I would love to see the US start losing these competitions on a regular basis.
It's the dilemma of an empire trying to hold onto the status quo. It doesn't dare sell its best stuff to anyone anywhere in the world that it might one day have to fight, while more modest great powers are free to sell their best stuff outside their sphere of influence.
In Bachmann's world, America is the only important country, Europe was important until it betrayed God's Covenant With The White Man, and Asia, South America and Africa are and will always be backward worthless places until our missionaries convert them to Pentecostalism. Ergo, India and China are not important, much less the future.
Just try and get a Tea Partier to accept that a massive shift in economic power is going on in the world and that it's towards countries that resisted US control, not its crashed lackeys in Rumsfeld's "New Europe" or some Pentecostal-infested madhouse like gay-bashing Uganda. They have no idea that modern megalopolises are appearing overnight in the deserts of Western China, or that we've already lost control of Central Asian fossil fuels to the SCO, or that Brazil stood up for Iran. They just can't accept that anything occurs until Fox tells them how it vindicates American values.
We're living in a nation of ingrates. In 1932, 1992, and 2008 Democrats had to wade in to clean up a mess Republicans and their capitalism created. Note that in the '94 Democratic wipeout, the recovery had already begun. So Americans will vote out liberals because they don't have enough money, but they will also vote out liberals because they have money again and the first thing they want is a return to the same greedonomics that led to the last crash. Since America is in long-term decline and wages have been flat for the 30 years of the Reagan ideological dominance, voters always feel that they have been cheated, but that means they view the extravagance of the last bubble as the closest they've come to getting what they deserve, instead of the very condition that caused the subsequent crash. Which favors the GOP.
At least until there aren't enough white voters left to keep this particular game going.
The answer from this American is "yes". As the white population gets squeezed closer and closer to minority status, a larger and larger proportion of it goes crazy and looks for a way to turn back the clock. Imagine the kind of people who seized control of South Africa in 1948. It will be a 40-year fight between them and the demographic victors, who have a more "European" attitude about the military and social spending despite not being ethnically European at all.
But if the bad guys make their move via theft, coup or secession, what will you Europeans do to stop them? You would do us a great favor by kicking us out of NATO and creating a single military restored to your own control. But ultimately, you're going to have to create resistance to America's true masters, the multinational corporations, and run the bastards off of your supermarket shelves, your commercial TV, and all the other places where they infiltrate and conquer. That will be supremely difficult, as anyone who has ever tried to organize a boycott of even one of them has discovered.
Unless the above steps are completed, you will find that if a right-wing putsch happens in Washington your own elected leaders will not lift a finger to oppose or sanction it, and then we're stuck with a multigenerational race war.
"The Keynesian pump-priming of the 1930s prolonged the depression by crowding out private savings."
Excuse me, but that's ridiculous. In January 1933 the Depression had gone on for 3 1/4 years with no signs of recovery. People had panicked and stopped spending, so there should have been plenty of private savings. However, in that month the banks were collapsing like crazy. In fact, Americans were spending increasing percentages of GNP on debt service because their wages were too small to get ahead of their debts. No one trusted the banks with their savings anyway, so there was no way savings could get to businesses. Classical economics couldn't explain this because it held as gospel that the velocity of money is constant, which it obviously wasn't. If the velocity reaches zero, then nothing else matters.
Classical economics is crap. Wages can fall below starvation levels, and even then markets do not always clear.
Declining empires have gone crazy on nostalgia before. See Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy" for some past examples.
So now that we have blown the chance for America to rationally retrench from being an unsustainable superpower to a more natural stance as a great power, what will become of us? History says we will either lose a war and lose everything, or win a war by becoming an ally of a rising power, and end up as its satellite. But the US hardly has any allies left whose citizens agree with being our allies. As the American decline continues, the witchhunting will intensify at home and abroad. The goal of the Right: to find the scapegoat whose eradication will require permanent martial law.
A slave ship is a good metaphor. This article horrified me, because I predicted 20 years ago that privatized prison labor might be used to bring back race-based slavery in the United States.
Note that while the Tea Partiers assume that illegals will be quickly shipped back to Mexico once caught, this article shows the private prisons have a vested interest in caging them for as long as possible. If they can get the right to use them for forced labor, then in effect the prison corporations will be stealing the very same jobs that we accuse the illegals of stealing. Difference: illegals make free-market deals with small businessmen and help to lower their bottom line, while the prison corporations will make bulk deliveries to big corporations. You might remember how it worked with I. G. Farben in Schindler's List.
At which point, the prison corps will be making so much money that they will throw their lobbying money into the creation of new crimes, both in the state legislature and in state referendums. Now what is more likely to be made a prison offence - selling subprime mortgages, or playing loud rap music?
The more colored folks you find an excuse to turn into prison slave labor, the fewer who can vote. The more outrageous the laws that can be passed against them. If they take up arms against this obvious white conspiracy, then we will need concentration camps, won't we?
Except for one little thing, PRS. Massive debt also caused the 1929 Crash, and after 4 years of trying to balance the budget and cut taxes which only worsened conditions, we turned to massive government intervention and debt and brought the country back from the brink of justified revolution. Even the FDR-haters who claim that only WW2 saved America forget that FDR financed WW2 with staggering debt and taxes. The War was the most successful government jobs program in history.
That's because private and state debt have different effects. When private debt defaults, it makes everybody too scared to spend or invest and the deflation never ends. If a state prints too much currency, it leads to inflation, but the effects of inflation are preferable to 30% unemployment. Proof: the German hyperinflation of 1923 versus the German branch of the Great Depression of 1933. Democracy survived the former, not the latter. And American democracy came much closer to the brink under Hoover than our schools dare teach.
I'll buy that the day that the corporate media covers giant anti-war and pro-healthcare rallies with the same cheerleading enthusiasm they reserve for the Tea Parties.
The proof that you're right - when it was the British who were on top and occupying 1/3 of the Earth's land area including Iraq, they never bothered to investigate what their troops were doing and why. They are much more willing to uncover negative truths about post-imperial military missions that promise them no profit, annoying moral obligations from Washington or the UN.
It's the compusion to stay on top and hold onto conquests that makes proper oversight and adherence to international law appear like treason. The more we sense our empire is declining the less we admit it and the more we persecute anyone who points it out. We're as irrational as the shrunken Daffy Duck holding on to one last gemstone in the cartoon "Ali Baba Bunny": "Mine! Mine! Mine!"
When the US military relentlessly propagandizes its troops by only running Fox News on public area TVs (soldiers don't have a lot of private areas), it is providing both a service to Mr. Murdoch, and troops collectively indoctrinated into a paranoid world view who will not question orders. Do you think that this relationship has no effect on the military's preferences for which news channel to leak scoops to, or on Fox's willingness to report bad news about the military? I mean, where has Fox been during the Air Force Academy scandal uncovered by the MRFF?
I think the whole point of teaching Civics in the '50s and '60s was to propagandize for one culture and one political mainstream ideology, insinuating that they are superior to all other lands'. When minorities and activists got public schools to present a more complex view, it added to conservatives' grievances over their loss of moral monopoly. Apparently civil society was never meant to be shared.
Muhammad Ali needs to give Mr. Williams a talking-to.
30 years ago, I used to see a public service ad that involved interviewing kids about how they would react to being called a racist name. One little boy concluded the ad by saying, "I would tell God, I would tell my Dad... and I would tell Muhammad Ali."
Do second-generation immigrants assimilate, or do they create a new synthesis?
Consider the vast unrecorded revolution that Jews, Italians, and Irishmen helped bring about from the rural, reactionary WASP America of 1870 to the urban, progressive America of 1932, first cultural, then political. Before 1900 most Americans were rural, their favorite entertainment was minstrel shows (!), they only had a few novelists and artists of note, most children were essentially taught using the Protestant Bible, and all manner of bigotry, casteism, and class abuse went unresisted. By 1929 everything had changed because of immigrant-infested New York and Hollywood.
America became a world cultural leader via new art and communication forms - Hollywood built by Jews, jazz created by Blacks unleashed on Chicago and St. Louis, mass newspapers designed by Hearst to sell in the ghettoes. While white longhairs like Ives bemoaned the lack of authentically American art forms, George Gershwin was listening to the music of a dozen peoples in the streets and creating synthesis. Immigrant kids were learning English all right - from Black jazz musicians and Communist newspapers.
Prohibition was actually a WASP attempt to crush the "differentness" of supposedly alcoholic European ethnics. So was the execution of Saccho and Vanzetti, and the deranged extolling of unlimited capitalism via WASPy Wall Street. When it all collapsed in 1929, a new American polity formed around ethnics and union labor. The new culture already had already won in the streets; it was time to accept the new America in the halls of power as the solution for problems, not the cause.
America needs it to happen again. And Europe does too.
What if they educated themselves by going to some Green Party seminars and learned that the Western way of life is ecologically unsustainable?
Meanwhile, how much are you checking to make sure that every white carpetbagger who moves to Tokyo or Shanghai is "assimilating" into the local culture? Or do I still smell the faint stench of extraterritoriality?
In fact, many small, dangerous Chinese mines are independently owned, and supposedly some are outlaw operations. Their government makes a show of shutting down small mines after these disasters. I guess if there were big private mining corporations in China, they would simply use their lobbyists to corrupt any safety regulations the way they do here in America.
After two world wars are fought on American soil, I expect the survivors will be much more careful about who they give power to. Assuming, of course, that there's any soil left.
I so, so wish this were true. I keep looking for the proof that Europeans were ready to make the sacrifices needed to throw off US hegemony. But Europe is ultimately capitalist. Who is propping up the US? The Chinese and Arabs have objective reasons to prop up the US $. Yet it seems to be getting a lot of help and cover from all the banks, corporate media and investors all over the capitalist world. And Europeans are used to letting their countries' foreign policies be controlled by a ministerial elite, which in turn defers to NATO, which in turn is run from the Pentagon.
If you got a debate going about a unified European military, a lot of voters would be forced to consider matters they would rather not. Like whether US doctrines of power are completely obsolete scams. Like whether France's small nuclear arsenal is in fact plenty to deter a state-launched attack on all of Europe. Like whether Western troops actually are needed to ensure trade flows - as opposed to hegemonic profits from same. Look at Japan, after all.
It would be best if a democractic, socialist European superpower stood in stark contrast to America's creaking global war machine. Instead, the truly independent corporate empires like China will move into the power vacuum of American decline and senility. The world has gotten too complicated for democracy to have a say.
I don't think they're so much like zombies as they are like the people of the slave states circa 1859. They know they will lose the numbers game to the non-white hordes unless democracy is terminated, and it would take extreme acts to create the conditions that would enable this. So they stand there in a mob and try to provoke each other into lighting the cannon pointed at Fort Sumter by escalating lies about how awful their lives will be if someone doesn't do it. I've read the newspaper editorials from the South in 1860 and they're just appalling, truly Goebbels-esque.
Now note that this game was also being played during the fight against the Civil Rights Movement - if we don't stop Dr. King, surely the Reds will win. So we have to look at their personal risk/reward calculations in 1860, 1960 and today. To put it bluntly, in 1960 it made sense to accept sharing a fast-growing pie in a sound economy. Are we now at the point where instead we expect there to be less to go around, so we look to push each other out of the lifeboat?
The article says 1.9 million homes. The average US home uses about 1 kw continuous, so the total power is only 1,900 MW. Even offshore turbines don't make 100% of rated capacity, so it's reasonable.
That is an outstanding analogy. I think it needs to be explained to people across the political spectrum, from people like Chomsky on the left who assume that America must be the master villain because it's the bigger capitalist power, to people on the right who see Jewish conspiracies everywhere. Being dragged around by your own satellite is not unusual. In 1973 the USSR and USA were almost dragged by their Mideast allies into a war they didn't dare allow. In 1968 candidate Nixon connived with South Vietnamese dictator Thieu to sabotage LBJ's peace talks and keep the war going, which is treason by the way. The relationship between great powers and satellites is complicated, unless the former's corporations have penetrated the latter and completely dominate it. Solution: no permanent alliances or interests.
Hitler was afraid that das Heer (the Army) would not commit enough atrocities in Russia, so before the invasion he lined up its generals and made them swear they would throw out the rules of conduct. He said, "I have a feudalist Army, a monarchist Navy, and a National Socialist Air Force", which shows that even in supposedly totalitarian states, the ruler is wrestling with factions and entrenched culture.
However, it was dangerous for the US to exaggerate this distinction to exculpate the Army (the term Wehrmacht refers to the entirety of the armed forces, which did include the Waffen SS). I read that it annoyed the hell out of the British that we were so infatuated with Rommel and built up the myth of his anti-Nazism. Even Colonel von Stauffenburg, the man who bravely led the last attempt to kill and overthrow Hitler, was a reactionary aristocrat who expected that the Allies would at least let Germany keep Poland.
Recall that Patton wanted to win quickly, then ally with the Nazis to treacherously invade Russia again. I suggest that many near-fascists were in our Army high command at the time, as they were in business and the State Department, and they pushed the myth of a good Army merely following orders because they had their own plans for Germany. But luckily our country also created and staffed the Nuremburg tribunals, which showed why an army must be held morally responsible for the orders it obeys. Maybe Iott should be made to wear his uniform at a re-enactment of one of those postwar trials of German war criminals to commemorate a real American achievement that has been undone by our growing imperialism.
You're right, dimsum, that the country's probably screwed anyway, but how it's screwed is the difference between a long, boring decline and a second Civil War. If a reactionary movement just makes up history wholesale to depict all progressives as evil or even led by the Antichrist, and the corporate media lets it get away with it, it's beginning to smell a lot like Weimar.
A society based on the Old Testament, unlimited private property and gun rights, militias, extreme restrictions on government power, and the infinite inequality of the races was LEFTist?
You don't know a damn thing about what the Left was about. Parties can change their position in the political spectrum just like corporations change their product line. The KKK endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964 - where they Leftists? Goldwater was the godfather of modern conservatism and shared their opposition to civil rights.
What happened was that blacks switched parties quickly in 1960 and 1964 due to Kennedy's implied support for civil rights legislation, and THEN racist Democrats switched parties. Read any respectable history of voting patterns in the last half-century - which states switched parties? Practically every white Southern racist switched from the Democrats to the GOP, including Senator Strom Thurmond, whom Republican minority leader Trent Lott praised as having had the right ideas. That was entirely about revenge against blacks and the Democratic Party.
I dare you to Google black Republican Jackie Robinson's account of his terrifying experience at the Goldwater-dominated 1964 GOP convention, which he compared to a Nazi rally. The moderate liberal GOP you talk about was murdered by Goldwater, Reagan, the Bushes and the Christian neo-Confederate Right. It's as dead as the 91% top income tax rate supported by the old GOP.
Or are you saying the 95% of blacks who voted Democratic are right-wing white supremacists?
And to add to your point: Why did Germany have to fight against such long odds? Because their blatant militarism scared their neighbors into eventually uniting against them. What good does it do to have the best weapons if you terrify the entire human race into opposing you?
Which leaves America in an interesting position today.
I'm not neglecting it. Bombing was part of blitzkreig. And it's part of the lie of sanitary warfare that the US crams down everybody's throats. Now do you wish to continue this pissing contest over which of us is more anti-war or will you explain to laymen the implications of my comments about the uselessness of this approach to war? It DOESN'T PRODUCE VICTORY! That's all the masses care about, and they have to understand what's actually going on in modern warfare.
They wrote the book on modern war pre-1973. The combo of Vietnam and the near-defeat of Israeli tanks by Egyptian anti-tank weapons signaled the end of an era, but the military industrial complex will not admit it. The first Iraq war is extolled as exemplary, but the 2nd Iraq war is the reality of modern war even more than Afghanistan - a dirty struggle of assassins, informers, and suicide bombers.
The appeal of the blitzkreig is the appeal of the military industrial complex - the selling of clean civilian-free wars, especially by a richer, more technologically advanced white country over large hordes of backward peasants. The peasants have figured out that such countries are horrible at occupations and bide their time for revenge. Now that the 1st world capitalists have already shipped all manufacturing overseas, the means for us to carry out such wars against any sort of important country is a myth, while God knows what robotic monstrosities China's assembly lines will crank out by the millions in the future.
What has changed about Germany is that right-wing extremists no longer have a built-in advantage over left-wing extremists in being seen as more "genuine" or patriotic Germans, or more moral and Christian, or more in touch with a sacred past. The World Wars changed that about a lot of societies, but the USA got off too easy to get the message.
Would you say that he is therefore part of the militant Christian Zionist conspiracy that has dominated Southern Baptism?
And Harry Reid is a Mormon. But he's also a Democrat. Most of his fellow Mormons probably wish he was dead.
You can tell which persons put theocracy ahead of democracy. In the case of Jewish Americans, it's very easy to tell. But all this Jew-bashing makes it easy to avoid the responsibility of America's white conservative ownership class that controls the shares in the firms headed by Jews.
Face it, we're in a class war, the same class war we were in when all our Russian Jews were living in urban ghettoes. They did what they had to do to get hired out of the ghetto, but who owned the banks and factories and oil fields then, and how rich are their great-grandchildren still?
Trying to fantasize that there's a "good" capitalism of steel mills and weapons factories run by conservative Gentiles and a "bad" capitalism of movie studios and banks run by liberal Jews is a hallmark of Fascist thought. It's all one racket, and it has no loyalty to ordinary Americans at all. You should worry about how much economic power they've already transferred to new host bodies like China.
I would like to stand up for the ability of my people, the white Protestants, to control media, corrupt banks, and oppress minorities. We have been unfairly ignored in these capacities. Everyone talks about the Jews controlling Hollywood. But who owns the studios? Warner is owned by Time, the spawn of Henry Luce. Disney was created by an anti-Semite. NBC Universal is owned by WASPy General Electric. Fox is, well, Fox. They all have shareholders, reaching into the pension funds of every corporation in the US. The megaWASP US car industry, spawn of Hitler-loving Ford, got its bailout along with the finance industry. As for the Jewish bankers, Goldman Sachs and all the other banksters are in an alliance with every corrupt debt pimp in every goyim subdivision from Maine to San Diego, with redneck car dealers, with Sunbelt defense contractors, with Jew-free Big Oil. Is every Jew selling life insurance, or medical or home insurance that never pays when you really need it, or shipping jobs to China, or trucking in illegals to work in their sweatshops? No, it is the good Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians who do the hard work of cheating ordinary Americans of all faiths in the name of the God of Greed. And capitalism ultimately lives on the certainty that all these bastards can order the government and its peckerwood army to gun down anyone who takes a stand against it - at home and abroad. Give the Zionists points for seeing that the sick neoconservative movement started by Scoop Jackson and Jeane Kirkpatrick was a useful way of melding American and Israeli militarism into a crusade against the entire rest of the human race, but those Zionists speak for fewer and fewer American Jews every year. In fact, as talk2action.org has shown, the Zionists now seem to be looking at inviting deranged Baptist gun nuts to emigrate to Israel to do what even Israeli Jews lack the stomach to do. If you want genocide done right, my kin from Tennessee and Texas are still the best America has to offer.
In an ideal world you might be right, but this is about defeating an insane movement by pointing out its illogic, which sound like fair game to me. Hiding in the dark corners of the right-wing mind is the nostalgia for a past America of monoculturalism and monoethnicity, where parents would sacrifice for the future because their kids were guaranteed to grow up as their clones and thus validate their values. O'Donnell's life is a dissonant reminder that this just doesn't happen anymore.
While a certain faction of the Christian Right loves converts and captured seekers like O'Donnell as proof of the supremacy of their cult in the cultural marketplace, I bet the rest don't really want these tokens to govern. They'll jump up and down to cheer on an ex-Moslem convert as a spokesman, but would they ever let him head the denomination? Black conservatives played much the same role in right-wing ideology, but look at how poorly Michael Steele is treated now that he's running the RNC instead of generating soundbite insulation against charges of GOP racism. Since 2008 you hardly see Bush-era black spokestokens in the media, because the Tea Party doesn't trust them. They probably won't vote for a Mormon or a Jew either. Reformed WASP drunks like G. W. Bush, another matter.
