbelief followed by sighs of relief that they don’t live in such a sick, money-grubbing madhouse.

2009-12-16T10:18:00.000-08:00

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.

Media for Morons

2009-12-11T11:02:00.000-08:00

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.

Been There, Bombed That

2009-12-03T05:43:00.000-08:00

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!

A Decade End Review

2009-11-30T08:52:00.000-08:00

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?

The South Side Comes to South America

2009-11-21T11:31:00.000-08:00

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.

It Worked So Well The Last Time

2009-11-12T08:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Salang, It's Been Good to Know You

2009-11-04T07:42:00.000-08:00

Click on picture to enlarge
Karman 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.

The Alternative Isn't Pretty

2009-10-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

Peace With Persia

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

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.

Volcker Too Dem for Dems

2009-10-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

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.

(All quotes taken from linked article)

In Our Future

2009-10-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Scandal-navia

2009-10-09T06:06:00.000-07:00

A Not So Noble Nobel
I heard this morning that Barack Obama will have to take time out from strategizing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, supervising the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, propping up a murderous military coup in Honduras, reviving the Fourth Fleet to police a peaceful (until now) Latin America, opening a new string of bases in Colombia, calling air strikes and commando raids from the Horn of Africa to the Philippines, and helping America to sell more weapons to more countries than the whole rest of the world combined, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.
I guess the next thing is to give Colonel Sanders the Lifetime Vegetarian award.

Kitchen Magic

2009-10-06T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Indispensable Ingredient
I know you expect political rants from me, but sometimes weighty affairs just have to wait.* As some of you know, I’m an ardent fan of cooking shows and devour the Wednesday NY Times Dining Section as if it were a well-seasoned meatloaf. Therefore, I thought I might try my hand at gourmet glamour blogging by exploring trendy and exciting new ways to celebrate a commonplace item available in every kitchen. Who knows, this effort may grow into the next Larousse or Joy of Cooking. One can hope. So, anyway, here are some tips on using this all but magic ingredient.
To start off, it’s amazingly versatile, a complement to any meal and a must for many. Cooks everywhere, be they range royalty or tyro toast burners, can’t praise it enough. And it’s at the heart of myriad ethnic cuisines. Enough build-up. I’m talking about water, the new star of the kitchen!
You can use it not only to boil an egg, but also to clean up your pan and plate afterwards. It’s excellent for washing salads, fruits and even snap peas. Try it hot with Nesquick and enjoy a nice cup of near cocoa.
My grandmother, Matija, who was an ethnic crone, liked to cook fish in it. She would buy baccala (salt cod), and put it in a pot of water with garlic, onion, potato, olive oil and other ingredients. Then she would heat it slowly on a stove. After several hours, it was ready to eat. I recall as a youngster that it stunk up the house for days. I used to lock myself in the bathroom to get away from the smell. By the way, our bathroom had water available from several faucets. There was even a flush bowl of water that the dog used to drink from.
Many claim medicinal or even magical qualities for water. In the hills of Bosnia, not far from the alleged Catholic shrine of Medjugorje, there’s a stream that flows with what the locals call muska voda, or men’s water. It is said to instill male virility. The peasants learned this generations ago when the spaghetti they were boiling stood straight up in the pot.
One of my favorite uses for water is to freeze it into small cubes and then put them in a glass and pour whisky over them. This can be done year round, but tastes cooler on a hot summer day. On the other end of the thermometer, consider that hot water does wonders for JELL-O powder.
The French think it sinful to mix water with wine. In the Adriatic region, by contrast, there’s a summer custom of adding a bit of water, either in its liquid or solid form, to wine, creating a drink they call bevanda that a self-respecting Frenchie would quickly expectorate. Chaque pays à son guise.
However you want to use it, you’ll be happy to know that water is widely available (except in desert or drought areas) and relatively inexpensive. Many stores sell it in glass or plastic bottles. Both domestic and foreign bottled waters are popular with folks on the run, who carry them on their persons in little holsters designed for the purpose. Automobiles often have cup holders that can be used for water as well as gin and tonic.
Additionally, just about everybody has access to water right in their home, rental apartment, condo, coop or even vacation cabin. This water flows from faucets, typically located in kitchens and bathrooms. That makes it extra handy for cooking and washing. This may not be the case in poor countries.
For a wonderful assortment of recipes, I recommend “Cooking With Water” by Hy Drater, published by River Books and available at Amazon.
A word of caution: Though water is generally safe, it should be used judiciously. Too much and you’ll drown; too little and you’ll die of thirst.
Stay wet until next time, when The Karman Turn takes a gourmet gander at the longtime love-hate relationship between salt and pepper.
*Credit for that line goes to the writers of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Mullahs and Morons

2009-10-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

Even Our Wars Are Dumbed Down
Remember the Cold War? It was about the future. It was about which modern system of organizing society, capitalism or communism, would win the world. You could read a library full of books by deep thinkers arguing for one side or the other. It was a scary and repressive time, but also an intellectually stimulating one.
Our latest epic conflict with the Islamic equivalent of our holy rollers is all about the past and not nearly so edifying. The other side relies on just one book, the Koran, which one is supposed to peruse only in the original Arabic. Our side reads Tweets.
Their side is characterized by semi-literate theocrats who’ve beamed up from the seventh century to sow stupidity and slay infidels. Our side stands for a decadent empirium that calls itself the greatest when it means the greediest. For all their detestation of each other, both are compatibly reactionary. They clash mainly on eating pork rinds.
The great declaration of this conflict was My Pet Goat, read by George W. Bush as the World Trade Center and Pentagon burned. It was his equivalent of Pope Urban II’s marching orders to the soldiers of Christ back in 1095 “to let the deeds of your ancestors like Charlemagne and his son Louis move you to destroy the kingdoms of the pagans and extend the territory of the Holy Church.”
Our invasion of Iraq and investment of Iran were perfectly understandable. Their peoples resembled, at least to us, the presumed authors of the 9/11 atrocity. What's more, their pagan kingdoms were ripe for conquest and conversion. We wanted their oil and we wanted to use them as bases to dominate the region. We still do.
Afghanistan, however, I just don't get. Bombing its rubble into dust? Killing the survivors of countless massacres? Nation building by way of Predator missiles? For what? Afghanistan is not a state but a congerie of feudal clans who have mastered just enough western technology to fight off the infidelic present. Even if the Taliban harbored Al Qaeda, invading Afghanistan to get at them made as much sense as assaulting Italy to shut down the Sopranos.
After eight years of fighting off the world's most powerful military, the Taliban's elusive Mullah Omar says his side is just getting warmed up. “We would like to point out,” he offered in recent days, “that we fought against the British for 80 years from 1839 to 1919 before defeating them and gaining our independence."
Meanwhile, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, worries that we are losing the battle of ideas in Afghanistan to people who had their last fresh thought fourteen hundred years ago. What an insult to our country!
Back in the Cold War, the righties were glomming onto Burke, Kirk, Hayek and Rand, while the lefties were devouring Marx, Marcuse, Mills and Sartre. There were study circles, teach-ins, free universities, alternate schools. Everyone was an ideologue or an analyst. Brains rather than boobs were on display on campuses. Not any more.
Today our politics are populated by Palinites who don’t know an ideology from an ice cream cone. They say there are also intelligent progressives out there somewhere. If they got involved they could outsmart the cretinous righties at every turn and restore the country to membership in western civilization. One wonders why they’re not marching on Washington, crowding the yahoos out of the town hall meetings, and massively mocking the pols and the media like a million Michael Moores and Bill Mahers? Let’s go, folks!

When Government Is Gone

2009-09-24T07:19:00.000-07:00

What If It's Privatna Enterprise?
My morning blat tells me that Mikhail Prokhorov, one of the richest and tallest men in Russia, is dickering to buy the New Jersey Nets. Nintendo and one of its Japanese execs already own the Seattle Mariners, and the Chinese have a chunk of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Rich Russkies are the new Steinbrenners of British soccer.
So what does this have to do with the yahoos who’ve taken to the streets to slag Obama and big government as the mother of all their miseries?
The basic notion of American conservatism is that private does just about everything better, and certainly more profitably, than public. America won’t become a truly free and prosperous nation, intones hard right strategist Grover Norquist, until we shrink government to the size of a baby and drown it in the bath tub.
Being a proudly provincial and putatively patriotic bunch, the righties assume that when this happy day arrives, the private interests that subsume the public weal will be flying the stars and stripes over their corporate HQs and speaking English in their boardrooms. That's not necessarily so.
Like the town meeting harpy who told the tv that she didn’t want socialism “like in Russia” only 20 years after that country had turned capitalist, the American right has apparently missed globalization and the vast run-up in foreign debt that feeds this current economic mess. No doubt they’ve been in church rehearsing for the rapture.
Forbes tells me that foreign corporate investment in the U.S. jumped 88 percent between 2005 and 2007 and now totals well over $200 billion. And that’s a mere tear drop in that bath tub compared to the Treasury and corporate paper held by folks whose passports Rush Limbaugh would have trouble reading.
Wouldn’t it be fun if the right wingers got their wish so that the government disappeared and they woke up one morning to find Russian, Saudi, Chinese, Iraqi and, ugh, even French corporate honchos running the show instead of the Old Glory waving and hot dog eating politicos who now populate the Potomac?
Such a takeover is not likely soon. There’s still plenty of juice in American capitalism, even if it’s leaking out at a ferocious rate. And even if foreign economic dominance did transpire, the nominally nationalist knuckleheads of the right would quickly adjust.
We learned that a couple of decades back when Japanese automakers began opening assembly plants in Dear Old Dixie. One would have assumed that the region’s reputation for conservatism, racism and rebelliousness promised trouble for companies owned by the progeny of those who sucker punched us at Pearl Harbor and were depicted all through World War II in viciously racist propaganda.
But no. Toyota, Honda and Nissan managers praised their southern workers as among the most docile and obedient in their multinational operations. Though paid far below what UAW workers get, they’ve yet to say yes to union, let alone to strike. They’re happy with whatever papa san doles out.
Southerners know how to save their race baits and rebel yells for the weekends. Weekdays, they're pleased to perform for anyone who pays them regardless of provenance or pigmentation. Like other Americans, they supplicate in the presence of spondulicks. So I wouldn’t sweat the transformation of the Nets into the Nyets. The fans will just shout Da! instead of Rah!