Along the lines of my previous post about people wanting to obey religion, not understand it, here is a link to an article about sex-scandal-plagued "Bishop" Eddie Long and the enormous change he's made to Protestantism that the media is too dumb to investigate:
The key to the article is that Long overthrew the right of his congregation to overrule him, then convinced other church leaders to do the same, then elevated himself over all those churches as a bishop, with all authority flowing downward and all money flowing up. Yet he has contacts with white Pentecostal extremists who have recommended exactly this strategy as a pyramid-scheme march to global conquest. The term is "steeplejacking".
Bishops? For this to happen in Baptism is shocking, but it is truly a total reversal of the populist spirit of Pentecostalism. What is left is the desire to surrender rational comprehension of the rules and intent of religion in exchange for a delirium of mass obedience.
Why do they get away with it? It appears many Americans want a new authority in their life to replace the messy democracy they must share with people different than themselves, and which they so easily sell out to their bosses' agendas.
When I first started taking political science courses I had to do a paper on a 1980 Texas voter survey, which startlingly showed Texans on average far more liberal than their hero Ronald Reagan. Now I see parents begging Christian extremists to "educate" their children when they're not even a part of their religion.
I wonder if what I'm seeing is the desire for a faith-driven strongman to keep order, because we know ourselves to be too ignorant and lazy to take care of it ourselves, even if we don't agree with the strongman's policies. Of course, the faith in greed seems to motivate voters to put businessmen in office, on the assumption that the rich guy must have some ability that we lack. I've also noticed that people who defend teaching Creationism in schools don't talk about the merits of the ideology, but instead express fear about "out of control" kids. In other words, we need our schools to break our children's will with the myth of the all-powerful Big Daddy Jehovah.
And the more complex and diverse our society becomes, the more we want someone else to do the dirty work of keeping order and protecting our selfish interests at the expense of others.
We damn well shouldn't destroy secular nationalism if we don't want theocracy to come roaring back as its replacement. Say what you want about the Treaty of Westphalia, but the seemingly invincible absolute kings it appeared to create were giving way to parliaments and republics in the next century. Reason? A secular state must justify its existence on practical realities, including the power of ethnic solidarity as a tool for building a better society. If people give up on that idea, it's back to religion, which never has to justify anything with facts or data. And that is a catastrophe in a world of fundamentalist monotheism, whose logic is that all problems can only be solved by the elimination of all other religions.
The problem is, even if the GOP achieves less than Gingrich did in '94, it will still paralyze the nation. In '94 this meant that when the bubble economy grew no one had the guts to stand up to Reaganite dogma and preserve the regulatory framework erected after the '29 crash, which we have been paying for all decade. But to have the nation paralyzed now is far more destructive, because there isn't even an equivalent to the tech boom to at least get the country back to some real growth.
This won't matter to the corporations that fund the GOP, because they have already abandoned loyalty to their country. They can finance extremists to squeeze more war contracts and tax cuts out of the citizens, lure them into running up more debt on smaller wages, while they transfer their real assets to Asia where more responsible governments are investing in an educated workforce who will become our replacements as consumers. GM sells more cars in China than it does in the US; where does its ultimate loyalty lie? "Pump and dump" can be done with entire countries.
The panic of white reactionaries will not recognize capitalism "being itself" as the cause of this accelerating decline. It will turn on Mexicans, blacks, gays, witches, labor organizers, anyone it associates with the liberal perversions of the 20th century. They will rule the midterms and undo any good the poor and non-white try to do at presidential elections - literally a civil war with battles 2 years apart. Democrats no longer have unions or working-class neighborhoods to organize the progressives as in 1932, and if they tried to do so their own corporate sponsors would cut them off and move to China even faster.
The demographic trends say that eventually there will be too few whites to even control midterms. But the renewed screams for secession, nullification, and the repeal of the 13th and 14th Amendments indicate that there will be one more great showdown, where the right will attempt to use some crisis to throw minorities off the voter rolls forever. We've done it before in this country and it was done in South Africa in 1948 and it may happen in Israel even sooner.
At that point, the number of citizens on each side will not matter, only the number willing to fight and die for their irreconcilable definitions of a just society.
I'm always on the lookout for wind turbine designs that don't require transmissions, but it's hard to otherwise obtain the high RPM that generators require for efficiency.
The good news that isn't being considered here, though, is that all this repair work will have to be done by locals, while the fuels we rely on represent very little labor and a whole lot of corporate and landowner property rights, which simply feed into the upper classes and their self-destructing financial bubbles. Renewable energy is labor-intensive, and Americans have been taught for decades that labor-intensive is evil - because labor is evil. This kind of thinking was used to make us welcome outsourcing, until our remaining jobs no longer paid the wages necessary to pay for the goods our bosses were selling us.
It might not be a bad thing if our children grew up in a world where they knew good jobs existed specifically due to the need to build energy-producing devices and keep them running, instead of hoping that their relentless consumption would keep banks feeding dollars into a mysterious shadow economy of exotic investments that somehow keeps small crews here and abroad sucking hydrocarbons out of the earth. Literally, destroying one surplus in order to destroy another surplus.
Since Ontari0 is connected to the grid of the northeastern US, any extra power it can generate can be exported. The NE is a bottomless pit for energy, and the US could help itself in many ways by shutting down more of its coal mines.
However, Canadians should not assume that hydropower is all that is needed. Any dam that is built on a river supplied by snow melt during the warm months may be at risk from climate change. Take a look at the Colorado River in recent years. There is great concern that the rivers supplied by the Himalayas, on which countless millions in India and China depend on, will be disrupted as snow is replaced by rain that quickly evaporates instead of getting stored up.
The problem with the Tea Party/Christian extremist alliance is that they literally don't think that the economy consists of anything other than what white Christian Red-State American conservatives are good at. In their universe, every failure of capitalism is shoved off on those Jewish-named bankers in evil New York, while its every accomplishment is due to "real" Americans in the heartland pimping McMansions and SUVs, as if it isn't the unregulated success of the latter that leads to the rise of corporate oligopolies and financial speculation and market crashes and Depressions.
This is also a characteristic of fascism. An artificial division is made between "good" capitalists - death merchants like Krupp and I. G. Farben, and "Jew" capitalists who use movies and banking to corrupt the warrior spirit of the white race. What are the policy implications of a capitalism that only asks the "real" citizens to arm up, steal resources from other races in other lands, and then preside over labor camps and sweatshops? It means that the real work done by Mexicans repairing our roads and building our homes, the people in China building all our consumer goods, the engineers in China and India who design everything from computers to DNA sequences, can all be denigrated, while implicitly our kind have a right to point nukes at all of them and demand that they keep bailing out our currency because we're the guardians of free enterprise and thus deserve to make a living off of them.
O'Donnell didn't grow up in the '70s either. Watch the video of her admission to Bill Maher - she's quite young. So after witchcraft, she became an anti-masturbation crusader and rode that (excuse me) to electoral politics, re-made her appearance into a copy of Sarah Palin and got nominated to be a Senator by the GOP.
Is that the reigning example of meritocracy and hard work and implied superior Caucasian intelligence that the Right says will rebuild America's globe-sucking empire?
The Palin video is important because of the people giving the blessings - leaders in an outlaw Pentecostal movement called the New Apostolic Reformation who were her key support group until she was nominated as McCain's running mate.
See more at http://www.talk2action.org, which has links on its main page to part of its coverage of this sprawling network of theocrats, witch-hunters, and Catholic-bashers. Put it this way, Palin has fewer than 6 degrees of separation from the bill to execute gays in Uganda. This network also puts out videos documenting its exorcisms of entire regions against the demon known as the "Queen of Heaven" (the Virgin Mary), taking credit for causing Mother Teresa's death, and driving witches out of villages and praying for them to have accidents. The NAR believes that everyone who disagrees with it, even other Christians, is under demonic influence, and that one day its members will take over all governments, corporations, and wealth worldwide.
Palin's personal connection is Mary Glazier, a NAR leader who was a secretary for the Alaska Independence Party - which Todd Palin was a member of. Glazier recruited Palin into both the NAR and politics. She also "prophesized" that McCain would die in office and leave Palin as president. The NAR is obsessed with the idea of Alaska becoming a stronghold in the holy war to come.
It's not just that. The Christian Right is out to destroy every secular institution that has in any way eroded the power of the Medieval church: public education, public health, unions, the separation of church and state and the establishment of secular law over clerical law. It has embraced near-unlimited property rights and economic inequality. It has abandoned any opposition to war. What do these measures point to? A populace reduced to the status of debt peons to corporations that function as a new nobility, while the president is only called "commander-in-chief", a tribal war chief whose only power is to kill foreign babies rather than feed our own. We know what role the church plays in such a society; the dispossessed throw themselves on its mercy and are indoctrinated against revolution, and it pretends to soften the abuses of the landlords when it is itself one of the biggest landlords. I'm not just describing Medieval Europe, but in parts the church of Catholic Fascism, that of Chile and Guatemala, and that of rural 19th Century United States.
Erdogan: less oil, better strategic position. Turkey is a relatively middle-class country; the issue is not starvation like it was for the masses in neoliberal Latin America in the '90s, but whether ordinarily religious people can have their beliefs used against them as an excuse to preserve an undemocratic elite. I think of Erdogan as being more like JFK, who struggled to prove that his faith - and that of many working-class Democrats - did not make him un-American in 1960, and succeeded so well that such fantasies have hardly been uttered since. Of course, that doesn't mean that many of the Catholic benefiaries of that breakthrough have been friends to the poor or non-white in subsequent years, nor will the beneficiaries of the AKP be assumed to support economic justice or minority rights. But it raises the standards.
Where it figures into the larger world is that increasingly we see labor beginning to organize in China and neighboring countries, we see gay rights become the norm in most of Catholic Europe, we see all sorts of social progress as countries pass up America left and further left. Turkey is one of those many countries, all of them increasingly aware of each other's progress - and America's backsliding. America is now what the Ottomans were, overarmed and underbrained and too obsessed with past glories to heed the warnings of concerned persons abroad as we roll happily down the wagon ruts to the canyon.
Michael Scheuer's book "Imperial Hubris" seemed to me to be saying that bin Laden primarily intended his movement to inspire Moslems to defend their own countries, that he expected it would take many decades to turn back the tide of Western domination, and that bin Laden himself did not expect to live to see that victory or obtain a position of power. It's easy to ascribe every evil or insult to the guy, but he seems to have read the nature of the American empire pretty well and has set the wheels turning on its demise at the hands of others. And he has reason to think that his rinky-dink activities in the past finished off the USSR - at least as much as people who credit it to Ronald Reagan.
So that leaves us with two questions:
1. what right does the West, and America, really have to dominate the world when we run it so badly?
2. why can't the Moslems get a better deal from a Chinese-dominated future than the global mess that has resulted from 60 years of the US trying to impose the contradictions of the Saud dynasty and Israel on the Middle East? The Chinese would not have been so stupid, because they're too cynical to let sentiment (Israel) or ignorance (the Sauds) dictate their interventions.
Like John Brown, bin Laden might get the last laugh on all of us.
Is our charity only extended to those who might otherwise wash up on Florida shores and become a tax burden? Pragmatic of us, but hardly noble, and our aid to Haiti won't begin to solve its systemic problems anyway.
Do we subconsciously feel that Pakistanis deserve to suffer for defying us? Americans are at that dangerous point where they've heard just enough about a country to recognize that some of its people and institutions are defiant, but they haven't learned nearly enough to understand the context of that defiance.
Or is it maybe that we sense Pakistan really is too big to deal with? A nuclear-armed, semi-Islamist army on top, highly corrupt and parochial political parties in between, a vast sea of terribly poor people below, meaning we can't easily coerce them, or cheaply bribe them, or use our media power to appoint a white knight to make democracy suddenly work the way we want it to.
Here's the test; if we were polled on having the option of the status quo of poking and prodding overwhelmed Pakistani leaders, and just getting out of the region and dumping Pakistan in the laps of Beijing and Moscow and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, how would we vote?
Lincoln could not conciliate with the rebels until he had defeated them. Problem is, the American people can't look on a phalanx of white, Christian, apparently middle-class bigots as rebels who need defeating when it's so much easier to join with them to damn Moslems and Chinese and Venezuelans and Mexicans and blacks as the rebels who need defeating via the militarization of our society. That is why there is so much fear and uncertainty in our country today. No one can agree on who the real enemy is, and we're too lazy and cowardly and broke to beat them anyway.
Yours is an excellent analysis. Many people have noted a relationship between ethnic homogeniety and support for welfare and redistribution. Because in the long run the poor must do their part by using their benefits wisely, which they may be more likely to do if the rich don't view them as an inferior alien race who they will never hire anyway. This was the way it was in the old Scandinavia, but the consensus fell apart once there was an immigrant population. For America that tribal brotherhood could only be induced artificially by WW2 and the Cold War. Liberals paid a price for using those struggles to make the argument, "We must do these things for minorities and the poor or they won't be loyal to us against the Nazis and Reds". Because once the Cold War was over, it was time for the rich to party consequence-free, and they're still doing it. No one really believes that blacks or Latinos will switch over to al-Qaeda nor must they comply with a draft, so the War on Terror has simply upped the self-righteousness of the "good" Americans who obviously merited their vast war bonanza.
The trick is that it takes time for tax hikes to kick in. The top tax rate was hiked up, I think, to 63% in the late '30s, and at the start of the war it went up to 91%. There was a temporary hike to 94% during the war. However, FDR's redistribution went far beyond taxes. The war created full employment, but for once the war machine was on the side of the workers, who got better wages with less gender and race discrimination than ever before seen in new government-sponsored factories. Also, much of the war was financed by selling billions in war bonds to ordinary Americans at rather low interest rates. Note that Reagan's final chapter of the Cold War was financed in exactly the opposite way: tax cuts for the rich, high-interest rate t-bills sold to the rich and paid off with interest. I think that had a big effect.
The myth that Reagan created an economic miracle and defeated the Soviets by sacrificing the lazy, un-American poor is so deeply ingrained in our greedy souls that it can't be refuted with all the evidence in the world. I think that the only way a society learns it was wrong is by catastrophe. The three big catastrophes of the 20th Century, the world wars and the Depression, shocked Europe out of its belief in a divinely-ordained class order that overrides democracy. But America really only suffered one of those, and the lesson was not taught deeply enough to create more than the one generation that swore to remember, and the thin layer of financial regulations to prevent it recurring. When that generation died out, so did the regulations. Instead, the plutocrats have prepared by creating what their 1929 predecessors didn't have, a media machine so pervasive and seductive that people vote against their interests and evidence. The solution to every problem is further to the Right, always rightward, always the certainty that if inequality grows, MY superior merit will finally be recognized over my lazy, worthless peers, and if things get bad enough, we will know who to throw out of the lifeboat.
It is the difference between what happened in America in 1933 - and what happened in Germany. I now believe white middle-class America would have to end up like Germany in 1945 to really change, and you know what that would mean.
What is the point of debating the merits of counter-insurgency strategy when the Chinese government is sitting on over a trillion dollars of foreign currency, and its business agents are swarming all over every continent looking to buy up every resource of value? When the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is the only hope for development in Central Asia while Wall Street freezes capital to help the Tea Partiers? When Chinese trade ministers are going to Havana right now to offer the people of Cuba a much better deal than our Mafia ever did? We might as well be Britons in Iraq in the 1920s, arguing strategies to legitimize a puppet king while our own country is being bound to Wall Street and our troops worldwide are preparing the way for Ford and Coca-Cola.
What good is strategy when it is blind to the largest realities in global power?
Well, they won't win the hearts of America's imminent non-white majority, that's for sure. But then the entire point of the venture, and why it will succeed for a while, is that "our enemies abroad" is a codeword for "everyone who refuses to obey us", at home or abroad. If November 2008 proved nothing else, it proved that white reactionaries have reason to feel embattled; that if minorities vote at all, they will vote for the guy further to the left, and that American conservatism has zero friends overseas where the future is being built. But those folks can't very well openly proclaim that, can they?
Nothing left to do but what the Afrikaners did in South Africa in 1948 when they knew blacks would be allowed to vote in future elections: scrape together one more temporary majority, storm into power and install a new order that would wall itself off from the world as necessary. In South Africa, the alien code-word was "Communism".
And that's why we seem angrier at Moslems than we were after 9/11.
If only we could make the overseas war total, then, finally we could wipe out the real enemy here at home. Isn't that how it always works? We just need for someone else to step forward first and say the hateful words, then we can rush to proclaim him as "grassroots" and "sincere" and drag the Overton window a few inches further right. Someone else has to say it first, because the rest of us who lust for war and conquest and curtailment of domestic rights also know in our hearts that it will involve sacrifice and we don't want to make any sacrifices. But if some guys in Florida double-dare our manhood, we can happily toss out our own common sense and charge over the cliff with them.
Over and over we are told by the right wing that if we slash taxes on the rich and everything in the government that goes to those worthlesss negroes (meaning not Social Security, Medicare or the increasingly white Southern war machine) there will be an economic miracle that will wipe out the deficit. Then when it fails to happen, the right claims it was betrayed by a president who was not extreme enough. That got us from Nixon to Reagan, Reagan to W, now W to some maniac to be named later.
Well, where is this miracle supposed to come from? Name the industry! No, we're supposed to blindly trust the Invisible Hand to magically come up with something new, because "entrepreneurs" are infallible. Well, the last boom was due to a lot of software engineers who needed work after the Cold War, and due to the giant financial bubble the capitalist class built around that tech boom supposedly being immortal. The big tech industry now is portable computing and communication, which is full of European and Asian companies and Apple, which uses outsourced labor. There is not a single nation-dominating new industry where we have an advantage over Asians. Not alternative energy, which many conservatives damn as a cultural affront even when it is privately financed. Not genetic engineering, because of our increasingly extreme religious faction. Not war, because that does not produce real economic resources anymore.
There isn't going to be another boom. The capitalists' plan is feudalism. All public goods will be sold cheaply to domestic Halliburtons to run the way it ran Iraq. "Entrepreneurs" my ass, the GOP's sponsors will all have guaranteed, no-risk revenue running your roads, your prisons (with perhaps slave labor to juice the profits and steal your job), and your Social Security fund (!). Also your schools, which will be run by whichever religious fanatics volunteer the most of their free labor to convert our kids into compliant Medieval peasants who have zero idea how science and technology work. After all, if it's good enough for Pakistan...
Conservatives keep blaming all the evils of the past on government, and applying terms like "slavery" to anything that reduces inequality. But feudalism was simply private landlord/lenders grabbing sovereign power over the rest of the population and providing all public services and military functions. And the only slavery that has ever existed in America was a private, conservative institution founded on the dogma of unlimited private property rights. Both institutions absolutely required a weak central government that would never take the side of the poor against the rich. Now who advocates such a thing today?
Besides, how else can conservatives rule after whites become a minority, but by stripping the franchise from the non-white poor? Strange that no one ever talks openly about the plan for that demographic inevitability.
The last deficit under Bush was a lie. How could you not know that he excluded the entire cost of his wars from the deficit?
Secondly, the entire Bush scam was built on private debt, to create a boom in financial services and real estate flipping that was completely unproductive investment; it made nothing that could survive the inevitable bursting of the bubble. For instance, in 2004 nearly a trillion dollars in home equity loans were taken out. That is literally creating that much money, which no matter what you believe about Keynes will cause several trillion dollars of extra economic activity in a year. The problem is that it means without that borrowing, we would have had a massive depression right then and there, and with the borrowing the trillion still had to be paid off at some point - meaning right now. But home equity loans don't cause a more productive economy or workers. Factories do, but the capitalists want them all in China so they can afford their monster bonuses. The debt made it possible for our bosses to keep us spending without having to pay us decent wages for making real things.
Thirdly, the largest portion of the stimulus package consisted of tax cuts. Which don't work during a depression because people are too scared to spend the extra money, but right-wing dogma says that tax cuts are the solution to every problem so we did it just like Herbert Hoover.
Fourthly, the government is not spending much more money now than under Bush, but tax revenues have completely collapsed due to the crash. That alone is what caused the ballooning of the deficit from the real war-included amount under Bush.
So when did tax cuts and reduced government spending ever cause a boom? Can any conservative give me a date? The boom after the Civil War was built on stolen Indian land and unlimited immigration; it helped to have an Army available again to help in the stealing. The boom of the 1920s was a fraud; wages did not rise, so production was driven by consumers buying on credit. Everything else was stock and real estate bubbles. The Reagan boom was the biggest joke of all; it was under him that wages began their long stagnation but his relentless evangelism of greed and gluttony helped keep people spending more, which meant digging into their savings. Without the Japanese we would never have gotten away with it.