Hassles and Missiles

2009-09-17T12:15:00.000-07:00

Taking the Public Private
The health care hassle is the latest and biggest example of the unthinking caps we have pulled down over our brows, reducing our reasoning resources to the range of rodents.
Even the pundits who do our political parsing for us are impressed by the depths of the shallowness to which they have mis-educated us. There are countless petty stupidities out there, but one big one stands out for its prodigious and apparently permanent power.
It is that we have agreed as a nation that, in the sacred name of free enterprise, we will not do anything for the public unless its main beneficiaries are private. Or to put it another way, we will not do anything for the public, except to hope, as Kenneth Galbraith so pungently put it, that some of the oats we feed to the horses will fall to the road for the sparrows. Thus we have transmogrified our proud eagle into a cash cow.
We now fight our wars with mercenary contractors. They don’t take orders from our military and are markedly free to rip us off, screw everything up, and make more enemies than they kill. And so we gag at the case of the fabulously freaky private U.S. embassy guards acting as if every night in Kabul was Halloween on Castro Street. Our government, in this case Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, says we have to bend over and bear it because private companies providing such services are rare, if not unique. Remember when manly Marines protected our diplomats?
Despite our faith in God, we have nevertheless turned medicine into mammon even though Jesus never demanded a co-pay for His healing. Where once our health care provided succor, it now fleeces the suckers. Attempts to transform it into a public service as in every other first world country are denounced as devilish.
All those democratic and prosperous nations also provide their citizens with free education through college on the notion that public investment in smarts is smart. Meanwhile we have turned higher ed into humongous debt, graduating armies of beholden BA’s. I don’t see us bragging to the world about the fact that the average American 25-year-old college grad is up to his or her mortarboard in loans that will take years to pay down.
In Europe you can get from anywhere to everywhere on fast, frequent and reasonable public transportation. Here we once sentimentalized big country and small towns as the soul of America. Now we’re happy to let our rurals rot in isolation, watching their main streets blow away because it’s not profitable to serve them with privately run trains, planes, trucks and buses any more.
I could go on and on with similar examples of the collapse of the commons and the rise of the corporate. We are nine-tenths of the way to a society in which public discourse will be reduced to the question, “cash or credit?” Look forward to the day not far away when your house is burning, the kids are screaming, and you’re in telephone hell trying to give your Mastercard number to “Firefighters Are Us, Inc.”

Barack Goes Un-Ballistic
Zeus only knows how many zillions of our tax tributes have already been spent on the European Space Defense, whose abortion was announced today by the Obama Administration.
If you paid attention, you’ll know that the ESD was supposed to be an array of radars and missiles placed by the Pentagon in Poland and the Czech Republic to protect against Iranian rocket raids on northern Europe, particularly Scotland, Ireland and Iceland.
Why we should pay for such idiotic schemes was never noted. Likewise ignored was why Iran, which hasn’t attacked anyone in 250 years, would want to zap those countries. Of course, those things don't have to be explained or justified in our body politic. Our defense contractors have long since indoctrinated us into the illogic that our designated enemies are bound to commit evil everywhere and under every circumstance, thus necessitating our “full spectrum” response everywhere and anytime--regardless, of course, of the cost-plus cost. It’s the same as the burglar alarm sales rep insisting that you buy one for every closet, cupboard and cranny to ensure “total security.”
To be sure, those in the know knew that the ESD was really aimed at bullying the Russkies, who saw those missiles as more of a threat to St. Petersburg than a deterrent to Persia, while at the same time greasing the Poles, cashing the Czechs, and engorging Lockheed and its like.
So, Obama has put the ESD out of its misery. Maybe he even got some concession from Moscow for his troubles. No doubt, the good folks in Donegal and Reykjavik will resume shivvering in their splendid sweaters from renewed Iran-o-phobia.
As I read the early indications, the right people are rollicking and the wrong ones are roiling at the decision. So I guess our smart president has done something smart for a change. He says he favors an alternate Euro defense against the peaceable Persians using smaller missiles. Let’s hope that's just balderdash to hush up the losers. I give him a thumbs up, finally.

Cowardice Confirmed

2009-09-09T19:58:00.000-07:00

What a Pill
The blog just below this one was written before the speech last night in which Pres. Obama backed off his “public option” since it faced opposition by Republicans with whom he wished to demonstrate his high-minded bipartisanship and maybe even get them to go along with his bigger and badder war in Afghanistan. His surrender statement said: “The public option is only a means to that end – and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal.” And though he said health care was a vital public issue, he didn't call for public support to get it done. Rather, he said compromise with the Republicans, who abhor him and regard any reform as "socialism," was the way to go. Having watched and then read the speech, I see no reason to change a word of what I had written earlier.

From the Chronicles of Cowardice

2009-09-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck 1
Barack Obama 0
Whereas Harry Truman would have no doubt treated the guy to a hearty “give ‘em hell” and a celebratory tumbler of bourbon, Barack Obama fired White House aide Van Jones for insulting Republicans, and, in particular, annoying Glenn Beck. Or to put it another way, Glenn Beck, of all people, became a presidential personnel manager.
By showing Mr. Jones the back door, Obama was sending two signals. The first underlined that Obama is a typical Dem, growling at anything to his left and groveling at anything to his right. It was a warm-up for his forthcoming congressional battle with the Reps over health care. Who wants to bet that the Dems won’t start with compromise and, at the merest hint of opposition, move swiftly to capitulation?
The second was that we no longer have to take Obama seriously. Given our fatuous politics, there comes a time when every president is recast as a fool and gentle parody becomes grisly put-down. Given their awful personalities, Nixon and Bush II got the raspberry almost from the git-go. It has taken Obama, a cooler type, six months to don the clown costume.
There’s an old bromide that says never wrestle with a pig because you only get dirty and the pig enjoys it. Even worse is the pig winning. The Elmer Fudd-faced Glenn Beck was already a farce on his way to becoming a freak. He had dumbly accused our half-white president of hating whites, for which he lost dozens of sponsors. He had begun inspecting old paintings for pinko propaganda. He found subversive depictions of carpenters using hammers and farmers wielding sickles. He sobbed a lot on his show, leading to bets on when he would move on to public pants wetting. And he went on the wacko warpath against the "Bolshevik," "Marxist, "anarchist," "fascist," anti-Christ Van Jones, who was spreading the stigmata of socialism to all and sundry from his White House cubby hole of communism. Surely, Beck was nearing the Joe Pyne-Morton Downey, Jr., moment of self-destruction.
By firing Van Jones in the middle of the night for calling Republicans “assholes,” Barack Obama not only saved Beck from himself, but made him an even bigger star on the right--someone who could bully the leader of the free world. Not even the mighty Limbaugh had such a scalp on his belt. No wonder Obama’s crestfallen aides on the Sunday talk shows looked like they had just been convicted of wimpery with intent to cringe.
Contrast this exercise in pusillanimity to the incident a few years back when Vice President Dick Cheney told Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont to “go fuck himself.” As far as I know, the Reps all had a good laugh while the Democrat Leahy more than likely seriously considered the suggestion.
It looks like despite all the fertilizer that gets spread in Washington, there will never be enough to help Obama and the Dems to grow a pair.