America's prosperity rests mostly on the growth from 1940 to 1980. Before that we were a 3rd world country with a small military. Now we are a 3rd world country with a huge military. In between we were a successful country with an activist government, big public investments, a well-funded public educational system, a GI Bill to create free college for millions of white men, a relatively small Wall Street, relatively low-paid corporate executives, and a top tax rate of 91% until JFK cut it while continuing to spend on the military. We were also the world's largest producer of crude oil until 1973 - we were our own Saudi Arabia.
In fact there is nowhere in the world you can point to that proves your economic theories. Switzerland has socialized medicene, the brutal neo-capitalist regimes of Latin America have all been kicked out by their victims except for narcotized Peru and Colombia, all the Asian success stories have a significant government and/or US aid component, and the only other big pile of money in the world is the one the Arab princes used to prop up the dollar and US commercial real estate.
When Confederate general (and former slave-trader and future KKK founder) Nathan Bedford-Forrest overran Ft. Pillow and its mostly black defenders, one of the black men who tried to surrender to a Southern cavalryman was told, "Saddle my horse!"
The man complied. Then the Confederate said, "I will saddle my own horse, and shoot you too." Which he did, though the prisoner survived.
That was then the Southern view of black people's right to exist. Once they had shown they would defy slavery, they had no right to exist. This was impractical for the Southern elite from a labor economics standpoint, of course, so they constructed a satistfyingly humiliating caste status for freed slaves that kept poor whites sadistic and happy.
Thomas Jefferson expressed a similar viewpoint, though, in his writings on the Commonwealth of Virginia; he said the blacks had to be freed, but then they would immediately have to be ethnically cleansed. His ideal social system would not work, he knew, if whites had to share citizenship with blacks and compete with them in the marketplace.
It is too easy for white Americans to believe that all other nations and races only exist to serve them, since that is mostly how it has been in modern times. So we are slowly transitioning from the confident, aggressive bigotry against any of the sub-creatures at home or abroad who refuse our orders, to the fearful, senile bigotry against the competition from our former subjects.
Yet this process can happen quickly or go in reverse. An extremist like Milosevic or Hitler can come to power based on the fear that "those people" are too competitive to be allowed to exist, yet after a few easy victories they switch to a triumphal tone saying that they must cross borders and rescue their kind in other lands, which implies that they are naturally superior.
In the US context, I have in the past tried to distinguish between racism based on the belief that the enemy race is born inferior and therefore should be kept under unfair conditions, and racism based on the belief that the enemy are the product of an inferior culture, and must be forcibly assimilated. Mostly the former have been conservatives and the latter have been liberals, but Reagan seized on the libertarian idea that "less entrepreneurial" cultures had no inherent right to exist (Thomas Sowell eloquently damns his own people to cultural extinction this way) and thus rehabilitated his new Southern allies, who switched to the safer form of bigotry by becoming market fundamentalists.
This is another dimension to the racism problem. You can see cases where people who fear a competitive rival group will try to mandate cultural extermination instead of deportation. The corporate elite certainly would prefer this, since they are the high priests of modern white American culture and want to standardize the entire world population to be addicted to the products and labels they control. When the goal is to keep a lower caste subjugated, however, assimilation is a tricky matter. Some slaveowners in the US wanted slaves Christianized, but perhaps some saw that this would create dangerous questions about how Christians must treat other Christians. The tendency in the South was that assimilation must occur under the context of "seperate but equal", meaning that blacks got inferior everything, but had to act white and not express any ideas of their own despite their differing circumstances.
In the current white power crisis, the corporate sponsors have total control of where the Tea Party can go in eliminationism. Thus we see in Arizona that real efforts to reduce the illegal population such as jailing guilty employers are bypassed for laws that target all Hispanics for petty humiliation. If too many Hispanics leave, it's bad for business. But if too many Hispanics stay and give birth to new, voting, citizens, then whites will lose the competition for power. So we see a law that targets Hispanic education classes that might teach an accurate history of how whites got power over Hispanics. A delicate dance of treating Hispanics as sub-creatures, as competitors, as deportable, as necessary labor captives, has turned into a slamdance run by Neanderthals.
Anyone who reads Dr. King's later sermons will have to admit that he was a radical pacifist, a unilateral disarmer, and an enemy of American global domination. That he viewed worship of US intervention abroad as akin to support for racism at home, because the government could not long pay for war and the Great Society.
But no one reads those sermons. There is no point in reading those sermons. The Right learned the hard way during the MLK Day controversy that he couldn't be smeared, so he had to be co-opted, and that required erasing all evidence of what fascists like J. Edgar Hoover and the KKK correctly pointed out about his radical politics. Al Sharpton claims he witnessed James Brown use his connections in the GOP to negotiate Reagan's approval for the holiday. But Brown could hardly have imagined how that would require the Orwellian rape of King's dream of an egalitarian, multi-cultural society.
If we don't draw the line here on historical truth, there is no lie the Right cannot make "common knowledge". At this very moment, other tentacles of the right-wing lie machine have an aggressive Internet rumor campaign underway to paint Hitler as part-Jew, part-Black, all-homosexual, and by insinuation a "liberal". Other tentacles are telling black audiences that the Democrats are still the party of white supremacy, while yet other tentacles tell carefully chosen white audiences that Lincoln was evil and slavery was just.
All of that is going on at the same time. Why? So that when normal people are no longer sure what the truth is, they will turn in their confusion to the only people who have certitude in America, those who will never stop screaming, lying and fighting until they have restored our society to the bitterly-resisted evils of 19th century Christian-protected white supremacist unregulated capitalism. And this time they will kill as many of us as they have to in order to keep it cemented in place.
There is one big difference between this situation and the War of 1812:
Americans were genuinely hostile to the UK government for many decades after the burning of the White House. But in the late 19th century America became Britain's junior partner in the capitalist subjugation of the world. Britain was the #1 investor in US industry and railroads. The US was heavily in debt to Britain. Anglo-American businesses, like the White Star Line that owned the Titanic, became common. American corporations benefitted from British global military domination as British industry itself was becoming senile. By 1916, it was obvious ethat if the US was going to enter WW1 at all, it would be on the British side. That war reversed the two countries' positions as debtor and creditor. It is as if there was a single business class transfering its assets from one host body to the other, until the UK became the servile junior partner it is today.
But our animus towards Britain after 1812 would have been shorter-lived if we could have seriously claimed to have won that war. Economic interests aside, the one thing the US really hates is not winning. We claim to be generous in victory towards countries like Japan, but we are sore losers everywhere we didn't get our way, evidenced by our chain of long running economic sanctions around the world.
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven."
"Do not save riches here on Earth, where moths and rust destroy... for your heart will always be where your riches are."
"You cannot serve both God and money."
"Do not be worried about the food and drink you need to stay alive, or about clothes for your body. After all, isn't life worth more than food?"
"look at the birds flying around: they do not plant seeds, gather a harvest, and put it in barns; your Father in heaven takes care of them."
"But I tell you that not even Solomon, as rich as he was, had clothes as beautiful as one of these flowers."
"Sell all you have and give the money to the poor, then come and follow me."
"Give to everyone who asks you for something, and when someone takes what is yours, do not ask for it back."
But the real question, zaxxon, is how you could be so confident in your ignorance of Jesus, when you claim that I haven't even read the Bible. Which gospel were you taught? The Gospel of Ayn Rand? The Prayer of Jabez? The Theology of Prosperity uber Alles?
Is this what American Christians are like now? I was brought up a conservative Southern Baptist in the '70s and I knew these things. Have they been consigned to the memory hole in the Reaganite church?
And worst of all, zaxxon didn't have a problem with me pointing out that conversely, the Jehovah of the Old Testament was a murderous bastard who ordered his Hebrews to conquer innocent towns and kill and enslave their inhabitants and later to ethnically cleanse non-Jews from His kingdom. That didn't bother him, but Jesus the socialist caused him to froth incoherently, and use an obscenity (the F in LMFAO).
Perhaps the false Christs truly have come, as warned of in prophecy. Could they be any more disgusting?
Sure, and the Old Testament teaches that God will punish an entire country unless its people worship Him alone and expel or murder everyone who refuses to comply. So have I just described the essential, unchanging practice of Judaism or Christianity? The Old Testament also supports slavery, yet both sides in our conflict over slavery used the Bible to beat the other over the head. And the New Testatment has Jesus denouncing private property and wealth and demanding that his followers give away everything to the poor. Does that in any way characterize the behavior of Christian societies in the subsequent 2000 years? That goes double for his pacifism.
The end game is the disenfranchisement of an imminent non-white majority, just as it was in South Africa in 1948 and in Israel today. Years ago I heard about the extremist movement to repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments on the fringes of the far right. I knew that movement would be shepherded to the GOP mainstream by the same machinery that has mainstreamed so many insanities once held only by Birchers, and indeed GOP senators are now trying to hold hearings on ending birth-right citizenship based on the 14th Amendment. There is no reason to abolish those amendments unless you are trying to give states the right to exclude enough non-whites from voting to ensure white rule forever. That was what Jim Crow was originally about; all the segregated drinking fountains and baseball that the mainstream media continually rattles on about were merely side effects of an ideology manufactured first and foremost to keep blacks from voting.
Now obviously wholesale disenfranchisement would lead to violent conflict, but once whites and blacks were shooting at each other, which side could then be designated as "terrorists" and then categorically denied the right to vote? Similarly, the wave of multiple laws designed to provoke and humiliate Arizona Latinos, citizen and alien alike, serve no useful purpose unless it is to escalate a race conflict that will harden all those Latinos into one camp that can be stigmatized as traitors and legally suppressed. If the goal had been to really stop illegal immigration, merely jailing employers for doing everything they could to hire illegals would suffice but that would ruin Arizona's future as a caste-based economy. If the goal had been to merely weaken Latinos as a political force, Latino citizens and non-citizens could easily have been played against each other for decades. Instead, just as the new right-wing populism deliberately chose to offend and denigrate blacks and the man whom 95% of them voted for as traitors, the Arizona branch deliberately chose to unify all Latinos as an enemy.
Why go out of your way to make all blacks, all Latinos, and all Moslems your enemy? Because you need clear boundaries and absolutes if you intend to circle the wagons of "real" Americans for the political equivalent of war, instead of the normal vague divisions that characterize a healthy democracy. The Solid South of 1876-1964 made a mockery out of democracy by waging this sort of war and it is foolish to think that such a strategy is too immoral to be tried again.
Miller got his big paycheck, and then he became a right-wing absolutist. No surprise. Bill Cosby got many big paychecks and went to the right little by little - in the early '70s he was hosting documentaries about racism in Hollywood, and bailing out the production of the wonderfully inflammatory "Sweet Sweeback's Badass Song."
I guess I could speculate about the speed at which persons of various backgrounds sell out, but what matters is what's in right-wing ideology for entertainers: I'm rich, you're all inferior to me, but as long as you're my whorish yes-man, I will reassure you that you're better than those whiny troublemakers who complain about all the goodies that you consume to make your whore life endurable (which is good for Wall Street, which makes me even richer). If a bully and his hangers-on laugh while they pull down a smart kid's pants, I guess that must be humor.
Meanwhile, thank God for Chris Rock, whose documentary "Good Hair" I just watched. His brand of humor remains observational, not denigrating, and he shows great restraint in depicting the paradox that a hair-care industry that supports black jobs and businesses is in fact reliant on dangerous chemicals and exploiting religious women in India. Actually, in taking extra time from his touring career as he found he had to follow the story wherever it went, he did what corporate journalists are supposed to do, but don't.
It seems to me, Prof. Cole, that your quote from Alvarus is entirely the point of Christian extremists. Given their paranoid belief that anything less than a total monopoly on power means that they are slaves, they already think they are living in a Hell of diversity. But if the Spaniards were able to slaughter, torture and conquer their way out of the weakness of diversity, then so can America. To them the Golden Age could only have been when white Christians held the world in chains, filling the coffers of a Christian despot like Charles V or Queen Victoria. If they can purify the thoughts of young, military-age Americans, they can turn things around and rule the world!
Actually, I recently read that migration by Jews out of Israel has begun to outpace immigration of "Jews" (including Russians who claim to be Jewish to get settler benefits) to Israel. This is a nightmare scenario for Zionist ideology and explains the growing paranoia Prof. Cole has observed. But if all the liberal Jews are getting sick of scary militarism and leaving, and nominal Jews from Russia try to prove themselves good Israelis by their willingness to oppress and kill Palestinians, what kind of population do you end up with? This is why the politics and attitudes of actual Jewish-Americans and Jewish-Europeans get further and further away from Israelis, yet the political representatives of the former only obey the laundry lists of the latter.
Soon, ordinary liberal American Jews will face a permanent campaign of denunciations from Fox, AIPAC and the Christian Right for being race traitors and heretics because they won't emigrate and they don't hold pro-war beliefs. Will this persecution be called anti-Semitism?
When I was a teenager in the late '70s and an increasingly skeptical Baptist, I was introduced to a BBC series about the lack of achaeological evidence for David's empire. I had no idea that the mainstream view in Europe was that the Old Testament was just propaganda written by self-serving priests - a view I now share.
Yet the gap between what Europe and America believe about the history of the Middle East seems to be widening. To be a Christian at all in America you must claim to be a literalist, or it will get ugly for you. Even if you are not religious you must repeat the dogma that the Old Testament narrative justifies the seizure of Palestinian homes and farms.
I think the US and Israel are locked in an embrace of origin stories. Our WASP ancestors used the Old Testament as an analogy for their destruction of Native Amemrican lands to the point where they practically appointed themselves the named party in a new Covenant. Then Jabotinsky name-checked America's successful crime in proclaiming his goal in Palestine - complete elimination. Then the Right in the US fell in love with a victorious, expanding Israel in 1967 and both the neo-con and Christian wings have seemed to channel its might-makes-right ruthlessness to bully their way into power here and around the world.
Is Israel the 51st state, or a new Red State that the other Red States follow out of the Union into an expansionist crusade against any land with resources?
Arizona is a herald of American Failing Nationalism Syndrome. Except here what is failing is one definition of a nation versus another, not one nation falling to another.
I have a map, which I don't know how to post, of the % of Hispanic voters in US states. Combine that with the black vote in the South, and you can see a delicious irony: the Red States, the heartland of the GOP, are the states most rapidly losing their white majority. Tea Partiers will deny it up and down, but the sense of threat they feel comes from their own local demographics. Since they are reactionaries and only have the dogma of their beloved States' Rights past to appeal to, they can only hate on Washington and federal power and New York and California and the North in the manner of Jefferson Davis. But all the power they try to amass for states will pass into the hands of minority voters. So the real function of that 19th Century rhetoric can only be to carry out a 19th Century agenda - the re-restriction of the franchise to ensure a permanent white majority. Will this anti-tax movement soon advocate a poll tax?
No wonder their embrace of Israel grows ever tighter. No wonder John Hagee is financing building in the illegal settlements while his acolytes challenge Israeli courts to accept Tennessee Pentecostal theocrats as part of the "Judeo-Christian" nation. No wonder Sen. Lieberman marches increasingly in lockstep with the deranged Christian Republican Party. The US Christian Right and Zionism both must justify Jim Crow to perpetuate rule of their own homelands, surrounded by enemies, but they possess media control, capitalist sponsorship, and nuclear arsenals. So they're gonna give it a try and drag all the rest of us with them.
Amazing. America keeps getting sick of unwinnable wars faster and faster, but we are surprised that the rest of the world is getting sick of us escalating these wars in the first place. Instead of embracing peace, our leaders seem to be indoctrinating the voters that we are entitled to order other countries to do all our fighting for us - and Israel's fighting - because our two nations are the only moral ones in the world and all the wicked servant satrapies must pay tribute to that with the blood of their young men. And our voters are buying into this insanity because they want the costs of war to go away but refuse to sacrifice any of the emotional benefits of being the "most powerful country in the world".
I can't figure where this thinking is headed. Since we keep losing these guerrilla wars that require so many of our couch potatoes to become boots on someone else's ground, I guess we secretly desire to blackmail other countries into providing the IED fodder instead. We might not be able to hit the right tent in Pakistan, but we sure can hit London and Berlin with nukes.
There is also the role in energy development of the biggest government endeavor of all - war!
When we squeezed Pennsylvania dry, the world was still a long way from its transition to oil. The armies began chasing the crude, and thereby made the transition practical. War is entirely responsible for the existence of the nuclear industry. The cradle of the solar photovoltaic industry was the needs of space satellites during the Cold War.
Do the actual rulers of Pakistan demand that Afghanistan be a satellite, or do they accept it as a sovereign state? If the former, as Michael Scheuer claims, then there will always be a Taliban, or something like it. No one pretends that the Pakistani Army is not deeply involved in the Kashmir resistance. That is its modus operandi with its neighbors.
So where does that leave America? It can't leave Afghanistan because of the specter of 9/11. It can't admit that Pakistan keeps the Taliban alive without declaring Pakistan an enemy. Pakistan has atomic bombs because the US spent the '80s and '90s pretending that Pakistan was a friend, so clearly there are asses which must be covered. Besides, all-out war between the US and Pakistan is unthinkable, so there is nowhere to escalate to.
That leaves us with Afghanistan as a tragic ritual slaughter, which cannot end as long as Pakistan and America each demand its subjugation to their competing agendas, and each denies demanding its subjugation.
Isn't it a hell of a thing to be praying for our Chinese creditors to hurry up and put a leash on our madness? Yet I can't think of anyone else who can do the job. The only reason I can imagine why they haven't ordered us to shut down our bases in 130 foreign countries and divert money from the military to infrastructure repair and debt service is that our decaying empire serves their purposes for now.
Joe McCarthy was enabled by a capitalist media that was already witchhunting before he was. The coming of a new McCarthy was predictable. That he is not a senator this time may tell us how much the Right now relies on denigration of elected government instead of slavish support for it.
We should also recall the front page of the Tulsa newspaper the day before the horrific white riot which destroyed the black part of Tulsa in the '20s. The only remaining copy has a square cut out of it, where an article was run telling whites where to go to start the riot.
And where were the Southern newspapers in 1860 and 1876? Doing their worst.
In the past the media aided and abetted tyranny, oppression and bigotry and never was punished for the disasters it caused. So I don't see anything stopping it this time.
Davr: Apparently it's not possible for a right-winger to be anti-American. This is not sarcasm. There is a built-in assumption across the political spectrum that right-wingers are more "real" Americans than anyone else. I think this involves vaguely sensed notions of the origin of American identity in the colonial past, and the special insecurity that white Christians feel that, unlike Germans or Englishmen, they can't declare American as both ethnicity and nationality. They want tribalism, but the act of defining themselves as a tribe rightfully ruling over "conquered" peoples like blacks and Latinos is suicide. Obsessing over Free Enterprise or Christian fundamentalism is a way of asserting that identity behind a non-racial front, but always worshipping an idealized past when WASPs just happened to monopolize power.
Meanwhile, we're all still ignoring the question of Turkey's geostrategic importance. Which is not surprising when Americans run a world that they can't recognize on a map. Turkey was Bush's (read Cheney's) oil trump card - the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline was supposed to turn the ex-Soviet 'Stans into Exxonstan. A vulnerable pipline winding through various war zones for no purpose but to wage economic war on Russia and Iran by throwing out all notions of "free trade". But we've done nothing but antagonize the Turkish electorate ever since. How much of the oil arriving in Turkey was meant to be shipped to Israel in the future? Don't bet on it now.
Furthermore, since the 1800s Britain considered the biggest threat from Russia to be its overthrow of the Ottoman Empire and waged a cold war - Charge of the Light Brigade and all - to prevent the Russians from gaining open access to the Mediterranean. Like most British imperial goals, that one was passed to the US after 1945. If at any point during the Cold War, Turkey had switched sides, it would have been considered a strategic catastrophe of the greatest magnitude in the Pentagon. Yet now we act as though Turkey is nothing, and Israel is everything, and Putin is not standing there with a lot of oil and gas ready to send to Turkey as a bribe.