Confronting the Terrace Menace

2009-09-05T09:50:00.001-07:00

Cafe Socializing: New York City above. Split, Croatia, below.

Note the difference.

Cafes Harbor Socialization Threat
The Congregational church cater-corner from our house in West Tisbury specializes in ice cream and strawberry socials. Surely, those are not the socializations stirring a storm this summer. The coalition of the ignorant and inane appear instead to have their pitchforks out for European socializing. You can’t surf past Fox News or saunter in the environs of a town hall meeting without hearing some yahoo warn that American politicians are secret agents of Euro socializing and that they plan to infect us with it.
What exactly is this menace? I decided to look into it--at some risk, I may add, to my waist line. Early in the summer I surveilled subversive socialization sites along the Adriatic. This is my report:
Euro socializing consists in the main of sitting in cafes and not worrying about doctor bills, college tuition or scuffling for silver in your golden years. Instead, you schmooze with your friends about soccer, sex and the stupidity of Americans. As in: “Juventus looks great this season, Monique has a new boy friend, and I get a kick out of those dumb Americans paying through the nose so that their doctors can sail their gaudy yachts to Frejus and rent villas in Poggibonsi. Tee hee.”
Europeans are able to accomplish all of this socializing because they have vastly more outdoor tables and chairs under awnings and umbrellas than Americans do. In other words, there’s a cafe gap. Unlike the notorious missile gap from the 60’s, when American worried that they didn’t have enough rockets to blow up the world as many times as they wanted to, the cafe gap is real. And it’s not just patio furniture. Europe has an overwhelming lead in high-tech, multi-spigot expresso machines with awesome latte steaming capabilities.
Crewing these marvels are not just all-thumbs nerd grad students, but professional baristas versed in every trick in the book from infusions to spremutas. They’ve got your pastis coolly clouding on a coaster while their American counterparts are still asking, ‘”like what kind of drink is that, dude?”
It gets scarier. While America’s few socializing spots are relegated to malls or old neighbs turned trendy, the Euro ones have Roman ruins, castles, medieval plazas, and perfect seascapes providing the eye candy.
Can America breach the cafe curtain and deal with the terrace threat? It’s going to be hard. Socialization is anathema in many parts of our country. And cafe crawling is regarded by many as a waste of time more properly spent studying bankruptcy law or mortgage refinancing.
There may be hope. I was having a drink the other night with a right wing friend. As usual, he was damning government as the mother of all evil and private property as the father of all virtue. I was allowing that across the ocean in Christendom, government was regarded more as a comfortably off uncle who’s around to pick up the bills when mom gets sick or Hans heads off to college. He fumed that the welfare state was abomination. Then he thought a minute, perhaps recalling his last toke in Amsterdam or the taste of tomatoes in Taormina, and a small smile broke over his face as he offered, “Yeah, but I have to admit, those Euros know how to live.”

Law Limiting Third Parties Thrown Out

2009-09-03T07:43:00.000-07:00

Greens Get a Break
Democrats, as I’ve long noted, are just one party away from believing in a one party system. Certainly, no one has worked harder to eliminate third parties from the ballot. The Dems have successfully used courts and legislatures in virtually every state to throttle Greens and other practicioners of small d democracy.
Well, they finally lost one. A federal judge in Hartford ruled last Friday that the state’s recently enacted campaign financing law “imposes an unconstitutional discriminatory burden on minor party candidates’ exercise of fundamental rights for no compelling reason?”
If there are five people making political speeches in the park, and the government gives two of them megaphones, that unfairly drowns out the others, said U.S. District Court Judge Stefan Underhill.
Mike DeRosa, co-chair of the Connecticut Green Party, a plaintiff along with the Libertarian Party, said the law was aimed at leaving no Democrat or Republican behind. He welcomed its repeal. So do I.

Fact (1) and Fiction(2)

2009-08-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

1. I Should Have Gone to Vegas

OBSERVATION INITIAL MOD COMPLE 99219
COURTESY FILE-NONPAR
The Sarasota Memorial Physician Group SMPG Hospitalist/Geriatrics has been dunning me for two years for $168 for performing the above whatever it was. Apparently, that particular charge got eaten by the dog in the paperwork purgatory that characterizes our health care system. It is currently “undergoing review” and will likely go on to “appeal.”
A nice woman in claims guided me through this and a thick list of other charges resulting from my overnight at Sarasota Memorial Hospital after experiencing chest pain in a movie theater. No angiogram was performed and tests were limited to x-ray, EKG and blood work. The bills, I was told, totaled between four and five grand--enough to rent the best hotel suite in Vegas with complimentary champagne and blond. Happily, my discomfort was not as serious as it felt. Also on the bright side was a heart pill recommended to me by one of the Florida docs that has all but eliminated my bouts of chest pain since then. But still, five grand!
Specialite Cardiaque
Those two words, handwritten on a bill, were sufficient to cover the totality of the room charge, meals, medications, angiogram, x-ray and other tests performed on me several years earlier at the Hopital Cochin in Paris. On leaving the hospital after a 24 hour stay also occasioned by chest pain, the cashier stamped it paid and returned it to me along with my credit card chit. In Yankee dollars, the charge was $1,323. Had I been a citizen of France, my taxes would have paid for that hospital stay just as our taxes in America pay to protect Iceland from an attack by Persian missiles.
I related the French experience in an earlier blog and even wrote a contemporary op-ed about it in the Hartford Courant headlined, “Getting Sick in a Healthy Country." I revisit it because I keep hearing morons moan that we can’t afford a government health plan. They’re oblivious to the fact that government plans, including our own Medicare/Medicaid, are far simpler, more efficient and cheaper than our idiotically complex corporate pay-or-die system. Such people don’t deserve health care. They deserve to be locked in a room with nothing but a manual of medical insurance codes to keep them company.

2. A Parable
Mom, I’m out of my asthma medicine.
Sorry, honey, but we can't afford to pay for more?
Dad’s got money.
Not for that. He’s got to pay for that expensive new hunting rifle and his trip to the Sierras.
Why does he keep going out there?
To protect us from the mountain lions, honey.
But there are no mountain lions in Cleveland.
Yes, honey, but dad says that if we don’t stop them in California they could come to Ohio and bite us. Remember how one bit dad?
But that was in California, and he was trying to take a cub from the lion’s den.
Yes, but don’t you remember that an alley cat bit little Jimmy down the block and he died from an infection?
But that was a Cleveland tabby cat, not a California mountain lion.
Dad says they’re all the same family. We can’t trust any of them, even the baby kittens.
Does dad have to to rent a Porsche SUV and stay in that super-expensive hunting lodge?
Of course, honey, you wouldn’t want him to skimp on our protection.
Did he have to buy that $10,000 rifle with all the fancy scroll work and engraving on it?
Yes, honey, that’s to produce shock and awe among the mountain lions and make them easier to hunt.
Hack. Hack. Mom, I think I’m having an asthma attack.
Just say a prayer and breathe as best as you can, honey.

Seventy! I Can't Believe It

2009-08-20T12:01:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday to Me

I was born in St. Clare’s Hospital in Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan on August 21,1939. It was a hot, back-to-work monday. Europe was a week away from war. On that sunday some poor devil named Frank Goesch died when a tree branch fell on the open top of the Fifth Avenue bus he was riding in. He was going as I was coming.

The snapshot above is dad and me on the roof circa 1940. I wonder what happened to that snazzy carriage?

I’ve seen amazing changes over my life. We used to have a phone that had to be plugged in all the time. Now I have a small one that I plug in only to charge the battery. And my car has an automatic transmission, meaning no clutch pedal. Society is also very different. Girls are a lot easier--or so younger men tell me. You can’t get Trommer’s Beer anymore. The Dodgers left town in 1957.
When I was born, the prevailing pols were:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the U.S.

Herbert Lehman, governor of New York
Robert F. Wagner, senior senator from New York
Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York City
If those guys were around and trying today what they did 70 years ago, they would be slagged as whacko socialists or even Canadians. They initiated things like Social Security, minimum wages, the right to join unions, unemployment insurance, and public housing. Roosevelt’s “stimulus” packages gave us countless bridges, highways, rural electrification, flood control and irrigation projects, and the Astoria pool, where we used to dunk girls and snap towels at each other all summer long. Good thing we already have those assets, because they would never pass nowadays.

When I was 12, President Harry Truman, another weird lefty, was ticked because Americans were paying as much as $12 a day for hospital rooms. He called for the equivalent of a single payer health system, such as most Dems disavow 60 years later as being too radical. Truman failed, beaten by the same corporate crowd now making countless billions a year off $1,000 a day hospital rooms and health insurance so expensive it makes you sick.
We had an empire even then, but at least presidents gave us reasons for going to war. Obama is plunging us into Pakistan, a nation of 170 million people who are said to be particularly anti-American (i.e., disobedient), without even bothering to shill it. Our wars don’t need rationales anymore; just no-bid contracts.
I brood on such things because I was a red diaper baby. My parents were part of the radical upsurge in the 30’s and paid for it big time in the 50’s (but that’s a story too complicated to tell here). I lived in a world of pinko political palaver and picket line protest. It primed me for the 60’s, when America--or at least me--enjoyed its last radical upsurge.
Back then, folks called me an extremist because I wanted to change the world. Now, when I’m willing to settle for the norms of the People’s Republic of Eisenhower, they still call me an extremist. The country keeps moving to the right faster than I can adjust to it. It won’t be long before they’re branding Ronald Reagan a red.
Seventy years on, there are lots of great gizmos in the world. I love the jets that let me depart Bradley in the morning and gobble swell seafood at Swan’s in San Fran at lunch. I love the computer that gives me access to almost everything I want to know and just about everyone I want to trade info, ideas and jokes with. I like not having to shift gears in traffic.
On the down side is that my compatriots have become stupider and ever more self-destructive. Older generations have been saying that about younger ones since Socrates. Obvioulsy, they weren’t always right because, despite plagues, pestilences, wars and Rush Limbaugh, civilization has advanced.
But we seem to be in a regressive phase. We Americans locked onto the notion that money cures everything. That as opposed to the French view that a month's paid vacation at the seashore and good food work even better. The pelf panacea was arguable when we actually had moolah but it’s moronic now that we’re in hock. Lately, we’re trying to see if debt solves everything, but that’s an even dumber idea.
Being a lefty in a righty culture is a downer. My government disappears people of my ilk in countries in which it has "vital interests." Let's hope they don't get interested in my vitals. The worst is that we lefties seem to have lost the optimism that made the 60’s a gas. History helps me stay sane. If you keep track of it, it reminds you that despite the fact there’s nothing new under the sun, the world somehow gets better--if you’ve got a couple of centuries to spare.
On the sunny side, I’ve got a great family, a fascinating world to wander, and a good health plan. What's more, my finances are as un-American as my politics: I don’t owe a dime to anyone. I guess I’ll try to hang around as long as I can. Atheists like me don’t have much choice.