On top of all that, it was reported after Bush's arrogant dismissal of Saudi initiatives to hasten the peace process in Iraq and Palestine that the Sauds had embarked on a more independent foreign policy. Their key agents - the Turkish and Pakistani governments. Why? Well, besides Pakistan's nukes, I expect that both nations being viewed as democracies made them look better in Western media than the Saudi's own despotism. Pakistan is also massively in debt to Arab investors. This is a complicated 3-way development, and it could have many good or bad outcomes. But this is not a case of America being able to punish Turkey without it having others to turn to. At least Putin and King Abdullah can read a map.
Well, David, Mr. Atilgan is described as a retired army officer. The Turkish Army is Edrogan's greatest enemy, a historically anti-democratic organization that turned Ataturkism into a state religion at war against Islam, and created a civil state that similarly wages war on Moslems and bans the parties of elected officeholders for insufficient loyalty to Ataturkism. So yeah, he'd be a good fit in the Likud. The Army has been mad at Edrogan because he doesn't want to kill Kurds enough. Israeli "contractors" have often been reported to be helping the Iraqi Kurdish fiefdom with military matters, and the warlords running that fiefdom have done a great job protecting the PKK in Iraq from the US Occupation, so that the PKK could attack the US's NATO ally the last 7 years. So I guess if you're angling on using Atilgan to smear Edrogran, you will have to be careful claiming the Kurds as heroic victims of Edrogan's extremism.
I love Desertec because it enabled me to write my all-time favorite e-mail title about the German project to generate electricity in North Africa - "Afrika Korps II: Electric Boogaloo."
But I also admire it because it's the kind of big project we Americans used to carry out and no longer seem able to manage. Look at the problems with the Big Dig. Or our refusal in the late '90s to budget $50 billion to restore southern Louisiana's waterways and wetlands to a natural state to avoid a future disaster like Katrina - which I understand caused many times more expense.
The catch - Germany has a 50-cent per kilowatt-hour tariff on renewable electricity. So presumably the Desertec partners were expecting to get that ridiculous bounty by running power lines all the way from North Africa. It sounds like the commitment to such subsidies will be strangled by "austerity".
They need to think big. The US has manipulated politics and pipelines across Central Asia in a desperate attempt to keep Europe from buying gas & oil from Russia because, we claim the Euros will sell out their democracy to the Russian Satan. But if Europe can build Desertec, then it won't need gas from Russia or Iran, and how could America object?
Unless, of course, what we really want is to keep Europe from becoming too independent of us. If such a system is built, the meaning of all sorts of relationships change. North Africa is no longer another place where undeserving Arabs and others squat on "our" oil - these solar collectors will require labor and trained technicians. That damages both Israel's narrative of Arab inferiority and its claim that its alliance with America helps ensure our energy security (!) by keeping Arabs and Iranians in line. Because Europe will be the place where electric cars will prove most useful and economically attractive due to $7/gallon gas, the entire role of oil in justifying the Anglo-American power structure might be threatened by a flood of cheap solar electricity.
No one has had an entity that economically integrated both sides of the Mediterranean since Rome/Byzantium. By the dogmas of the Project for a New American Century, Europe would become a threat to America. I welcome it - our greed and shortsightedness has already ensured China's rise to a share of global power and its people sacrificed greatly to bring it about. Rather than try to pull it down, as many Americans seem to desire, how about we pull up democratic Europe as a counterbalance before we become too weak to pick winners?
You have definitely done more to stop the wars than I have. The challenge is defining exactly what is to be America's role if we will genuinely foreswear these generational exercises in nation-destroying. In other words, a specific goal instead of an absence of current butchery. The peace movement has nothing to fill the vacuum of idle American minds once the troops are home.
But the bigger problem, which soured George Kennan on Americans and maybe democracy, is that there is such a narrow range of views that Americans will accept about the outside world. It takes a certain amount of experience with policymaking and conflict outcomes to see that you have to be cynical and have a bit of a tough hide to have a rational discourse over a moral and efficacious foreign policy. That's why I made the Sean Connery joke back in 2001; most Americans can't seem to stomach that kind of black humor about their precious boys in uniform and their tax dollars at work.
This leaves them in three camps: isolationists, crusaders, and social workers. The 3rd group being progressives who want to shut down the empire but still would like to have US power on their side in pushing sovereign states to stop doing nasty things in Darfur, etc. These groups represent minimum thought and maximum self-absorption.
Meanwhile, in reality land, America is a declining empire that has to decide the terms of its decline. These 3 camps make it impossible to have a hard-headed discourse on shutting the thing down. In the absence of such discourse, every time some dictator or militia does something halfway around the world, one of those camps will demand that the President "do something" depending on the ideology of the perpetrator, and another country gets added to that list of 130, if not something far worse, and we blow another billion on deployments.
We're not ready yet. If the President all Clausewitzian and say that we must rationally plan our demotion from a superpower to a Great Power state, and draw a defense perimeter over which our forces will not cross, but within which we still reserve the right to violence, then you can imagine the public hell that would break loose. Centrists should be the ones propounding this, but their moderation simply consists in trying to defend US power everywhere without looking too hard for new wars. Worst of all the peace movement will be just as mad because they refuse to even accept the US as a Great Power state, which is why the brainwashed mainstream thinks they're traitors.
So the matter gets punted to the next Administration when we will be even deeper in debt.
Cutting our defense budget in half ought to be the most obvious goal in our current crisis, and a great achievement, yet you could not find 10% of the politically vocal population to even touch the idea because their absolute, moral and unimpeachable positions are so far removed from the messy reality of being a declining empire.
Watch what happens when Obama tries to get a missile reduction treaty through Congress. The streets will fill with deranged theocratic and fascist protestors, and the Left will stay home because they're not satisfied with cuts that are still far too deep for Congress. So the uninformed masses will only see the far-right maniacs and the TV Swiftboating ads and conclude that they must be right that Obama is a secret Moslem terrorist.
Design the ad that can turn that around, and you will have done the greatest practical service to peace worldwide.
So you bought the narrative. The day after 9/11, I wrote an e-mail to some friends of mine about this being our Sepoy Rebellion moment - the time when we had to decide whether we would simply continue as a capitalist trading state with a varying sphere of influence, or we would become crazed, racist crusaders as the Victorian Britons did when outraged Indians tried to throw the East India Company out of their sovereign kingdoms. The point being - Britain thought it conquered India, but it set in motion a bloody era of imperialism and militarism and ended up losing India after only 90 years - to what benefit for ordinary Britons?.
Or as I put it to an ex-military friend of mine, "You can be Sean Connery, and I'll be Michael Caine." "The Man Who Would Be King" would have told you everything you needed to know about the madness of ordinary men handed imperial power in a place where they don't belong.
We're lucky that the Chinese are phasing our empire out slowly for reasons of their own, but we won't even get the 90 years. You have the choice of cheering on the end of these wars and then going back to uninformed sleep, or taking an active role in shaping the public discourse about why we should be a superpower with troops in 130 countries, and what can we replace this with.
Remember South Korea and Spain too. It can take several successful elected governments to get the Army to return to the barracks for good. Pakistan will never have several successful presidencies in a row.
However, we must consider that the US military does not have the troops to carry out an actual coup - the essence of the power of the South Korean, Spanish, Turkish and Pakistani armies as a gray eminence. That's because while those other armies all were the dominant partner with civilian elites in ruling, our military is simply a front for the military-industrial complex. The corporations are the dominant partner, and the place from which a coup would originate. See the DuPont plot of 1934 against FDR - the US Army was so weak that the plotters figured to create a fascist militia that could give it a run for its money, especially since the plotters also had media power on their side. What changed in the capitalists' need for the military was the vast overseas expansion of both after 1945, but that has created a military literally intended to waste money on nonexistent threats and avoid mediapathic casualties while punishing rebellious colonies.
No, those other countries were dominated by the actual power of the Army in their streets. We are dominated by addiction to the empire in our minds, like other declining empires that collapsed without a coup.
That would not be the worst outcome I could imagine, but in Afghanistan we always give up chances to avoid the worst outcome.
What we know about Afghanistan is that the Pakistani Army is committed to keeping it as a satellite, apparently beyond all reason, poverty, or bribery. A couple of years ago they hated Karzai's guts because of his ties to India. Then things started to change.
If it matters more to them to have a puppet in Kabul than who that puppet is, Karzai may be sending his application for the position by bad-mouthing the US and stealing elections from the formerly India-backed Northern Alliance.
That would indeed lead to a divided country. It would be horrible to let the Pakistani Army continue to pursue its murderous obsession. But if it's stupid enough to be happy with Karzai, we could wash our hands of him. We just want the Pakistani Army to promise it will never let the Taliban appear to have won. Now what leverage do we have to accomplish that given that Army's nuclear arsenal? Mostly, we have that Army's blowback problem - the Pakistani Taliban created because it couldn't control its proxies. That's why they don't stop us from these damned drone strikes on their territory.
If the Pakistani Army is satisfied with real control over southern Afghanistan, and Kurdish-style pretend control over the north, it doesn't need the Taliban on either side of the border. If it wants the whole rancid ball of wax, then the Northern Alliance takes up arms and we have to decide whether to back it or let it have its old sponsors back. I'd take the latter, because I'm sick of our attempts to override Russia's sphere of influence. But a permanent proxy war between the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on one side and Pakistan on the other will be even crueler than what we're doing.
It means that pulling out is really only partly about what internal factions will rule what part of Afghanistan, and much more about getting their sponsors to accept an invisible ceasefire line once we're gone.
There is only one bribe left to offer the parties, and we won't enjoy it. The SCO has had Afghanistan and Pakistan as observers at its summits. I bet the US is blocking those countries from joining the SCO - I can't imagine Gates standing for it, or even Hillary. If they join, it puts Russia and Pakistan on the same side. They get the damned Afghan pipeline route that Benazhir Bhutto planned and the 'Stans flood Europe with crude and the US loses more and more of its superpower mojo.
But better an SCO that can improve living conditions and prevent further regional chaos than a NATO that threatens Russia on its southern flank for no good reason but Washington's fear of EU petro-Finlandization. One day a US president must tell the citizens that our days as a superpower are over, that we are only the foremost among Great Powers and cannot dictate everything in every corner of the Earth to our advantage.
Oh boy, it's the Edrogan is the new Chavez meme. Friedman, who worshipped at the altar of the invasion of Iraq, refuses to explain that the Turkish people themselves went from being overwhelmingly pro-American to overwhelmingly anti-American due to our actions in Iraq. Edrogan was dragged along behind them.
So if you're looking for someone to blame, Tommy, look in the mirror.
Hey, Richard the Lion-Hearted was willing to piss away the powerful empire that he inherited to go engage in holy butchery for an illegitimate Crusader colony headquartered in Jerusalem. If he had kept his talents where they belonged and not left his throne to John Lack-land, the Plantagenet Empire might have radically reshaped European history. Try running a cost-benefit analysis on that without laughing.
Right-wingers don't believe that people TURN to evil, they believe that people ARE evil. God rewards good people with success in capitalism, so the evil poor, at home and abroad, can only be kept on the right path through the terror of our righteous weaponry and the karate-chopping hand of the market.
By this formula, Rep. Pence is not causing Turkey to turn towards evil Iran, he is exposing its evil nature in that it is willing to defy rich, Godly Israel. And that's how it is across the spectrum of foreign policy issues for the faith-blinded. They already know all foreigners will serve the Anti-Christ and attack Israel in the End Times, so they are very satisfied to have an ever-growing enemies list to fill out their Armageddon scorecard.
The only way we will accept such a tax is in exchange for the elimination of the income tax. See my comment above about having to disguise simple reforms with right-wing arguments.
Problem is, an energy tax is regressive in that it will collect a higher % of the income of the poorest car-owners, like me. So there will have to be some kind of rebate check strategy, but the right-wing inequality cult will immediately start a long-term campaign to make the rebates resented, then despised.
What we really need is a return to the tax structure that worked so well for us from 1935 to 1960, but we have already been brainwashed to believe that a 91% top rate never happened because surely it would have caused Communist tyranny. We got such high rates to work because the only way to evade them was for businessmen to reinvest in their own businesses, which would encourage a lot of the activity that an American energy transition now requires such as job training. With low tax rates and capital gains discounts, businessmen instead look for a quick kill on Wall Street or real estate or derivatives or any bubble they can concoct.
Besides, we've probably already outsourced too much to ever learn how to start making things for ourselves again, so we will have to import solar panels and turbine blades from China and continue to weaken our working class.
You always have to wrap it in the flag here in America.
Prof. Cole failed to mention that JFK had it easy - the space race was patriotic pork; no Republican could oppose it. Democrats always have to do it that way because right-wing arguments are the only safe arguments. Making peace with China? Only Nixon was allowed to do it, because there was no way his lackey party could call him a traitor. There was no way Democrats could wrap that in right-wing-speak.
It's built into our fundamental political beliefs: the Right defends the Real America, the Left wants to change it into something else. Which is treason. Our people will accept tiny bits of this treason when they truly face destruction, and as soon as things get better they swing way to the right to prove they are not really traitors. Until you change this dynamic, you can change nothing.
"Their fundamental view is, the Europeans treated the Jews badly and gave them our land — this is Palestinian thinking [...]"
Uh yeah, that's what happened, Chuck. Screw fantasy Jehovah, that's objectively what happened here in the real world. Ibn Saud made that exact specific complaint to FDR and made him promise that the Palestinians' status wouldn't be changed without consultation with Arab rulers - which made Israel's borders their business. The onus was on the colonists to prove that they weren't Plymouth Rock set to land on the redskins and crush them out of existence.
I bet Chuck doesn't use that explanation in front of a secular New York audience that is a little nervous about the idea of people being run off their farms because of some old scrolls fabricated by self-interested temple priests thousands of years ago. No, with them he just makes history start at the Munich Olympics.
NATO increasingly reminds me of the tragedy of the Delian League, the Athenian-dominated military force created to continue the alliance that had defeated Persia. Athens' voters took to using the League to crush any opposition in the Greek world, until undemocratic Sparta believed it had to go to war to survive. Everybody was ruined, Athens fell under a junta, and the Greek world was easy pickings for Philip of Macedon.
I don't see a way out. If NATO is dissolved in favor of a proper EU military, Americans will freak out and vote in people to the right of Sarah Palin, with a mandate to wage eternal war against an ungrateful and wicked world - all of it, not just the easy marks. We will go from Athens to Sparta in an eyeblink.
The American people have never valued the lives of individual Americans more than they have the triumph of the American way of life over all alternatives - whether they define it as Pentagon boots on the ground, American predatory capitalism run amuck, or worst of all Dominionism, the belief that America is merely the capitol of a global crusade to restore the world to the decentralized, arbitrary rule of the Biblical patriarchy. The libertarian wing is sure the corporate whores can do it better than the Pentagon or the theocrats, so it opposes war. But the goal is always a global slave plantation with "our kind" living in the big house and the unentrepreneurial darkies happy in the fields. It is an addiction well worth feeding with our boys and our subsidies and our unregulated safety - until it becomes too much of a hassle and we withdraw and claim to have learned our lesson. Then it starts all over again in some new guise.
Drunken Economist -
Remove incumbents so we can put in Sarah Palin, who wants eternal war on all Moslems and witches? (See http://www.talk2action.org for where she's coming from.)
Ron Paul has muffled himself on peace issues to help his son in pro-war Kentucky. It's all Confederate now, and when have the "small-government" Southern states ever sincerely opposed any war overseas? They were only against the Serbian war to get back at Clinton.
I have come to the depressing conclusion in recent days that Americans do not comprehend the basic premise of international law. Which is that all men are created equal, thus they have the right to form sovereign states and that those states also have the same rights regardless of the color of those men or their language or way of dress. If there is a Dred Scott rule, then international law simply is arbitrary power.
It wasn't just dealing with liberals on DailyKos in recent days, liberals who regard the war on Palestinians to be sacred above all moral limits. I really tried. I even pointed out that they were calling for a lower standard to be applied to Palestinians whose original crime was to merely live on land whites wanted to take, than the US applied in 1945 to the defeated peoples of Germany and Japan who were treated according to the laws of occupation despite having voted in fascist governments that committed genocide.
What really sickened me were comments on Yahoo stories about the fall of Japan's prime minister because he was voted into power with a promise to reduce the number of US bases on Okinawa, my birthplace. In other words, Obama overruled the will of the Japanese people. The replies were vile beyond belief. People repeatedly claimed that the US had conquered Japan and could do what it pleased to it in perpetuity. That they were lucky we let them live at all. That they were spoiled and ungrateful. They all presumed that America knew what was best in matters of war in every corner of an Earth they despise, that it was impossible that we were making up or building up enemies to inflate the profits of our special interest groups.
They said, essentially, what Hitler said about Germany.
Whereas nearly every person who said they had lived in Okinawa, presumably due to military service, expressed sympathy with the Okinawan people and their rights.
Maybe we should bring back the draft, make every testosterone-laced dumbass spend two years living off-base in several non-Western countries so they can have the experience my Dad from Jim Crow Texas had in Okinawa before he married an Asian woman. Of course, there's the problem of the inevitable increase in rapes.
You think things are bad now when war is fought by tiny indoctrinated elites. Wait 'til the pendulum swings back to people's war.
Medieval era - elite war by knights and fiefs
The 30 Years' War - medieval model bloated into mass destruction by continent-wide holy war; 1/3 of Bohemia destroyed; elites sign Treaty of Westphalia to restore limited, non-ideological war
The Age of Reason - elite war by "professional" armies that go on inconclusively for decades but don't threaten the system
The Wars of the French Revolution - suddenly mobs of radical patriots find they can throw away the rules and crush the pros; elites use Congress of Vienna to restore limited, non-ideological war
World War I - as Churchill put it, "I blame it on technology and democracy." Elites use Treaty of Versailles to restore limited, non-ideological war but it doesn't even last 20 years.
The elites want to wage endless wars of policy, but keep the tools of warfare out of the hands of the masses. The masses get fed up, and suddenly an uprising exposes the military elite as bloated, incompetent and obsolete. Then we have mass war, total war, chess pieces removed from the board and smashed forever.
All the tools are out there for a new people's war. Industry has been exiled to the poorest corners of the earth. The richest, most right-wing armies left on Earth, Israel and the US, have failed time and again to win convincingly against hostile societies. The Israeli failures you describe are due to the males of rich nations becoming fat, cowardly couch potatoes who need the unjust global economic system just as much as we Americans do. The elitists have only one saving throw: to turn their couch potatoes into genocidal monsters using Fox News and extremist religion, and terrorize the world into handing over its resources.
I think it's already failed, but you know how it is with dying empires. Head cut off, body still stumbling around killing millions.
I applaud the involvement of Irish peace activists, whose whiteness makes them difficult to impeach, whose ethnicity gives them an audience in the USA, and who certainly would not have a country or justice if their forefathers had not turned to terrorism in 1919 against the might of a great empire.
Make our racists explain the difference between stealing land from an Irishman and a Palestinian.
Well, Iran is surrounded by enemies and beseiged now. So does that mean it's understandable that threatened countries actually increase their proliferation activities?
You are right that the American model of capitalism will always turn any new technology into greater inequality. All that we've recently experienced parallels the 1920s, which was a dry run for modern consumerism. However, the New Deal showed that an active vision of how social improvement would work with technological improvement could prevail for a while. 1950s America was not the Tea Party fantasy (which really is based on 1850), but a society with a 91% top tax rate, high corporate taxes, burgeoning public university attendance, powerful unions, and the world's best artists, writers, architects, scientists, and engineers. World War II did not produce all that; the political interpretation of the War in the light of the sufferings of the Depression produced it.
This was all suffocated in its sleep by the corporations, who would side with "ex"-segregationists, religious fanatics, and John Birchers to reclaim their monopoly on power so that they would not have to share any profits from the next technological revolution. But Europe and Asia are at least trying to avoid our extremes. For them the new communications and media fit with their high-density urbanized populations, their lack of a car-centric culture, their need to hold down oil consumption, and quite possibly a more fundamental commitment to social interaction than America has really possessed.