Don't Be Disillusioned

2009-08-18T08:57:00.000-07:00

A Solution For the Dems' Quandary

Our two parties have different political styles. The
Reps start with combat and advance to conquest.
The Dems start with compromise and retreat to capitulation.

The worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party was to win the presidency, house and senate with big majorities. It's stripped them as naked as a Perdue chicken.
When they were out of power or had minimal majorities, the Dems could claim that they really wanted to do good things for ordinary Americans but couldn’t because they didn't have the votes. Alas, all they could do was reluctantly tag along while the Reps did good things for rich Americans.
Now, with Obama’s crumble on health care, his war-mongering and his reiteration of the Bush-Cheney brand of human rights, everyone can plainly see that he and the Dems are full of it. There’s no one they can blame stuff on but themselves. But of course, they’re not going to do that. The iron law of politics is that when you screw up, you blame everyone else and create distractions.
If the Obama-Dem nose dive continues, don’t be surprised to see war clouds gathering, either in the already well-bombed Middle East or in pristine Latin America, where Caracas, La Paz and Quito offer juicy targets. What red-blooded Dem or Rep wouldn’t salivate at the chance to pop the disobedient Hugo Chavez, grab all that oil, and, for a change, trash a country where beer and babes abound? We’d forget about health care and recession in a Manhattan minute.
If Dems don’t want to die of disillusionment, I recommend they vote Rep the next time around. With the GOP back in power, the Dems could go back to lying about how they’re really for the little guy but don’t have the juice to do anything but grovel before the likes of Chuck (“Am I dead yet?) Grassley and John (How’s my tan?) Boehner.

The Angst of the Anglos

2009-08-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

No, You Can’t Have Your Country Back
From the days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony until the post World War II era, these United States were ruled and largely owned by white Protestant males. The advertising of their accomplishments is ubiquitous and needs no further celebration here. Far less bruited is that they made a series of historically disastrous decisions, the results of which their crestfallen progeny cannot bear.
They imported millions of Africans to toil as slave labor. They brought in tens of millions from other lands to keep down the price of wage labor. They grabbed a great chunk of Mexico and became the overseers of Latin America. They created a global empire whose upkeep and expansion requires not only constant wars but the inhaust of millions of the empire’s subjects. And, in the modern era, they were among those chiefly responsible for shifting our economy from production to peculation, erasing millions of jobs and plunging the nation into insolvency.
Taken together, these historic decisions turned Anglo-Saxon Protestants into a fading and falling minority in the country they once regarded as theirs alone. Because of the actions of the leaders they had freely chosen, they found themselves on the outside looking in at an increasingly diverse and money-centered America where globalism rather than patriotism is the password and where, unimaginably, the dread sin of miscegenation is rewarded by the accession of Barack Obama to the White House.
These ‘real Americans’ see themselves retreating while those with darker skins and funny foreign names are advancing. They are made heartsick and apoplectic at the sight of former thralls in positions of power, hometown storefronts with unreadable signs and alien wares, and a mass culture that mocks their piety and provincialism.
It matters not that their forebears had devised and that they had acceded in their own downfall. Even if it's self-induced, the pain is unbearable. To relieve it, WASPs have become the base of the fundamentalist right, joining together to demand that their country be taken back from the blacks, beaners, ragheads and liberals and returned to them.
But no matter how many town meetings they bust up, how many guns they store up, how many Palins they put up, they’re pissing in the wind. Even the completion of the corporate fascism whose interest they serve would not make their noxious nostalgia real nor restore their
superiority. Too much has changed.
No puede ser hecho.

Beaching and Moaning

2009-08-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

Sour Grapes from the Vineyard

West Tisbury, MA

Having written some less than flattering things about our new president’s policies, I doubt I’ll draw an invite to his dilatory domicile down the road at Blue Heron Farm or to any of the soirees the local swells are eventing up for the Obamas. Well, that’s no peel off my sunburn. Not to be blase, but been there and done that. I was also snubbed by the Clintons back in the 90’s when they helped to transform Martha’s Vineyard from a quiet glen for the arrived to a gaudy glam for the arrivistes.
One of the nicer things about this island--introduced to me 35 years ago by my ever loving--is that it was an offshore holdout from the pelf pandemic. There were always big bucks down the dirt roads and along the private beaches, but they dressed themselves in old jeans, got around in battered pick-ups and made island-wise small talk with the locals while waiting patiently in line at Alley’s to pay for their morning Times and Wall Street Journal.
Such inconspicuousness has become far less conspicuous. Nowadays, like my former chum Bobby Zimmerman sang, money doesn’t talk, it screams. Cruise Main Street in Edgartown and you will no longer be able to see the pretty preppies at their window shopping because the roofs of the parked Escalades and Navigators rise nearly to the second stories of the cutesy boutiques that were once grocery and hardware stores.
Blue Heron Farm, on the border of Chilmark and West Tisbury, used to be actually agricultural. Then some moneyed folks bought it, yuppified it, and died in a plane crash. It’s had several developers since and some faceless corp now rents it in the $50,000 a week (yeah, week) range. It is said to be adorned with every luxury known to Joan Rivers--but in a proper New Englandy rustic mode, to be sure.
Sitting on a Vineyard porch and watching a presidential vacation extravaganza is a sure way to disabuse any sentient human of the lies we Americans like to tell ourselves about ourselves. Like the one about us being down-home, small d democratic folks with a government that cares. With our close-up seats, we note that to travel even a short distance from Washington for a short time, our leader requires a vast pomposity of toadies and toughs kissing his ass and kicking ours. It makes Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra resemble Rose the scullery maid in Upstairs Downstairs.
If Clinton’s visits to the Vineyard are any indication, the White House will be renting dozens of houses and scores of hotel rooms at top dollar. The skies will darken with the squadrons of C-130s and exec jets flying in the limos, the monstrous black Jimmies, the com gear and all the other ruck required by the royalists.
Air space will be restricted, boats diverted, roads blocked. People living or working in “sensitive” spots will be prevented from going about their daily business. For the duration, cops of various stripe will be free to exercise at least as much arbitrary power as they did in Henry Louis Gates’ living room.
There are two likely reasons for the ever escalating ambit of presidential protection, neither of them encouraging. Either, our leaders really need it, meaning we are constantly accreting new and violent enemies. Or, it’s just another appalling manifestation of “shock and awe,” designed to both exhilarate and intimidate the empire's subjects.
Of course, there’s another reason: If you take all the security stuff our government will be doing on the Vineyard in the next couple of weeks, but remove the presence of Obama and his family from the effort, what you have, fellow Americans, is little more than a mini rehersal for the imposition of fascism.

So far, So bad

2009-07-30T06:52:00.000-07:00

Nothing Personal, Mr. President
I didn’t vote for Barack Obama--but it was nothing personal. I’m a Green and a lefty and always vote for candidates whose politics are closest to mine. That way I don’t get confused.
I knew Obama was a business as usual Dem with a gold card from Goldman Sachs. But he was smart, personable and a fresh breeze. I hoped he might just try to repair our real economy rather than reinflate its collapsed bubbles. He disappointed me in that regard--but still it wasn’t personal.
He super-sized our war on the medieval Pushtuns of Afghanistan and commenced a new one in Pakistan. He’s currently spreading that fight from the Northwest Frontier down to Baluchistan to provoke the adjacent Persians, whom he apparently wants a piece of (the piece with the oil in it). In other words, he’s become Queen Victoria II, rumbling his elephantine echelons down exactly the same imperial ruts that led Kipling to pen,

At the end of the fight is the tombstone white
with the name of the late deceased,
and the epitaph drear,
a fool lies here who tried to hustle the east.

Still, his targets are religionists with their heads stuck in the 8th century. So I don’t take it personally.
At home, he’s pitching every marketer’s wet dream: mandatory consumption. He wants to force us to buy intangible products called health insurance peddled by the same financial hustlers who, if you recall, took themselves and this country broke just a few months back. Still, no skin off my nose since I’m already on Medicare and have backup coverage from an elite institution that provides the equivalent of socialized medicine to its own people.

Then he started going macho south of the border. He’s on board with the reconstitution of a World War II era naval fleet to patrol Latin America. (Imagine if--or should it be when?--the Chinese send warships to maintain the peace up and down our east and west coasts!). Obama’s beefing up our bases in Columbia, a country where rightwingers regularly win elections mainly because leftwingers regularly catch bullets behind the ear--if they’re lucky.

Then a month back he and Hillary gave the go-ahead for the fascist coup in little Honduras. The local death squads we created back in the days of our Nicaraguan and Salvadoran sallies swung into action, killing, torturing, disappearing and jailing people with the same politics as mine. What put them in the cross hairs and testicle pliers was supporting the legitimately elected president. Apart from smashing the weakest link in the continent-wide drive for real democracy and independence, the coup was a warning to the Chavistas and all the other progressives in Latin America that Uncle Sam would be coming for them with blood in his eye. Not only had Queen Victoria recrudesced in the person of Obama, but so had her contemporary, Teddy Roosevelt.
Jamming folks whose ideas and ideals I share! I have no choice but to take that personally. I know that, living in a land where the foreign policy consensus is “kick their ass and take their gas," few will join in my personal pique at the cruelties Obama is visiting upon a democratic people in a tiny country. We haven’t had an anti-imperialist movement since the Philippine Insurrection, and our small generic peace movement seems to be peacefully dozing.
But I hope more and more of us are taking those other issues above personally. Certainly, they’ll have conniptions when they finally experience Obama’s health fraud (assuming it gets enacted). Our new president will discover that, like lots of other things in our crazy culture, his popularity is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Gall in Gaul

2009-07-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

Job Blows
The newest fashion in France is threatening to blow up your work place. It’s all the rage--or should I say outrage?
France, a very capitalist country no matter what our yahoos fantasize, is suffering from capitalism’s current crisis just like us. Layoffs and rollbacks are rampant. People are hurting--but not so much as here since unemployment payments are generous and no one loses health care or pensions when they get the boot.
Nevertheless, they’re pissed. But instead of getting boozed or beating the wife and kids, they wax militant and take it out on the people who are actually to blame, their patrons (bosses). In several factories and work sites around the country, workers have wired gas cylinders in place and vowed to set them off if their demands were not met. Here in the states, such militancy is unimaginable. But if it somehow occurred, it would be no big deal. The masked ninja cops would be sicced to destroy and devour the dissidents. The media would scream terror. Public opinion would cheer the cops.
Unlike the moderate Barack Obama, France’s conservative Nicholas Sarkozy doesn’t have the option of simply blowing away troublemakers. Sarkozy has to deal with not a dumb and docile but a sharp and refractory populace. A murderous government attack on the working class would bring millions of Frenchies, who have a gene that stores 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871 and 1968, into the streets. Or, at any rate, that's the French establishment's fear.
You know what happened? Capitalism, which is overwhelming even in France, wins--but not totally. The workers get the bum's rush. But they also get the equivalent of 40 grand each in added severance--and amnesty for their violent threat.
Yeah, we’re all capitalists now--though alternatives are beginning to bubble. But we poor Americans, largely thanks to our attitudes, live in a capitalist country where the workers fear the bosses. The French live in a capitalist nation where the bosses fear the workers.
Until we change our attitudes, we will remain the patsies of the planet.