The hopelessness of the Islamist goal of autarky lies in the fact that more than half the world's population is now urban. Cities change people. I think part of the big divergence between postwar Europe and America is that when Americans moved back out of cities into the new suburbs, their brains went into reverse too. The Islamic world has cities teeming with first-generation rural refugees, and they aren't any happier than the immigrants living in NYC's hell-ghettoes in the 1800s. The first response of a colonized or expelled people in ghettoes is to rile up their oppressor by falling back on their own traditions and insularity, to treat assimilation as a form of defeat. But the kids who grow up under these conditions will explore ideological options one after another until they find the politics that work, usually in concert with other groups trapped in those same slums. That's adaptation, not assimilation. I can't imagine that Hezbollah has been unchanged by so much of its base moving to cities and having contact with Lebanon's other factions. Muqtada al-Sadr's movement will be very different 20 years from now, but the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad will hamper that evolution. Bolivia has gone from the rural, xenophobic country where Che died from lack of support to the leading edge of modern radicalism - not Evo Morales, but the broad-based anarchist Indian movement that arose in the slums that considers Evo to be an Uncle Tom.
Somewhere in the cauldron of urbanization and technology will come movements that will be judged on their ability to bring objective improvement in living conditions. They will certainly not look anything like American corporate capitalism, nor like the Taliban. Those are already both religions, hiding from a present that they do not understand.
Wow, say anything against the Paul dynasty and suddenly you're a Commie.
Health care: if free markets work so well in health care, then why has every civilized country abandoned them? I mean, every one. And every one is spending a smaller % of GNP on health care, and almost every one has a longer life expectancy than the United States. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Costa Rica are following Switzerland in making health care a right, not a market reward. Ask Switzerland how it did it without "serving to glut and bloat" Bern.
As for Rand ending the empire, he also wants to take America back to the 1800s. In the 1800s, churches censored books, ranchers held the power of kings over Mexican serfs, corporations used hired thugs and a bought & paid-for National Guard to slaughter striking workers, immigrant women burned to death in unsafe factories, the Five Corners of Manhattan were as bad as any slum in modern India, and a terrorist organization ruled the South, lynching blacks but sometimes also persecuting labor organizers for its wealthy sponsors. Rand keeps claiming the free market will make everything wonderful. Didn't we have a free market back then?
And dirty little secret: where did the capital to build America's railroads and industries come from? Mostly the British empire, otherwise known as the world's biggest drug cartel. So much for our self-sufficiency.
Pons Seclorum: Note that Mexico has a right-wing, pro-free enterprise government. Are you willing to have us denounce Mexico's immigration policies if it means the country falls into the hands of the Socialists, or worse, the scary Zapatistas who dare to point out the collapse in the living standards of the Mexican poor since "market-based reforms"?
redneckdago: Plenty of small businessmen supported the New Deal. Their ethnic groups were crowded into ghettoes with no hope of improvement, their savings accounts were wiped out by frequent collapses of unregulated banks, and well, they had a certain sense of decency that was offended by someone like Herbert Hoover, who before becoming President said that "If you haven't made a million dollars by the time you're 30, you're not much of a man."
The following 25 years were the greatest explosion of economic growth our country has ever seen. Those small businessmen did very well for themselves, as did the rich and every other class. Adjusting for inflation, wages are now lower than they were when Reagan took office. Where has that left small businessmen? The capitalist pimp rag The Economist admitted two years ago that America has less class mobility than much of Europe, and that its small business sector is now a smaller part of the national economy than France's.
But of course, the solution to every failure is to go even further to the Right, where our infallible sacred traditions lie. Just what they used to say in the Spanish Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
Every private-sector TV commercial you've ever seen is a meta-commercial for corporate rule. They have spent your entire life telling you that they have all the answers, that they are the ones who care about you, that they will make your life easy and protect you from all dangers.
We need to guard against namecalling such as "Stalinist" or "Nazi", even if specific policies are exactly the same as those used in those societies. It becomes the same as calling Obama a Stalinist or Nazi because those societies had some form of universal health care though dozens of democracies have universal health care. The ultimate goal of Israel is not the same as the USSR or 3rd Reich. What is chilling is that the ultimate goal of Israel is the same as the United States of America in 1776: to steal land from natives too obscure to possess sovereign status, and deform them until they can never recover it. There are a long line of colonist societies that have had similar agendas. Canada, Australia and New Zealand have also essentially gotten away with it. Rhodesia and French Algeria did not. South Africa - well, a tiny white minority still has all the money.
The US and Israel are reflections of each other, American settler crimes justified by reference to a "Promised Land", Israeli crimes justified by the success of the American crimes, American neo-cons using Israel to dehumanize Arabs to justify an American colony in Iraq, ad nauseum. You could argue that the US and Israel are the only two right-wing countries remaining in the advanced world. The settler mentality - God & me against the earth. Two black holes of insatiable greed, trapped in each other's orbit, spiraling inwards towards... merger? Collision?
© 2025 All Rights Reserved
I would love to see the US start losing these competitions on a regular basis.
It's the dilemma of an empire trying to hold onto the status quo. It doesn't dare sell its best stuff to anyone anywhere in the world that it might one day have to fight, while more modest great powers are free to sell their best stuff outside their sphere of influence.
In Bachmann's world, America is the only important country, Europe was important until it betrayed God's Covenant With The White Man, and Asia, South America and Africa are and will always be backward worthless places until our missionaries convert them to Pentecostalism. Ergo, India and China are not important, much less the future.
Just try and get a Tea Partier to accept that a massive shift in economic power is going on in the world and that it's towards countries that resisted US control, not its crashed lackeys in Rumsfeld's "New Europe" or some Pentecostal-infested madhouse like gay-bashing Uganda. They have no idea that modern megalopolises are appearing overnight in the deserts of Western China, or that we've already lost control of Central Asian fossil fuels to the SCO, or that Brazil stood up for Iran. They just can't accept that anything occurs until Fox tells them how it vindicates American values.
We're living in a nation of ingrates. In 1932, 1992, and 2008 Democrats had to wade in to clean up a mess Republicans and their capitalism created. Note that in the '94 Democratic wipeout, the recovery had already begun. So Americans will vote out liberals because they don't have enough money, but they will also vote out liberals because they have money again and the first thing they want is a return to the same greedonomics that led to the last crash. Since America is in long-term decline and wages have been flat for the 30 years of the Reagan ideological dominance, voters always feel that they have been cheated, but that means they view the extravagance of the last bubble as the closest they've come to getting what they deserve, instead of the very condition that caused the subsequent crash. Which favors the GOP.
At least until there aren't enough white voters left to keep this particular game going.
The answer from this American is "yes". As the white population gets squeezed closer and closer to minority status, a larger and larger proportion of it goes crazy and looks for a way to turn back the clock. Imagine the kind of people who seized control of South Africa in 1948. It will be a 40-year fight between them and the demographic victors, who have a more "European" attitude about the military and social spending despite not being ethnically European at all.
But if the bad guys make their move via theft, coup or secession, what will you Europeans do to stop them? You would do us a great favor by kicking us out of NATO and creating a single military restored to your own control. But ultimately, you're going to have to create resistance to America's true masters, the multinational corporations, and run the bastards off of your supermarket shelves, your commercial TV, and all the other places where they infiltrate and conquer. That will be supremely difficult, as anyone who has ever tried to organize a boycott of even one of them has discovered.
Unless the above steps are completed, you will find that if a right-wing putsch happens in Washington your own elected leaders will not lift a finger to oppose or sanction it, and then we're stuck with a multigenerational race war.
"The Keynesian pump-priming of the 1930s prolonged the depression by crowding out private savings."
Excuse me, but that's ridiculous. In January 1933 the Depression had gone on for 3 1/4 years with no signs of recovery. People had panicked and stopped spending, so there should have been plenty of private savings. However, in that month the banks were collapsing like crazy. In fact, Americans were spending increasing percentages of GNP on debt service because their wages were too small to get ahead of their debts. No one trusted the banks with their savings anyway, so there was no way savings could get to businesses. Classical economics couldn't explain this because it held as gospel that the velocity of money is constant, which it obviously wasn't. If the velocity reaches zero, then nothing else matters.
Classical economics is crap. Wages can fall below starvation levels, and even then markets do not always clear.
Declining empires have gone crazy on nostalgia before. See Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy" for some past examples.
So now that we have blown the chance for America to rationally retrench from being an unsustainable superpower to a more natural stance as a great power, what will become of us? History says we will either lose a war and lose everything, or win a war by becoming an ally of a rising power, and end up as its satellite. But the US hardly has any allies left whose citizens agree with being our allies. As the American decline continues, the witchhunting will intensify at home and abroad. The goal of the Right: to find the scapegoat whose eradication will require permanent martial law.
A slave ship is a good metaphor. This article horrified me, because I predicted 20 years ago that privatized prison labor might be used to bring back race-based slavery in the United States.
Note that while the Tea Partiers assume that illegals will be quickly shipped back to Mexico once caught, this article shows the private prisons have a vested interest in caging them for as long as possible. If they can get the right to use them for forced labor, then in effect the prison corporations will be stealing the very same jobs that we accuse the illegals of stealing. Difference: illegals make free-market deals with small businessmen and help to lower their bottom line, while the prison corporations will make bulk deliveries to big corporations. You might remember how it worked with I. G. Farben in Schindler's List.
At which point, the prison corps will be making so much money that they will throw their lobbying money into the creation of new crimes, both in the state legislature and in state referendums. Now what is more likely to be made a prison offence - selling subprime mortgages, or playing loud rap music?
The more colored folks you find an excuse to turn into prison slave labor, the fewer who can vote. The more outrageous the laws that can be passed against them. If they take up arms against this obvious white conspiracy, then we will need concentration camps, won't we?
Except for one little thing, PRS. Massive debt also caused the 1929 Crash, and after 4 years of trying to balance the budget and cut taxes which only worsened conditions, we turned to massive government intervention and debt and brought the country back from the brink of justified revolution. Even the FDR-haters who claim that only WW2 saved America forget that FDR financed WW2 with staggering debt and taxes. The War was the most successful government jobs program in history.
That's because private and state debt have different effects. When private debt defaults, it makes everybody too scared to spend or invest and the deflation never ends. If a state prints too much currency, it leads to inflation, but the effects of inflation are preferable to 30% unemployment. Proof: the German hyperinflation of 1923 versus the German branch of the Great Depression of 1933. Democracy survived the former, not the latter. And American democracy came much closer to the brink under Hoover than our schools dare teach.
I'll buy that the day that the corporate media covers giant anti-war and pro-healthcare rallies with the same cheerleading enthusiasm they reserve for the Tea Parties.
The proof that you're right - when it was the British who were on top and occupying 1/3 of the Earth's land area including Iraq, they never bothered to investigate what their troops were doing and why. They are much more willing to uncover negative truths about post-imperial military missions that promise them no profit, annoying moral obligations from Washington or the UN.
It's the compusion to stay on top and hold onto conquests that makes proper oversight and adherence to international law appear like treason. The more we sense our empire is declining the less we admit it and the more we persecute anyone who points it out. We're as irrational as the shrunken Daffy Duck holding on to one last gemstone in the cartoon "Ali Baba Bunny": "Mine! Mine! Mine!"
When the US military relentlessly propagandizes its troops by only running Fox News on public area TVs (soldiers don't have a lot of private areas), it is providing both a service to Mr. Murdoch, and troops collectively indoctrinated into a paranoid world view who will not question orders. Do you think that this relationship has no effect on the military's preferences for which news channel to leak scoops to, or on Fox's willingness to report bad news about the military? I mean, where has Fox been during the Air Force Academy scandal uncovered by the MRFF?
I think the whole point of teaching Civics in the '50s and '60s was to propagandize for one culture and one political mainstream ideology, insinuating that they are superior to all other lands'. When minorities and activists got public schools to present a more complex view, it added to conservatives' grievances over their loss of moral monopoly. Apparently civil society was never meant to be shared.
Muhammad Ali needs to give Mr. Williams a talking-to.
30 years ago, I used to see a public service ad that involved interviewing kids about how they would react to being called a racist name. One little boy concluded the ad by saying, "I would tell God, I would tell my Dad... and I would tell Muhammad Ali."
Do second-generation immigrants assimilate, or do they create a new synthesis?
Consider the vast unrecorded revolution that Jews, Italians, and Irishmen helped bring about from the rural, reactionary WASP America of 1870 to the urban, progressive America of 1932, first cultural, then political. Before 1900 most Americans were rural, their favorite entertainment was minstrel shows (!), they only had a few novelists and artists of note, most children were essentially taught using the Protestant Bible, and all manner of bigotry, casteism, and class abuse went unresisted. By 1929 everything had changed because of immigrant-infested New York and Hollywood.
America became a world cultural leader via new art and communication forms - Hollywood built by Jews, jazz created by Blacks unleashed on Chicago and St. Louis, mass newspapers designed by Hearst to sell in the ghettoes. While white longhairs like Ives bemoaned the lack of authentically American art forms, George Gershwin was listening to the music of a dozen peoples in the streets and creating synthesis. Immigrant kids were learning English all right - from Black jazz musicians and Communist newspapers.
Prohibition was actually a WASP attempt to crush the "differentness" of supposedly alcoholic European ethnics. So was the execution of Saccho and Vanzetti, and the deranged extolling of unlimited capitalism via WASPy Wall Street. When it all collapsed in 1929, a new American polity formed around ethnics and union labor. The new culture already had already won in the streets; it was time to accept the new America in the halls of power as the solution for problems, not the cause.
America needs it to happen again. And Europe does too.
What if they educated themselves by going to some Green Party seminars and learned that the Western way of life is ecologically unsustainable?
Meanwhile, how much are you checking to make sure that every white carpetbagger who moves to Tokyo or Shanghai is "assimilating" into the local culture? Or do I still smell the faint stench of extraterritoriality?
In fact, many small, dangerous Chinese mines are independently owned, and supposedly some are outlaw operations. Their government makes a show of shutting down small mines after these disasters. I guess if there were big private mining corporations in China, they would simply use their lobbyists to corrupt any safety regulations the way they do here in America.
After two world wars are fought on American soil, I expect the survivors will be much more careful about who they give power to. Assuming, of course, that there's any soil left.
I so, so wish this were true. I keep looking for the proof that Europeans were ready to make the sacrifices needed to throw off US hegemony. But Europe is ultimately capitalist. Who is propping up the US? The Chinese and Arabs have objective reasons to prop up the US $. Yet it seems to be getting a lot of help and cover from all the banks, corporate media and investors all over the capitalist world. And Europeans are used to letting their countries' foreign policies be controlled by a ministerial elite, which in turn defers to NATO, which in turn is run from the Pentagon.
If you got a debate going about a unified European military, a lot of voters would be forced to consider matters they would rather not. Like whether US doctrines of power are completely obsolete scams. Like whether France's small nuclear arsenal is in fact plenty to deter a state-launched attack on all of Europe. Like whether Western troops actually are needed to ensure trade flows - as opposed to hegemonic profits from same. Look at Japan, after all.
It would be best if a democractic, socialist European superpower stood in stark contrast to America's creaking global war machine. Instead, the truly independent corporate empires like China will move into the power vacuum of American decline and senility. The world has gotten too complicated for democracy to have a say.
I don't think they're so much like zombies as they are like the people of the slave states circa 1859. They know they will lose the numbers game to the non-white hordes unless democracy is terminated, and it would take extreme acts to create the conditions that would enable this. So they stand there in a mob and try to provoke each other into lighting the cannon pointed at Fort Sumter by escalating lies about how awful their lives will be if someone doesn't do it. I've read the newspaper editorials from the South in 1860 and they're just appalling, truly Goebbels-esque.
Now note that this game was also being played during the fight against the Civil Rights Movement - if we don't stop Dr. King, surely the Reds will win. So we have to look at their personal risk/reward calculations in 1860, 1960 and today. To put it bluntly, in 1960 it made sense to accept sharing a fast-growing pie in a sound economy. Are we now at the point where instead we expect there to be less to go around, so we look to push each other out of the lifeboat?
The article says 1.9 million homes. The average US home uses about 1 kw continuous, so the total power is only 1,900 MW. Even offshore turbines don't make 100% of rated capacity, so it's reasonable.
That is an outstanding analogy. I think it needs to be explained to people across the political spectrum, from people like Chomsky on the left who assume that America must be the master villain because it's the bigger capitalist power, to people on the right who see Jewish conspiracies everywhere. Being dragged around by your own satellite is not unusual. In 1973 the USSR and USA were almost dragged by their Mideast allies into a war they didn't dare allow. In 1968 candidate Nixon connived with South Vietnamese dictator Thieu to sabotage LBJ's peace talks and keep the war going, which is treason by the way. The relationship between great powers and satellites is complicated, unless the former's corporations have penetrated the latter and completely dominate it. Solution: no permanent alliances or interests.
The question is not whether she was a witch, but whether she now believes witches must be blacklisted, bullied, disenfranchised or burned.
Hitler was afraid that das Heer (the Army) would not commit enough atrocities in Russia, so before the invasion he lined up its generals and made them swear they would throw out the rules of conduct. He said, "I have a feudalist Army, a monarchist Navy, and a National Socialist Air Force", which shows that even in supposedly totalitarian states, the ruler is wrestling with factions and entrenched culture.
However, it was dangerous for the US to exaggerate this distinction to exculpate the Army (the term Wehrmacht refers to the entirety of the armed forces, which did include the Waffen SS). I read that it annoyed the hell out of the British that we were so infatuated with Rommel and built up the myth of his anti-Nazism. Even Colonel von Stauffenburg, the man who bravely led the last attempt to kill and overthrow Hitler, was a reactionary aristocrat who expected that the Allies would at least let Germany keep Poland.
Recall that Patton wanted to win quickly, then ally with the Nazis to treacherously invade Russia again. I suggest that many near-fascists were in our Army high command at the time, as they were in business and the State Department, and they pushed the myth of a good Army merely following orders because they had their own plans for Germany. But luckily our country also created and staffed the Nuremburg tribunals, which showed why an army must be held morally responsible for the orders it obeys. Maybe Iott should be made to wear his uniform at a re-enactment of one of those postwar trials of German war criminals to commemorate a real American achievement that has been undone by our growing imperialism.
You're right, dimsum, that the country's probably screwed anyway, but how it's screwed is the difference between a long, boring decline and a second Civil War. If a reactionary movement just makes up history wholesale to depict all progressives as evil or even led by the Antichrist, and the corporate media lets it get away with it, it's beginning to smell a lot like Weimar.
By the way - the ONLY US political party to call for an end to Jim Crow before World War II? The Communist Worker's Party. That's the real Left.
A society based on the Old Testament, unlimited private property and gun rights, militias, extreme restrictions on government power, and the infinite inequality of the races was LEFTist?
You don't know a damn thing about what the Left was about. Parties can change their position in the political spectrum just like corporations change their product line. The KKK endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964 - where they Leftists? Goldwater was the godfather of modern conservatism and shared their opposition to civil rights.
What happened was that blacks switched parties quickly in 1960 and 1964 due to Kennedy's implied support for civil rights legislation, and THEN racist Democrats switched parties. Read any respectable history of voting patterns in the last half-century - which states switched parties? Practically every white Southern racist switched from the Democrats to the GOP, including Senator Strom Thurmond, whom Republican minority leader Trent Lott praised as having had the right ideas. That was entirely about revenge against blacks and the Democratic Party.
I dare you to Google black Republican Jackie Robinson's account of his terrifying experience at the Goldwater-dominated 1964 GOP convention, which he compared to a Nazi rally. The moderate liberal GOP you talk about was murdered by Goldwater, Reagan, the Bushes and the Christian neo-Confederate Right. It's as dead as the 91% top income tax rate supported by the old GOP.
Or are you saying the 95% of blacks who voted Democratic are right-wing white supremacists?
And to add to your point: Why did Germany have to fight against such long odds? Because their blatant militarism scared their neighbors into eventually uniting against them. What good does it do to have the best weapons if you terrify the entire human race into opposing you?
Which leaves America in an interesting position today.
I'm not neglecting it. Bombing was part of blitzkreig. And it's part of the lie of sanitary warfare that the US crams down everybody's throats. Now do you wish to continue this pissing contest over which of us is more anti-war or will you explain to laymen the implications of my comments about the uselessness of this approach to war? It DOESN'T PRODUCE VICTORY! That's all the masses care about, and they have to understand what's actually going on in modern warfare.
They wrote the book on modern war pre-1973. The combo of Vietnam and the near-defeat of Israeli tanks by Egyptian anti-tank weapons signaled the end of an era, but the military industrial complex will not admit it. The first Iraq war is extolled as exemplary, but the 2nd Iraq war is the reality of modern war even more than Afghanistan - a dirty struggle of assassins, informers, and suicide bombers.
The appeal of the blitzkreig is the appeal of the military industrial complex - the selling of clean civilian-free wars, especially by a richer, more technologically advanced white country over large hordes of backward peasants. The peasants have figured out that such countries are horrible at occupations and bide their time for revenge. Now that the 1st world capitalists have already shipped all manufacturing overseas, the means for us to carry out such wars against any sort of important country is a myth, while God knows what robotic monstrosities China's assembly lines will crank out by the millions in the future.
What has changed about Germany is that right-wing extremists no longer have a built-in advantage over left-wing extremists in being seen as more "genuine" or patriotic Germans, or more moral and Christian, or more in touch with a sacred past. The World Wars changed that about a lot of societies, but the USA got off too easy to get the message.
Jimmy Carter is a Southern Baptist.
Would you say that he is therefore part of the militant Christian Zionist conspiracy that has dominated Southern Baptism?
And Harry Reid is a Mormon. But he's also a Democrat. Most of his fellow Mormons probably wish he was dead.
You can tell which persons put theocracy ahead of democracy. In the case of Jewish Americans, it's very easy to tell. But all this Jew-bashing makes it easy to avoid the responsibility of America's white conservative ownership class that controls the shares in the firms headed by Jews.
Face it, we're in a class war, the same class war we were in when all our Russian Jews were living in urban ghettoes. They did what they had to do to get hired out of the ghetto, but who owned the banks and factories and oil fields then, and how rich are their great-grandchildren still?
Trying to fantasize that there's a "good" capitalism of steel mills and weapons factories run by conservative Gentiles and a "bad" capitalism of movie studios and banks run by liberal Jews is a hallmark of Fascist thought. It's all one racket, and it has no loyalty to ordinary Americans at all. You should worry about how much economic power they've already transferred to new host bodies like China.
I would like to stand up for the ability of my people, the white Protestants, to control media, corrupt banks, and oppress minorities. We have been unfairly ignored in these capacities. Everyone talks about the Jews controlling Hollywood. But who owns the studios? Warner is owned by Time, the spawn of Henry Luce. Disney was created by an anti-Semite. NBC Universal is owned by WASPy General Electric. Fox is, well, Fox. They all have shareholders, reaching into the pension funds of every corporation in the US. The megaWASP US car industry, spawn of Hitler-loving Ford, got its bailout along with the finance industry. As for the Jewish bankers, Goldman Sachs and all the other banksters are in an alliance with every corrupt debt pimp in every goyim subdivision from Maine to San Diego, with redneck car dealers, with Sunbelt defense contractors, with Jew-free Big Oil. Is every Jew selling life insurance, or medical or home insurance that never pays when you really need it, or shipping jobs to China, or trucking in illegals to work in their sweatshops? No, it is the good Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians who do the hard work of cheating ordinary Americans of all faiths in the name of the God of Greed. And capitalism ultimately lives on the certainty that all these bastards can order the government and its peckerwood army to gun down anyone who takes a stand against it - at home and abroad. Give the Zionists points for seeing that the sick neoconservative movement started by Scoop Jackson and Jeane Kirkpatrick was a useful way of melding American and Israeli militarism into a crusade against the entire rest of the human race, but those Zionists speak for fewer and fewer American Jews every year. In fact, as talk2action.org has shown, the Zionists now seem to be looking at inviting deranged Baptist gun nuts to emigrate to Israel to do what even Israeli Jews lack the stomach to do. If you want genocide done right, my kin from Tennessee and Texas are still the best America has to offer.
In an ideal world you might be right, but this is about defeating an insane movement by pointing out its illogic, which sound like fair game to me. Hiding in the dark corners of the right-wing mind is the nostalgia for a past America of monoculturalism and monoethnicity, where parents would sacrifice for the future because their kids were guaranteed to grow up as their clones and thus validate their values. O'Donnell's life is a dissonant reminder that this just doesn't happen anymore.
While a certain faction of the Christian Right loves converts and captured seekers like O'Donnell as proof of the supremacy of their cult in the cultural marketplace, I bet the rest don't really want these tokens to govern. They'll jump up and down to cheer on an ex-Moslem convert as a spokesman, but would they ever let him head the denomination? Black conservatives played much the same role in right-wing ideology, but look at how poorly Michael Steele is treated now that he's running the RNC instead of generating soundbite insulation against charges of GOP racism. Since 2008 you hardly see Bush-era black spokestokens in the media, because the Tea Party doesn't trust them. They probably won't vote for a Mormon or a Jew either. Reformed WASP drunks like G. W. Bush, another matter.
Along the lines of my previous post about people wanting to obey religion, not understand it, here is a link to an article about sex-scandal-plagued "Bishop" Eddie Long and the enormous change he's made to Protestantism that the media is too dumb to investigate:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/9/29/234537/872/Front_Page/Eddie_Long_Has_Apostolic_Authority_Over_79_Churches_in_Georgia_and_More_Nationwide
The key to the article is that Long overthrew the right of his congregation to overrule him, then convinced other church leaders to do the same, then elevated himself over all those churches as a bishop, with all authority flowing downward and all money flowing up. Yet he has contacts with white Pentecostal extremists who have recommended exactly this strategy as a pyramid-scheme march to global conquest. The term is "steeplejacking".
Bishops? For this to happen in Baptism is shocking, but it is truly a total reversal of the populist spirit of Pentecostalism. What is left is the desire to surrender rational comprehension of the rules and intent of religion in exchange for a delirium of mass obedience.
Why do they get away with it? It appears many Americans want a new authority in their life to replace the messy democracy they must share with people different than themselves, and which they so easily sell out to their bosses' agendas.
When I first started taking political science courses I had to do a paper on a 1980 Texas voter survey, which startlingly showed Texans on average far more liberal than their hero Ronald Reagan. Now I see parents begging Christian extremists to "educate" their children when they're not even a part of their religion.
I wonder if what I'm seeing is the desire for a faith-driven strongman to keep order, because we know ourselves to be too ignorant and lazy to take care of it ourselves, even if we don't agree with the strongman's policies. Of course, the faith in greed seems to motivate voters to put businessmen in office, on the assumption that the rich guy must have some ability that we lack. I've also noticed that people who defend teaching Creationism in schools don't talk about the merits of the ideology, but instead express fear about "out of control" kids. In other words, we need our schools to break our children's will with the myth of the all-powerful Big Daddy Jehovah.
And the more complex and diverse our society becomes, the more we want someone else to do the dirty work of keeping order and protecting our selfish interests at the expense of others.
We damn well shouldn't destroy secular nationalism if we don't want theocracy to come roaring back as its replacement. Say what you want about the Treaty of Westphalia, but the seemingly invincible absolute kings it appeared to create were giving way to parliaments and republics in the next century. Reason? A secular state must justify its existence on practical realities, including the power of ethnic solidarity as a tool for building a better society. If people give up on that idea, it's back to religion, which never has to justify anything with facts or data. And that is a catastrophe in a world of fundamentalist monotheism, whose logic is that all problems can only be solved by the elimination of all other religions.
The problem is, even if the GOP achieves less than Gingrich did in '94, it will still paralyze the nation. In '94 this meant that when the bubble economy grew no one had the guts to stand up to Reaganite dogma and preserve the regulatory framework erected after the '29 crash, which we have been paying for all decade. But to have the nation paralyzed now is far more destructive, because there isn't even an equivalent to the tech boom to at least get the country back to some real growth.
This won't matter to the corporations that fund the GOP, because they have already abandoned loyalty to their country. They can finance extremists to squeeze more war contracts and tax cuts out of the citizens, lure them into running up more debt on smaller wages, while they transfer their real assets to Asia where more responsible governments are investing in an educated workforce who will become our replacements as consumers. GM sells more cars in China than it does in the US; where does its ultimate loyalty lie? "Pump and dump" can be done with entire countries.
The panic of white reactionaries will not recognize capitalism "being itself" as the cause of this accelerating decline. It will turn on Mexicans, blacks, gays, witches, labor organizers, anyone it associates with the liberal perversions of the 20th century. They will rule the midterms and undo any good the poor and non-white try to do at presidential elections - literally a civil war with battles 2 years apart. Democrats no longer have unions or working-class neighborhoods to organize the progressives as in 1932, and if they tried to do so their own corporate sponsors would cut them off and move to China even faster.
The demographic trends say that eventually there will be too few whites to even control midterms. But the renewed screams for secession, nullification, and the repeal of the 13th and 14th Amendments indicate that there will be one more great showdown, where the right will attempt to use some crisis to throw minorities off the voter rolls forever. We've done it before in this country and it was done in South Africa in 1948 and it may happen in Israel even sooner.
At that point, the number of citizens on each side will not matter, only the number willing to fight and die for their irreconcilable definitions of a just society.
The answer: transmissions break.
I'm always on the lookout for wind turbine designs that don't require transmissions, but it's hard to otherwise obtain the high RPM that generators require for efficiency.
The good news that isn't being considered here, though, is that all this repair work will have to be done by locals, while the fuels we rely on represent very little labor and a whole lot of corporate and landowner property rights, which simply feed into the upper classes and their self-destructing financial bubbles. Renewable energy is labor-intensive, and Americans have been taught for decades that labor-intensive is evil - because labor is evil. This kind of thinking was used to make us welcome outsourcing, until our remaining jobs no longer paid the wages necessary to pay for the goods our bosses were selling us.
It might not be a bad thing if our children grew up in a world where they knew good jobs existed specifically due to the need to build energy-producing devices and keep them running, instead of hoping that their relentless consumption would keep banks feeding dollars into a mysterious shadow economy of exotic investments that somehow keeps small crews here and abroad sucking hydrocarbons out of the earth. Literally, destroying one surplus in order to destroy another surplus.
Since Ontari0 is connected to the grid of the northeastern US, any extra power it can generate can be exported. The NE is a bottomless pit for energy, and the US could help itself in many ways by shutting down more of its coal mines.
However, Canadians should not assume that hydropower is all that is needed. Any dam that is built on a river supplied by snow melt during the warm months may be at risk from climate change. Take a look at the Colorado River in recent years. There is great concern that the rivers supplied by the Himalayas, on which countless millions in India and China depend on, will be disrupted as snow is replaced by rain that quickly evaporates instead of getting stored up.
The problem with the Tea Party/Christian extremist alliance is that they literally don't think that the economy consists of anything other than what white Christian Red-State American conservatives are good at. In their universe, every failure of capitalism is shoved off on those Jewish-named bankers in evil New York, while its every accomplishment is due to "real" Americans in the heartland pimping McMansions and SUVs, as if it isn't the unregulated success of the latter that leads to the rise of corporate oligopolies and financial speculation and market crashes and Depressions.
This is also a characteristic of fascism. An artificial division is made between "good" capitalists - death merchants like Krupp and I. G. Farben, and "Jew" capitalists who use movies and banking to corrupt the warrior spirit of the white race. What are the policy implications of a capitalism that only asks the "real" citizens to arm up, steal resources from other races in other lands, and then preside over labor camps and sweatshops? It means that the real work done by Mexicans repairing our roads and building our homes, the people in China building all our consumer goods, the engineers in China and India who design everything from computers to DNA sequences, can all be denigrated, while implicitly our kind have a right to point nukes at all of them and demand that they keep bailing out our currency because we're the guardians of free enterprise and thus deserve to make a living off of them.
O'Donnell didn't grow up in the '70s either. Watch the video of her admission to Bill Maher - she's quite young. So after witchcraft, she became an anti-masturbation crusader and rode that (excuse me) to electoral politics, re-made her appearance into a copy of Sarah Palin and got nominated to be a Senator by the GOP.
Is that the reigning example of meritocracy and hard work and implied superior Caucasian intelligence that the Right says will rebuild America's globe-sucking empire?
The Palin video is important because of the people giving the blessings - leaders in an outlaw Pentecostal movement called the New Apostolic Reformation who were her key support group until she was nominated as McCain's running mate.
See more at http://www.talk2action.org, which has links on its main page to part of its coverage of this sprawling network of theocrats, witch-hunters, and Catholic-bashers. Put it this way, Palin has fewer than 6 degrees of separation from the bill to execute gays in Uganda. This network also puts out videos documenting its exorcisms of entire regions against the demon known as the "Queen of Heaven" (the Virgin Mary), taking credit for causing Mother Teresa's death, and driving witches out of villages and praying for them to have accidents. The NAR believes that everyone who disagrees with it, even other Christians, is under demonic influence, and that one day its members will take over all governments, corporations, and wealth worldwide.
Palin's personal connection is Mary Glazier, a NAR leader who was a secretary for the Alaska Independence Party - which Todd Palin was a member of. Glazier recruited Palin into both the NAR and politics. She also "prophesized" that McCain would die in office and leave Palin as president. The NAR is obsessed with the idea of Alaska becoming a stronghold in the holy war to come.
Your understanding is based on what? Pro-American news sources? Because as we all know all democracies LOVE America! It can never be otherwise!
Have you ever considered the idea that the Turkish people are MORE anti-American than Erdogan and he's holding them back?
It's not just that. The Christian Right is out to destroy every secular institution that has in any way eroded the power of the Medieval church: public education, public health, unions, the separation of church and state and the establishment of secular law over clerical law. It has embraced near-unlimited property rights and economic inequality. It has abandoned any opposition to war. What do these measures point to? A populace reduced to the status of debt peons to corporations that function as a new nobility, while the president is only called "commander-in-chief", a tribal war chief whose only power is to kill foreign babies rather than feed our own. We know what role the church plays in such a society; the dispossessed throw themselves on its mercy and are indoctrinated against revolution, and it pretends to soften the abuses of the landlords when it is itself one of the biggest landlords. I'm not just describing Medieval Europe, but in parts the church of Catholic Fascism, that of Chile and Guatemala, and that of rural 19th Century United States.
Erdogan: less oil, better strategic position. Turkey is a relatively middle-class country; the issue is not starvation like it was for the masses in neoliberal Latin America in the '90s, but whether ordinarily religious people can have their beliefs used against them as an excuse to preserve an undemocratic elite. I think of Erdogan as being more like JFK, who struggled to prove that his faith - and that of many working-class Democrats - did not make him un-American in 1960, and succeeded so well that such fantasies have hardly been uttered since. Of course, that doesn't mean that many of the Catholic benefiaries of that breakthrough have been friends to the poor or non-white in subsequent years, nor will the beneficiaries of the AKP be assumed to support economic justice or minority rights. But it raises the standards.
Where it figures into the larger world is that increasingly we see labor beginning to organize in China and neighboring countries, we see gay rights become the norm in most of Catholic Europe, we see all sorts of social progress as countries pass up America left and further left. Turkey is one of those many countries, all of them increasingly aware of each other's progress - and America's backsliding. America is now what the Ottomans were, overarmed and underbrained and too obsessed with past glories to heed the warnings of concerned persons abroad as we roll happily down the wagon ruts to the canyon.
Michael Scheuer's book "Imperial Hubris" seemed to me to be saying that bin Laden primarily intended his movement to inspire Moslems to defend their own countries, that he expected it would take many decades to turn back the tide of Western domination, and that bin Laden himself did not expect to live to see that victory or obtain a position of power. It's easy to ascribe every evil or insult to the guy, but he seems to have read the nature of the American empire pretty well and has set the wheels turning on its demise at the hands of others. And he has reason to think that his rinky-dink activities in the past finished off the USSR - at least as much as people who credit it to Ronald Reagan.
So that leaves us with two questions:
1. what right does the West, and America, really have to dominate the world when we run it so badly?
2. why can't the Moslems get a better deal from a Chinese-dominated future than the global mess that has resulted from 60 years of the US trying to impose the contradictions of the Saud dynasty and Israel on the Middle East? The Chinese would not have been so stupid, because they're too cynical to let sentiment (Israel) or ignorance (the Sauds) dictate their interventions.
Like John Brown, bin Laden might get the last laugh on all of us.
Why is Pakistan different than Haiti?
Is our charity only extended to those who might otherwise wash up on Florida shores and become a tax burden? Pragmatic of us, but hardly noble, and our aid to Haiti won't begin to solve its systemic problems anyway.
Do we subconsciously feel that Pakistanis deserve to suffer for defying us? Americans are at that dangerous point where they've heard just enough about a country to recognize that some of its people and institutions are defiant, but they haven't learned nearly enough to understand the context of that defiance.
Or is it maybe that we sense Pakistan really is too big to deal with? A nuclear-armed, semi-Islamist army on top, highly corrupt and parochial political parties in between, a vast sea of terribly poor people below, meaning we can't easily coerce them, or cheaply bribe them, or use our media power to appoint a white knight to make democracy suddenly work the way we want it to.
Here's the test; if we were polled on having the option of the status quo of poking and prodding overwhelmed Pakistani leaders, and just getting out of the region and dumping Pakistan in the laps of Beijing and Moscow and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, how would we vote?
Lincoln could not conciliate with the rebels until he had defeated them. Problem is, the American people can't look on a phalanx of white, Christian, apparently middle-class bigots as rebels who need defeating when it's so much easier to join with them to damn Moslems and Chinese and Venezuelans and Mexicans and blacks as the rebels who need defeating via the militarization of our society. That is why there is so much fear and uncertainty in our country today. No one can agree on who the real enemy is, and we're too lazy and cowardly and broke to beat them anyway.
Yours is an excellent analysis. Many people have noted a relationship between ethnic homogeniety and support for welfare and redistribution. Because in the long run the poor must do their part by using their benefits wisely, which they may be more likely to do if the rich don't view them as an inferior alien race who they will never hire anyway. This was the way it was in the old Scandinavia, but the consensus fell apart once there was an immigrant population. For America that tribal brotherhood could only be induced artificially by WW2 and the Cold War. Liberals paid a price for using those struggles to make the argument, "We must do these things for minorities and the poor or they won't be loyal to us against the Nazis and Reds". Because once the Cold War was over, it was time for the rich to party consequence-free, and they're still doing it. No one really believes that blacks or Latinos will switch over to al-Qaeda nor must they comply with a draft, so the War on Terror has simply upped the self-righteousness of the "good" Americans who obviously merited their vast war bonanza.
The trick is that it takes time for tax hikes to kick in. The top tax rate was hiked up, I think, to 63% in the late '30s, and at the start of the war it went up to 91%. There was a temporary hike to 94% during the war. However, FDR's redistribution went far beyond taxes. The war created full employment, but for once the war machine was on the side of the workers, who got better wages with less gender and race discrimination than ever before seen in new government-sponsored factories. Also, much of the war was financed by selling billions in war bonds to ordinary Americans at rather low interest rates. Note that Reagan's final chapter of the Cold War was financed in exactly the opposite way: tax cuts for the rich, high-interest rate t-bills sold to the rich and paid off with interest. I think that had a big effect.
The myth that Reagan created an economic miracle and defeated the Soviets by sacrificing the lazy, un-American poor is so deeply ingrained in our greedy souls that it can't be refuted with all the evidence in the world. I think that the only way a society learns it was wrong is by catastrophe. The three big catastrophes of the 20th Century, the world wars and the Depression, shocked Europe out of its belief in a divinely-ordained class order that overrides democracy. But America really only suffered one of those, and the lesson was not taught deeply enough to create more than the one generation that swore to remember, and the thin layer of financial regulations to prevent it recurring. When that generation died out, so did the regulations. Instead, the plutocrats have prepared by creating what their 1929 predecessors didn't have, a media machine so pervasive and seductive that people vote against their interests and evidence. The solution to every problem is further to the Right, always rightward, always the certainty that if inequality grows, MY superior merit will finally be recognized over my lazy, worthless peers, and if things get bad enough, we will know who to throw out of the lifeboat.
It is the difference between what happened in America in 1933 - and what happened in Germany. I now believe white middle-class America would have to end up like Germany in 1945 to really change, and you know what that would mean.