Honduras Won't Go Away

2009-07-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

Death Squad Democrats
I‘ve been promising to alarm you about the threat of European socializing, which has millions of people sitting in outdoor cafes and schmoozing with each other when they could be working three jobs and otherwise prowling the malls like we do. But I’ve been sidetracked yet again by the increasingly interesting news wafting up from central America, now by way of Clintonville.
The fascist coup in tiny Honduras at the end of June had all the teethmarks of the empire. It would have been the fifth time since 1907 that Washington felt itself obliged to rearrange the politics of that impoverished backwater. But, still harboring a vestige of Obamania, even this crusty old lefty thought maybe we should slip the new guy an inch of slack. So I ventured, improbably, that the coup might have been an insubordinate sally by the Honduran oligarchy or even an effort by some cabal among our spooks to set up or embarrass Obama. Surely, our new president, with all his fine talk at the Latin summit about a new day for democracy and respect for sovereignty, was too smart to pull a stunt that would mock his words and remind the 500 million souls to our south that the monster to the north was as nasty a neighbor as ever.
Naive, wasn’t I?
Latin Americanists of left and right are still stirring the ashes for clues to the coup’s creators. Meanwhile, the coup’s continuers have come out in public to advance the cause of democratic government by death squad. The NY Times tells us that Roberto Micheletti, the designated gorilla now in charge in Honduras, travels with an American advisor with Clinton ties who travels with an interpreter since he can’t deliver his advice in Spanish. The Times also reports that “every proposal that Micheletti’s group presents is written or approved by the American.”
If it’s still not quite clear, note that Lanny Davis, Bill Clinton’s personal and very plugged-in lawyer, has become chief Washington go-fer for the golpistas. As Doonesbury pointed out in his excellent coverage of Bizerkistan, you can’t be a bloodthirsty tyrant nowadays without a retinue of American lobbyists, flacks and coverts at your elbow.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration, unlike the whole rest of the world, has kept its ambassador in Tegucigalpa and is sidestepping laws that supposedly interdict intercourse with putchist regimes. No need to mention that the dad and lad coziness between the Pentagon and its murderous Honduran cadets continues as usual.
The estimable James Petras, who knows more about Latin America than anyone, sees the Honduran coup as an opening element by Obama to rollback the powerful anti-imperialist wave across the continent. But it’s a weak riposte and not likely to endure, he says. The Latinos have tasted real independence and are not about to surrender it because the White House is now home to a cool rather than clutzy imperialist. Anytime Obama uses the word democracia south of the Rio Grande, he’ll be subjecting himself to a big fat reir a carcajadas.

Selective Outrage

2009-07-08T09:32:00.000-07:00

Hypocrisy on Honduras
Back in May 2007, the Venezuelan government declined to renew the expiring broadcast license of television station RCTV for, among other breaches, taking a direct part in the failed 2002 coup to overthrow the elected government. The purpose of the coup was, as usual, to establish a fascist dictatorship, wipe out the left, restore the old oligarchy, call it democracy, and thus make kissyface with Washington.
The decision merely meant that RCTV would no longer be able to to use the public airwaves to diffuse its daily dump on the government. Its ever more colorful claims that President Chavez was a monstrous lunatic guilty of every imaginable crime and perversion known to man and God would remain available on RCTV’s cable and internet outlets.
That decision caused a great brouhaha in our media about the crushing of press freedom and growth of populist dictatorship in Venezuela. Nowhere was it mentioned that the Venezuela’s media was not only free but indulged by a government that let it get away with shit that would have landed the execs of ABC, CNN or NBC in the hoosegow had they, say, kept suggesting that the country’s leaders be tortured and killed in bizarre ways.
I imagine a lot of liberals felt righteous about standing up for press freedom in a supposedly repressed land. They certainly took up a lot of media space and time prating their pique.
Perhaps that incident exhausted their outrage.
On June 28, the Honduran military pulled off a successful coup, ousting the elected president at gunpoint and opening fire on those who took to the streets in defense of lawful, representative government. The golpistas didn’t bother waiting for tv station licenses to expire. They simply shut down the stations and newspapers that had supported legit authority. They also roughed up and expelled whatever foreign media they regarded as less then supportive of their thuggery. A particulary target was the crew of Telesur, a new Latin news network that has dared to compete with CNN in Latin America.
This morning I listened to an hour’s discussion of the Honduran crisis at On Point, an NPR gabfest hosted by one Tom Ashbrook, who filled in the yawning gaps in his of knowledge of the subject with lies.
There was lots of criticism of the imagined excesses that the overthrown president might have possibly committed had he been allowed to serve out his term. But there was no mention, let alone concern, at the media crackdown. So far as I know, only Journalists Without Borders, a Paris-based free press protagonist, has raised a stink about the erasure of press freedom in Honduras.
The stunning silence of supposed liberals on not only censorship but also on the brutal repression of democratic legitimists in Honduras reminds me of George Orwell’s quote about a similar outrage decades ago:
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.