What is the point of debating the merits of counter-insurgency strategy when the Chinese government is sitting on over a trillion dollars of foreign currency, and its business agents are swarming all over every continent looking to buy up every resource of value? When the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is the only hope for development in Central Asia while Wall Street freezes capital to help the Tea Partiers? When Chinese trade ministers are going to Havana right now to offer the people of Cuba a much better deal than our Mafia ever did? We might as well be Britons in Iraq in the 1920s, arguing strategies to legitimize a puppet king while our own country is being bound to Wall Street and our troops worldwide are preparing the way for Ford and Coca-Cola.
What good is strategy when it is blind to the largest realities in global power?
Well, they won't win the hearts of America's imminent non-white majority, that's for sure. But then the entire point of the venture, and why it will succeed for a while, is that "our enemies abroad" is a codeword for "everyone who refuses to obey us", at home or abroad. If November 2008 proved nothing else, it proved that white reactionaries have reason to feel embattled; that if minorities vote at all, they will vote for the guy further to the left, and that American conservatism has zero friends overseas where the future is being built. But those folks can't very well openly proclaim that, can they?
Nothing left to do but what the Afrikaners did in South Africa in 1948 when they knew blacks would be allowed to vote in future elections: scrape together one more temporary majority, storm into power and install a new order that would wall itself off from the world as necessary. In South Africa, the alien code-word was "Communism".
And that's why we seem angrier at Moslems than we were after 9/11.
If only we could make the overseas war total, then, finally we could wipe out the real enemy here at home. Isn't that how it always works? We just need for someone else to step forward first and say the hateful words, then we can rush to proclaim him as "grassroots" and "sincere" and drag the Overton window a few inches further right. Someone else has to say it first, because the rest of us who lust for war and conquest and curtailment of domestic rights also know in our hearts that it will involve sacrifice and we don't want to make any sacrifices. But if some guys in Florida double-dare our manhood, we can happily toss out our own common sense and charge over the cliff with them.
Over and over we are told by the right wing that if we slash taxes on the rich and everything in the government that goes to those worthlesss negroes (meaning not Social Security, Medicare or the increasingly white Southern war machine) there will be an economic miracle that will wipe out the deficit. Then when it fails to happen, the right claims it was betrayed by a president who was not extreme enough. That got us from Nixon to Reagan, Reagan to W, now W to some maniac to be named later.
Well, where is this miracle supposed to come from? Name the industry! No, we're supposed to blindly trust the Invisible Hand to magically come up with something new, because "entrepreneurs" are infallible. Well, the last boom was due to a lot of software engineers who needed work after the Cold War, and due to the giant financial bubble the capitalist class built around that tech boom supposedly being immortal. The big tech industry now is portable computing and communication, which is full of European and Asian companies and Apple, which uses outsourced labor. There is not a single nation-dominating new industry where we have an advantage over Asians. Not alternative energy, which many conservatives damn as a cultural affront even when it is privately financed. Not genetic engineering, because of our increasingly extreme religious faction. Not war, because that does not produce real economic resources anymore.
There isn't going to be another boom. The capitalists' plan is feudalism. All public goods will be sold cheaply to domestic Halliburtons to run the way it ran Iraq. "Entrepreneurs" my ass, the GOP's sponsors will all have guaranteed, no-risk revenue running your roads, your prisons (with perhaps slave labor to juice the profits and steal your job), and your Social Security fund (!). Also your schools, which will be run by whichever religious fanatics volunteer the most of their free labor to convert our kids into compliant Medieval peasants who have zero idea how science and technology work. After all, if it's good enough for Pakistan...
Conservatives keep blaming all the evils of the past on government, and applying terms like "slavery" to anything that reduces inequality. But feudalism was simply private landlord/lenders grabbing sovereign power over the rest of the population and providing all public services and military functions. And the only slavery that has ever existed in America was a private, conservative institution founded on the dogma of unlimited private property rights. Both institutions absolutely required a weak central government that would never take the side of the poor against the rich. Now who advocates such a thing today?
Besides, how else can conservatives rule after whites become a minority, but by stripping the franchise from the non-white poor? Strange that no one ever talks openly about the plan for that demographic inevitability.
The last deficit under Bush was a lie. How could you not know that he excluded the entire cost of his wars from the deficit?
Secondly, the entire Bush scam was built on private debt, to create a boom in financial services and real estate flipping that was completely unproductive investment; it made nothing that could survive the inevitable bursting of the bubble. For instance, in 2004 nearly a trillion dollars in home equity loans were taken out. That is literally creating that much money, which no matter what you believe about Keynes will cause several trillion dollars of extra economic activity in a year. The problem is that it means without that borrowing, we would have had a massive depression right then and there, and with the borrowing the trillion still had to be paid off at some point - meaning right now. But home equity loans don't cause a more productive economy or workers. Factories do, but the capitalists want them all in China so they can afford their monster bonuses. The debt made it possible for our bosses to keep us spending without having to pay us decent wages for making real things.
Thirdly, the largest portion of the stimulus package consisted of tax cuts. Which don't work during a depression because people are too scared to spend the extra money, but right-wing dogma says that tax cuts are the solution to every problem so we did it just like Herbert Hoover.
Fourthly, the government is not spending much more money now than under Bush, but tax revenues have completely collapsed due to the crash. That alone is what caused the ballooning of the deficit from the real war-included amount under Bush.
So when did tax cuts and reduced government spending ever cause a boom? Can any conservative give me a date? The boom after the Civil War was built on stolen Indian land and unlimited immigration; it helped to have an Army available again to help in the stealing. The boom of the 1920s was a fraud; wages did not rise, so production was driven by consumers buying on credit. Everything else was stock and real estate bubbles. The Reagan boom was the biggest joke of all; it was under him that wages began their long stagnation but his relentless evangelism of greed and gluttony helped keep people spending more, which meant digging into their savings. Without the Japanese we would never have gotten away with it.
America's prosperity rests mostly on the growth from 1940 to 1980. Before that we were a 3rd world country with a small military. Now we are a 3rd world country with a huge military. In between we were a successful country with an activist government, big public investments, a well-funded public educational system, a GI Bill to create free college for millions of white men, a relatively small Wall Street, relatively low-paid corporate executives, and a top tax rate of 91% until JFK cut it while continuing to spend on the military. We were also the world's largest producer of crude oil until 1973 - we were our own Saudi Arabia.
In fact there is nowhere in the world you can point to that proves your economic theories. Switzerland has socialized medicene, the brutal neo-capitalist regimes of Latin America have all been kicked out by their victims except for narcotized Peru and Colombia, all the Asian success stories have a significant government and/or US aid component, and the only other big pile of money in the world is the one the Arab princes used to prop up the dollar and US commercial real estate.
When Confederate general (and former slave-trader and future KKK founder) Nathan Bedford-Forrest overran Ft. Pillow and its mostly black defenders, one of the black men who tried to surrender to a Southern cavalryman was told, "Saddle my horse!"
The man complied. Then the Confederate said, "I will saddle my own horse, and shoot you too." Which he did, though the prisoner survived.
That was then the Southern view of black people's right to exist. Once they had shown they would defy slavery, they had no right to exist. This was impractical for the Southern elite from a labor economics standpoint, of course, so they constructed a satistfyingly humiliating caste status for freed slaves that kept poor whites sadistic and happy.
Thomas Jefferson expressed a similar viewpoint, though, in his writings on the Commonwealth of Virginia; he said the blacks had to be freed, but then they would immediately have to be ethnically cleansed. His ideal social system would not work, he knew, if whites had to share citizenship with blacks and compete with them in the marketplace.
It is too easy for white Americans to believe that all other nations and races only exist to serve them, since that is mostly how it has been in modern times. So we are slowly transitioning from the confident, aggressive bigotry against any of the sub-creatures at home or abroad who refuse our orders, to the fearful, senile bigotry against the competition from our former subjects.
Yet this process can happen quickly or go in reverse. An extremist like Milosevic or Hitler can come to power based on the fear that "those people" are too competitive to be allowed to exist, yet after a few easy victories they switch to a triumphal tone saying that they must cross borders and rescue their kind in other lands, which implies that they are naturally superior.
In the US context, I have in the past tried to distinguish between racism based on the belief that the enemy race is born inferior and therefore should be kept under unfair conditions, and racism based on the belief that the enemy are the product of an inferior culture, and must be forcibly assimilated. Mostly the former have been conservatives and the latter have been liberals, but Reagan seized on the libertarian idea that "less entrepreneurial" cultures had no inherent right to exist (Thomas Sowell eloquently damns his own people to cultural extinction this way) and thus rehabilitated his new Southern allies, who switched to the safer form of bigotry by becoming market fundamentalists.
This is another dimension to the racism problem. You can see cases where people who fear a competitive rival group will try to mandate cultural extermination instead of deportation. The corporate elite certainly would prefer this, since they are the high priests of modern white American culture and want to standardize the entire world population to be addicted to the products and labels they control. When the goal is to keep a lower caste subjugated, however, assimilation is a tricky matter. Some slaveowners in the US wanted slaves Christianized, but perhaps some saw that this would create dangerous questions about how Christians must treat other Christians. The tendency in the South was that assimilation must occur under the context of "seperate but equal", meaning that blacks got inferior everything, but had to act white and not express any ideas of their own despite their differing circumstances.
In the current white power crisis, the corporate sponsors have total control of where the Tea Party can go in eliminationism. Thus we see in Arizona that real efforts to reduce the illegal population such as jailing guilty employers are bypassed for laws that target all Hispanics for petty humiliation. If too many Hispanics leave, it's bad for business. But if too many Hispanics stay and give birth to new, voting, citizens, then whites will lose the competition for power. So we see a law that targets Hispanic education classes that might teach an accurate history of how whites got power over Hispanics. A delicate dance of treating Hispanics as sub-creatures, as competitors, as deportable, as necessary labor captives, has turned into a slamdance run by Neanderthals.
Anyone who reads Dr. King's later sermons will have to admit that he was a radical pacifist, a unilateral disarmer, and an enemy of American global domination. That he viewed worship of US intervention abroad as akin to support for racism at home, because the government could not long pay for war and the Great Society.
But no one reads those sermons. There is no point in reading those sermons. The Right learned the hard way during the MLK Day controversy that he couldn't be smeared, so he had to be co-opted, and that required erasing all evidence of what fascists like J. Edgar Hoover and the KKK correctly pointed out about his radical politics. Al Sharpton claims he witnessed James Brown use his connections in the GOP to negotiate Reagan's approval for the holiday. But Brown could hardly have imagined how that would require the Orwellian rape of King's dream of an egalitarian, multi-cultural society.
If we don't draw the line here on historical truth, there is no lie the Right cannot make "common knowledge". At this very moment, other tentacles of the right-wing lie machine have an aggressive Internet rumor campaign underway to paint Hitler as part-Jew, part-Black, all-homosexual, and by insinuation a "liberal". Other tentacles are telling black audiences that the Democrats are still the party of white supremacy, while yet other tentacles tell carefully chosen white audiences that Lincoln was evil and slavery was just.
All of that is going on at the same time. Why? So that when normal people are no longer sure what the truth is, they will turn in their confusion to the only people who have certitude in America, those who will never stop screaming, lying and fighting until they have restored our society to the bitterly-resisted evils of 19th century Christian-protected white supremacist unregulated capitalism. And this time they will kill as many of us as they have to in order to keep it cemented in place.
There is one big difference between this situation and the War of 1812:
Americans were genuinely hostile to the UK government for many decades after the burning of the White House. But in the late 19th century America became Britain's junior partner in the capitalist subjugation of the world. Britain was the #1 investor in US industry and railroads. The US was heavily in debt to Britain. Anglo-American businesses, like the White Star Line that owned the Titanic, became common. American corporations benefitted from British global military domination as British industry itself was becoming senile. By 1916, it was obvious ethat if the US was going to enter WW1 at all, it would be on the British side. That war reversed the two countries' positions as debtor and creditor. It is as if there was a single business class transfering its assets from one host body to the other, until the UK became the servile junior partner it is today.
But our animus towards Britain after 1812 would have been shorter-lived if we could have seriously claimed to have won that war. Economic interests aside, the one thing the US really hates is not winning. We claim to be generous in victory towards countries like Japan, but we are sore losers everywhere we didn't get our way, evidenced by our chain of long running economic sanctions around the world.
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven."
"Do not save riches here on Earth, where moths and rust destroy... for your heart will always be where your riches are."
"You cannot serve both God and money."
"Do not be worried about the food and drink you need to stay alive, or about clothes for your body. After all, isn't life worth more than food?"
"look at the birds flying around: they do not plant seeds, gather a harvest, and put it in barns; your Father in heaven takes care of them."
"But I tell you that not even Solomon, as rich as he was, had clothes as beautiful as one of these flowers."
"Sell all you have and give the money to the poor, then come and follow me."
"Give to everyone who asks you for something, and when someone takes what is yours, do not ask for it back."
But the real question, zaxxon, is how you could be so confident in your ignorance of Jesus, when you claim that I haven't even read the Bible. Which gospel were you taught? The Gospel of Ayn Rand? The Prayer of Jabez? The Theology of Prosperity uber Alles?
Is this what American Christians are like now? I was brought up a conservative Southern Baptist in the '70s and I knew these things. Have they been consigned to the memory hole in the Reaganite church?
And worst of all, zaxxon didn't have a problem with me pointing out that conversely, the Jehovah of the Old Testament was a murderous bastard who ordered his Hebrews to conquer innocent towns and kill and enslave their inhabitants and later to ethnically cleanse non-Jews from His kingdom. That didn't bother him, but Jesus the socialist caused him to froth incoherently, and use an obscenity (the F in LMFAO).
Perhaps the false Christs truly have come, as warned of in prophecy. Could they be any more disgusting?
Sure, and the Old Testament teaches that God will punish an entire country unless its people worship Him alone and expel or murder everyone who refuses to comply. So have I just described the essential, unchanging practice of Judaism or Christianity? The Old Testament also supports slavery, yet both sides in our conflict over slavery used the Bible to beat the other over the head. And the New Testatment has Jesus denouncing private property and wealth and demanding that his followers give away everything to the poor. Does that in any way characterize the behavior of Christian societies in the subsequent 2000 years? That goes double for his pacifism.
The end game is the disenfranchisement of an imminent non-white majority, just as it was in South Africa in 1948 and in Israel today. Years ago I heard about the extremist movement to repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments on the fringes of the far right. I knew that movement would be shepherded to the GOP mainstream by the same machinery that has mainstreamed so many insanities once held only by Birchers, and indeed GOP senators are now trying to hold hearings on ending birth-right citizenship based on the 14th Amendment. There is no reason to abolish those amendments unless you are trying to give states the right to exclude enough non-whites from voting to ensure white rule forever. That was what Jim Crow was originally about; all the segregated drinking fountains and baseball that the mainstream media continually rattles on about were merely side effects of an ideology manufactured first and foremost to keep blacks from voting.
Now obviously wholesale disenfranchisement would lead to violent conflict, but once whites and blacks were shooting at each other, which side could then be designated as "terrorists" and then categorically denied the right to vote? Similarly, the wave of multiple laws designed to provoke and humiliate Arizona Latinos, citizen and alien alike, serve no useful purpose unless it is to escalate a race conflict that will harden all those Latinos into one camp that can be stigmatized as traitors and legally suppressed. If the goal had been to really stop illegal immigration, merely jailing employers for doing everything they could to hire illegals would suffice but that would ruin Arizona's future as a caste-based economy. If the goal had been to merely weaken Latinos as a political force, Latino citizens and non-citizens could easily have been played against each other for decades. Instead, just as the new right-wing populism deliberately chose to offend and denigrate blacks and the man whom 95% of them voted for as traitors, the Arizona branch deliberately chose to unify all Latinos as an enemy.
Why go out of your way to make all blacks, all Latinos, and all Moslems your enemy? Because you need clear boundaries and absolutes if you intend to circle the wagons of "real" Americans for the political equivalent of war, instead of the normal vague divisions that characterize a healthy democracy. The Solid South of 1876-1964 made a mockery out of democracy by waging this sort of war and it is foolish to think that such a strategy is too immoral to be tried again.
Miller got his big paycheck, and then he became a right-wing absolutist. No surprise. Bill Cosby got many big paychecks and went to the right little by little - in the early '70s he was hosting documentaries about racism in Hollywood, and bailing out the production of the wonderfully inflammatory "Sweet Sweeback's Badass Song."
I guess I could speculate about the speed at which persons of various backgrounds sell out, but what matters is what's in right-wing ideology for entertainers: I'm rich, you're all inferior to me, but as long as you're my whorish yes-man, I will reassure you that you're better than those whiny troublemakers who complain about all the goodies that you consume to make your whore life endurable (which is good for Wall Street, which makes me even richer). If a bully and his hangers-on laugh while they pull down a smart kid's pants, I guess that must be humor.
Meanwhile, thank God for Chris Rock, whose documentary "Good Hair" I just watched. His brand of humor remains observational, not denigrating, and he shows great restraint in depicting the paradox that a hair-care industry that supports black jobs and businesses is in fact reliant on dangerous chemicals and exploiting religious women in India. Actually, in taking extra time from his touring career as he found he had to follow the story wherever it went, he did what corporate journalists are supposed to do, but don't.
It seems to me, Prof. Cole, that your quote from Alvarus is entirely the point of Christian extremists. Given their paranoid belief that anything less than a total monopoly on power means that they are slaves, they already think they are living in a Hell of diversity. But if the Spaniards were able to slaughter, torture and conquer their way out of the weakness of diversity, then so can America. To them the Golden Age could only have been when white Christians held the world in chains, filling the coffers of a Christian despot like Charles V or Queen Victoria. If they can purify the thoughts of young, military-age Americans, they can turn things around and rule the world!
Insane, but not unusual.
Actually, I recently read that migration by Jews out of Israel has begun to outpace immigration of "Jews" (including Russians who claim to be Jewish to get settler benefits) to Israel. This is a nightmare scenario for Zionist ideology and explains the growing paranoia Prof. Cole has observed. But if all the liberal Jews are getting sick of scary militarism and leaving, and nominal Jews from Russia try to prove themselves good Israelis by their willingness to oppress and kill Palestinians, what kind of population do you end up with? This is why the politics and attitudes of actual Jewish-Americans and Jewish-Europeans get further and further away from Israelis, yet the political representatives of the former only obey the laundry lists of the latter.
Soon, ordinary liberal American Jews will face a permanent campaign of denunciations from Fox, AIPAC and the Christian Right for being race traitors and heretics because they won't emigrate and they don't hold pro-war beliefs. Will this persecution be called anti-Semitism?
When I was a teenager in the late '70s and an increasingly skeptical Baptist, I was introduced to a BBC series about the lack of achaeological evidence for David's empire. I had no idea that the mainstream view in Europe was that the Old Testament was just propaganda written by self-serving priests - a view I now share.
Yet the gap between what Europe and America believe about the history of the Middle East seems to be widening. To be a Christian at all in America you must claim to be a literalist, or it will get ugly for you. Even if you are not religious you must repeat the dogma that the Old Testament narrative justifies the seizure of Palestinian homes and farms.
I think the US and Israel are locked in an embrace of origin stories. Our WASP ancestors used the Old Testament as an analogy for their destruction of Native Amemrican lands to the point where they practically appointed themselves the named party in a new Covenant. Then Jabotinsky name-checked America's successful crime in proclaiming his goal in Palestine - complete elimination. Then the Right in the US fell in love with a victorious, expanding Israel in 1967 and both the neo-con and Christian wings have seemed to channel its might-makes-right ruthlessness to bully their way into power here and around the world.
Is Israel the 51st state, or a new Red State that the other Red States follow out of the Union into an expansionist crusade against any land with resources?
Arizona is a herald of American Failing Nationalism Syndrome. Except here what is failing is one definition of a nation versus another, not one nation falling to another.
I have a map, which I don't know how to post, of the % of Hispanic voters in US states. Combine that with the black vote in the South, and you can see a delicious irony: the Red States, the heartland of the GOP, are the states most rapidly losing their white majority. Tea Partiers will deny it up and down, but the sense of threat they feel comes from their own local demographics. Since they are reactionaries and only have the dogma of their beloved States' Rights past to appeal to, they can only hate on Washington and federal power and New York and California and the North in the manner of Jefferson Davis. But all the power they try to amass for states will pass into the hands of minority voters. So the real function of that 19th Century rhetoric can only be to carry out a 19th Century agenda - the re-restriction of the franchise to ensure a permanent white majority. Will this anti-tax movement soon advocate a poll tax?
No wonder their embrace of Israel grows ever tighter. No wonder John Hagee is financing building in the illegal settlements while his acolytes challenge Israeli courts to accept Tennessee Pentecostal theocrats as part of the "Judeo-Christian" nation. No wonder Sen. Lieberman marches increasingly in lockstep with the deranged Christian Republican Party. The US Christian Right and Zionism both must justify Jim Crow to perpetuate rule of their own homelands, surrounded by enemies, but they possess media control, capitalist sponsorship, and nuclear arsenals. So they're gonna give it a try and drag all the rest of us with them.
Amazing. America keeps getting sick of unwinnable wars faster and faster, but we are surprised that the rest of the world is getting sick of us escalating these wars in the first place. Instead of embracing peace, our leaders seem to be indoctrinating the voters that we are entitled to order other countries to do all our fighting for us - and Israel's fighting - because our two nations are the only moral ones in the world and all the wicked servant satrapies must pay tribute to that with the blood of their young men. And our voters are buying into this insanity because they want the costs of war to go away but refuse to sacrifice any of the emotional benefits of being the "most powerful country in the world".
I can't figure where this thinking is headed. Since we keep losing these guerrilla wars that require so many of our couch potatoes to become boots on someone else's ground, I guess we secretly desire to blackmail other countries into providing the IED fodder instead. We might not be able to hit the right tent in Pakistan, but we sure can hit London and Berlin with nukes.
There is also the role in energy development of the biggest government endeavor of all - war!
When we squeezed Pennsylvania dry, the world was still a long way from its transition to oil. The armies began chasing the crude, and thereby made the transition practical. War is entirely responsible for the existence of the nuclear industry. The cradle of the solar photovoltaic industry was the needs of space satellites during the Cold War.
If the USA doesn't do industrial policy, then why is there a dam next to Las Vegas named after a Republican president?
Apparently even Hoover was too far to the left for the current reactionaries.
Do the actual rulers of Pakistan demand that Afghanistan be a satellite, or do they accept it as a sovereign state? If the former, as Michael Scheuer claims, then there will always be a Taliban, or something like it. No one pretends that the Pakistani Army is not deeply involved in the Kashmir resistance. That is its modus operandi with its neighbors.
So where does that leave America? It can't leave Afghanistan because of the specter of 9/11. It can't admit that Pakistan keeps the Taliban alive without declaring Pakistan an enemy. Pakistan has atomic bombs because the US spent the '80s and '90s pretending that Pakistan was a friend, so clearly there are asses which must be covered. Besides, all-out war between the US and Pakistan is unthinkable, so there is nowhere to escalate to.
That leaves us with Afghanistan as a tragic ritual slaughter, which cannot end as long as Pakistan and America each demand its subjugation to their competing agendas, and each denies demanding its subjugation.
Isn't it a hell of a thing to be praying for our Chinese creditors to hurry up and put a leash on our madness? Yet I can't think of anyone else who can do the job. The only reason I can imagine why they haven't ordered us to shut down our bases in 130 foreign countries and divert money from the military to infrastructure repair and debt service is that our decaying empire serves their purposes for now.
Joe McCarthy was enabled by a capitalist media that was already witchhunting before he was. The coming of a new McCarthy was predictable. That he is not a senator this time may tell us how much the Right now relies on denigration of elected government instead of slavish support for it.
We should also recall the front page of the Tulsa newspaper the day before the horrific white riot which destroyed the black part of Tulsa in the '20s. The only remaining copy has a square cut out of it, where an article was run telling whites where to go to start the riot.
And where were the Southern newspapers in 1860 and 1876? Doing their worst.
In the past the media aided and abetted tyranny, oppression and bigotry and never was punished for the disasters it caused. So I don't see anything stopping it this time.
Davr: Apparently it's not possible for a right-winger to be anti-American. This is not sarcasm. There is a built-in assumption across the political spectrum that right-wingers are more "real" Americans than anyone else. I think this involves vaguely sensed notions of the origin of American identity in the colonial past, and the special insecurity that white Christians feel that, unlike Germans or Englishmen, they can't declare American as both ethnicity and nationality. They want tribalism, but the act of defining themselves as a tribe rightfully ruling over "conquered" peoples like blacks and Latinos is suicide. Obsessing over Free Enterprise or Christian fundamentalism is a way of asserting that identity behind a non-racial front, but always worshipping an idealized past when WASPs just happened to monopolize power.
Meanwhile, we're all still ignoring the question of Turkey's geostrategic importance. Which is not surprising when Americans run a world that they can't recognize on a map. Turkey was Bush's (read Cheney's) oil trump card - the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline was supposed to turn the ex-Soviet 'Stans into Exxonstan. A vulnerable pipline winding through various war zones for no purpose but to wage economic war on Russia and Iran by throwing out all notions of "free trade". But we've done nothing but antagonize the Turkish electorate ever since. How much of the oil arriving in Turkey was meant to be shipped to Israel in the future? Don't bet on it now.
Furthermore, since the 1800s Britain considered the biggest threat from Russia to be its overthrow of the Ottoman Empire and waged a cold war - Charge of the Light Brigade and all - to prevent the Russians from gaining open access to the Mediterranean. Like most British imperial goals, that one was passed to the US after 1945. If at any point during the Cold War, Turkey had switched sides, it would have been considered a strategic catastrophe of the greatest magnitude in the Pentagon. Yet now we act as though Turkey is nothing, and Israel is everything, and Putin is not standing there with a lot of oil and gas ready to send to Turkey as a bribe.
On top of all that, it was reported after Bush's arrogant dismissal of Saudi initiatives to hasten the peace process in Iraq and Palestine that the Sauds had embarked on a more independent foreign policy. Their key agents - the Turkish and Pakistani governments. Why? Well, besides Pakistan's nukes, I expect that both nations being viewed as democracies made them look better in Western media than the Saudi's own despotism. Pakistan is also massively in debt to Arab investors. This is a complicated 3-way development, and it could have many good or bad outcomes. But this is not a case of America being able to punish Turkey without it having others to turn to. At least Putin and King Abdullah can read a map.
Well, David, Mr. Atilgan is described as a retired army officer. The Turkish Army is Edrogan's greatest enemy, a historically anti-democratic organization that turned Ataturkism into a state religion at war against Islam, and created a civil state that similarly wages war on Moslems and bans the parties of elected officeholders for insufficient loyalty to Ataturkism. So yeah, he'd be a good fit in the Likud. The Army has been mad at Edrogan because he doesn't want to kill Kurds enough. Israeli "contractors" have often been reported to be helping the Iraqi Kurdish fiefdom with military matters, and the warlords running that fiefdom have done a great job protecting the PKK in Iraq from the US Occupation, so that the PKK could attack the US's NATO ally the last 7 years. So I guess if you're angling on using Atilgan to smear Edrogran, you will have to be careful claiming the Kurds as heroic victims of Edrogan's extremism.
I love Desertec because it enabled me to write my all-time favorite e-mail title about the German project to generate electricity in North Africa - "Afrika Korps II: Electric Boogaloo."
But I also admire it because it's the kind of big project we Americans used to carry out and no longer seem able to manage. Look at the problems with the Big Dig. Or our refusal in the late '90s to budget $50 billion to restore southern Louisiana's waterways and wetlands to a natural state to avoid a future disaster like Katrina - which I understand caused many times more expense.
The catch - Germany has a 50-cent per kilowatt-hour tariff on renewable electricity. So presumably the Desertec partners were expecting to get that ridiculous bounty by running power lines all the way from North Africa. It sounds like the commitment to such subsidies will be strangled by "austerity".
They need to think big. The US has manipulated politics and pipelines across Central Asia in a desperate attempt to keep Europe from buying gas & oil from Russia because, we claim the Euros will sell out their democracy to the Russian Satan. But if Europe can build Desertec, then it won't need gas from Russia or Iran, and how could America object?
Unless, of course, what we really want is to keep Europe from becoming too independent of us. If such a system is built, the meaning of all sorts of relationships change. North Africa is no longer another place where undeserving Arabs and others squat on "our" oil - these solar collectors will require labor and trained technicians. That damages both Israel's narrative of Arab inferiority and its claim that its alliance with America helps ensure our energy security (!) by keeping Arabs and Iranians in line. Because Europe will be the place where electric cars will prove most useful and economically attractive due to $7/gallon gas, the entire role of oil in justifying the Anglo-American power structure might be threatened by a flood of cheap solar electricity.
No one has had an entity that economically integrated both sides of the Mediterranean since Rome/Byzantium. By the dogmas of the Project for a New American Century, Europe would become a threat to America. I welcome it - our greed and shortsightedness has already ensured China's rise to a share of global power and its people sacrificed greatly to bring it about. Rather than try to pull it down, as many Americans seem to desire, how about we pull up democratic Europe as a counterbalance before we become too weak to pick winners?
You have definitely done more to stop the wars than I have. The challenge is defining exactly what is to be America's role if we will genuinely foreswear these generational exercises in nation-destroying. In other words, a specific goal instead of an absence of current butchery. The peace movement has nothing to fill the vacuum of idle American minds once the troops are home.
But the bigger problem, which soured George Kennan on Americans and maybe democracy, is that there is such a narrow range of views that Americans will accept about the outside world. It takes a certain amount of experience with policymaking and conflict outcomes to see that you have to be cynical and have a bit of a tough hide to have a rational discourse over a moral and efficacious foreign policy. That's why I made the Sean Connery joke back in 2001; most Americans can't seem to stomach that kind of black humor about their precious boys in uniform and their tax dollars at work.
This leaves them in three camps: isolationists, crusaders, and social workers. The 3rd group being progressives who want to shut down the empire but still would like to have US power on their side in pushing sovereign states to stop doing nasty things in Darfur, etc. These groups represent minimum thought and maximum self-absorption.
Meanwhile, in reality land, America is a declining empire that has to decide the terms of its decline. These 3 camps make it impossible to have a hard-headed discourse on shutting the thing down. In the absence of such discourse, every time some dictator or militia does something halfway around the world, one of those camps will demand that the President "do something" depending on the ideology of the perpetrator, and another country gets added to that list of 130, if not something far worse, and we blow another billion on deployments.
We're not ready yet. If the President all Clausewitzian and say that we must rationally plan our demotion from a superpower to a Great Power state, and draw a defense perimeter over which our forces will not cross, but within which we still reserve the right to violence, then you can imagine the public hell that would break loose. Centrists should be the ones propounding this, but their moderation simply consists in trying to defend US power everywhere without looking too hard for new wars. Worst of all the peace movement will be just as mad because they refuse to even accept the US as a Great Power state, which is why the brainwashed mainstream thinks they're traitors.
So the matter gets punted to the next Administration when we will be even deeper in debt.
Cutting our defense budget in half ought to be the most obvious goal in our current crisis, and a great achievement, yet you could not find 10% of the politically vocal population to even touch the idea because their absolute, moral and unimpeachable positions are so far removed from the messy reality of being a declining empire.
Watch what happens when Obama tries to get a missile reduction treaty through Congress. The streets will fill with deranged theocratic and fascist protestors, and the Left will stay home because they're not satisfied with cuts that are still far too deep for Congress. So the uninformed masses will only see the far-right maniacs and the TV Swiftboating ads and conclude that they must be right that Obama is a secret Moslem terrorist.
Design the ad that can turn that around, and you will have done the greatest practical service to peace worldwide.
So you bought the narrative. The day after 9/11, I wrote an e-mail to some friends of mine about this being our Sepoy Rebellion moment - the time when we had to decide whether we would simply continue as a capitalist trading state with a varying sphere of influence, or we would become crazed, racist crusaders as the Victorian Britons did when outraged Indians tried to throw the East India Company out of their sovereign kingdoms. The point being - Britain thought it conquered India, but it set in motion a bloody era of imperialism and militarism and ended up losing India after only 90 years - to what benefit for ordinary Britons?.
Or as I put it to an ex-military friend of mine, "You can be Sean Connery, and I'll be Michael Caine." "The Man Who Would Be King" would have told you everything you needed to know about the madness of ordinary men handed imperial power in a place where they don't belong.
We're lucky that the Chinese are phasing our empire out slowly for reasons of their own, but we won't even get the 90 years. You have the choice of cheering on the end of these wars and then going back to uninformed sleep, or taking an active role in shaping the public discourse about why we should be a superpower with troops in 130 countries, and what can we replace this with.
Remember South Korea and Spain too. It can take several successful elected governments to get the Army to return to the barracks for good. Pakistan will never have several successful presidencies in a row.
However, we must consider that the US military does not have the troops to carry out an actual coup - the essence of the power of the South Korean, Spanish, Turkish and Pakistani armies as a gray eminence. That's because while those other armies all were the dominant partner with civilian elites in ruling, our military is simply a front for the military-industrial complex. The corporations are the dominant partner, and the place from which a coup would originate. See the DuPont plot of 1934 against FDR - the US Army was so weak that the plotters figured to create a fascist militia that could give it a run for its money, especially since the plotters also had media power on their side. What changed in the capitalists' need for the military was the vast overseas expansion of both after 1945, but that has created a military literally intended to waste money on nonexistent threats and avoid mediapathic casualties while punishing rebellious colonies.
No, those other countries were dominated by the actual power of the Army in their streets. We are dominated by addiction to the empire in our minds, like other declining empires that collapsed without a coup.
That would not be the worst outcome I could imagine, but in Afghanistan we always give up chances to avoid the worst outcome.
What we know about Afghanistan is that the Pakistani Army is committed to keeping it as a satellite, apparently beyond all reason, poverty, or bribery. A couple of years ago they hated Karzai's guts because of his ties to India. Then things started to change.
If it matters more to them to have a puppet in Kabul than who that puppet is, Karzai may be sending his application for the position by bad-mouthing the US and stealing elections from the formerly India-backed Northern Alliance.
That would indeed lead to a divided country. It would be horrible to let the Pakistani Army continue to pursue its murderous obsession. But if it's stupid enough to be happy with Karzai, we could wash our hands of him. We just want the Pakistani Army to promise it will never let the Taliban appear to have won. Now what leverage do we have to accomplish that given that Army's nuclear arsenal? Mostly, we have that Army's blowback problem - the Pakistani Taliban created because it couldn't control its proxies. That's why they don't stop us from these damned drone strikes on their territory.
If the Pakistani Army is satisfied with real control over southern Afghanistan, and Kurdish-style pretend control over the north, it doesn't need the Taliban on either side of the border. If it wants the whole rancid ball of wax, then the Northern Alliance takes up arms and we have to decide whether to back it or let it have its old sponsors back. I'd take the latter, because I'm sick of our attempts to override Russia's sphere of influence. But a permanent proxy war between the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on one side and Pakistan on the other will be even crueler than what we're doing.
It means that pulling out is really only partly about what internal factions will rule what part of Afghanistan, and much more about getting their sponsors to accept an invisible ceasefire line once we're gone.
There is only one bribe left to offer the parties, and we won't enjoy it. The SCO has had Afghanistan and Pakistan as observers at its summits. I bet the US is blocking those countries from joining the SCO - I can't imagine Gates standing for it, or even Hillary. If they join, it puts Russia and Pakistan on the same side. They get the damned Afghan pipeline route that Benazhir Bhutto planned and the 'Stans flood Europe with crude and the US loses more and more of its superpower mojo.
But better an SCO that can improve living conditions and prevent further regional chaos than a NATO that threatens Russia on its southern flank for no good reason but Washington's fear of EU petro-Finlandization. One day a US president must tell the citizens that our days as a superpower are over, that we are only the foremost among Great Powers and cannot dictate everything in every corner of the Earth to our advantage.
Considers breaking off Ties;
Israel Lobbies in Congress denounce Ankara
Oh boy, it's the Edrogan is the new Chavez meme. Friedman, who worshipped at the altar of the invasion of Iraq, refuses to explain that the Turkish people themselves went from being overwhelmingly pro-American to overwhelmingly anti-American due to our actions in Iraq. Edrogan was dragged along behind them.
So if you're looking for someone to blame, Tommy, look in the mirror.
Hey, Richard the Lion-Hearted was willing to piss away the powerful empire that he inherited to go engage in holy butchery for an illegitimate Crusader colony headquartered in Jerusalem. If he had kept his talents where they belonged and not left his throne to John Lack-land, the Plantagenet Empire might have radically reshaped European history. Try running a cost-benefit analysis on that without laughing.
Right-wingers don't believe that people TURN to evil, they believe that people ARE evil. God rewards good people with success in capitalism, so the evil poor, at home and abroad, can only be kept on the right path through the terror of our righteous weaponry and the karate-chopping hand of the market.
By this formula, Rep. Pence is not causing Turkey to turn towards evil Iran, he is exposing its evil nature in that it is willing to defy rich, Godly Israel. And that's how it is across the spectrum of foreign policy issues for the faith-blinded. They already know all foreigners will serve the Anti-Christ and attack Israel in the End Times, so they are very satisfied to have an ever-growing enemies list to fill out their Armageddon scorecard.
The only way we will accept such a tax is in exchange for the elimination of the income tax. See my comment above about having to disguise simple reforms with right-wing arguments.
Problem is, an energy tax is regressive in that it will collect a higher % of the income of the poorest car-owners, like me. So there will have to be some kind of rebate check strategy, but the right-wing inequality cult will immediately start a long-term campaign to make the rebates resented, then despised.
What we really need is a return to the tax structure that worked so well for us from 1935 to 1960, but we have already been brainwashed to believe that a 91% top rate never happened because surely it would have caused Communist tyranny. We got such high rates to work because the only way to evade them was for businessmen to reinvest in their own businesses, which would encourage a lot of the activity that an American energy transition now requires such as job training. With low tax rates and capital gains discounts, businessmen instead look for a quick kill on Wall Street or real estate or derivatives or any bubble they can concoct.
Besides, we've probably already outsourced too much to ever learn how to start making things for ourselves again, so we will have to import solar panels and turbine blades from China and continue to weaken our working class.
You always have to wrap it in the flag here in America.
Prof. Cole failed to mention that JFK had it easy - the space race was patriotic pork; no Republican could oppose it. Democrats always have to do it that way because right-wing arguments are the only safe arguments. Making peace with China? Only Nixon was allowed to do it, because there was no way his lackey party could call him a traitor. There was no way Democrats could wrap that in right-wing-speak.
It's built into our fundamental political beliefs: the Right defends the Real America, the Left wants to change it into something else. Which is treason. Our people will accept tiny bits of this treason when they truly face destruction, and as soon as things get better they swing way to the right to prove they are not really traitors. Until you change this dynamic, you can change nothing.
"Their fundamental view is, the Europeans treated the Jews badly and gave them our land — this is Palestinian thinking [...]"
Uh yeah, that's what happened, Chuck. Screw fantasy Jehovah, that's objectively what happened here in the real world. Ibn Saud made that exact specific complaint to FDR and made him promise that the Palestinians' status wouldn't be changed without consultation with Arab rulers - which made Israel's borders their business. The onus was on the colonists to prove that they weren't Plymouth Rock set to land on the redskins and crush them out of existence.
I bet Chuck doesn't use that explanation in front of a secular New York audience that is a little nervous about the idea of people being run off their farms because of some old scrolls fabricated by self-interested temple priests thousands of years ago. No, with them he just makes history start at the Munich Olympics.
NATO HQ Seething
NATO increasingly reminds me of the tragedy of the Delian League, the Athenian-dominated military force created to continue the alliance that had defeated Persia. Athens' voters took to using the League to crush any opposition in the Greek world, until undemocratic Sparta believed it had to go to war to survive. Everybody was ruined, Athens fell under a junta, and the Greek world was easy pickings for Philip of Macedon.
I don't see a way out. If NATO is dissolved in favor of a proper EU military, Americans will freak out and vote in people to the right of Sarah Palin, with a mandate to wage eternal war against an ungrateful and wicked world - all of it, not just the easy marks. We will go from Athens to Sparta in an eyeblink.
The American people have never valued the lives of individual Americans more than they have the triumph of the American way of life over all alternatives - whether they define it as Pentagon boots on the ground, American predatory capitalism run amuck, or worst of all Dominionism, the belief that America is merely the capitol of a global crusade to restore the world to the decentralized, arbitrary rule of the Biblical patriarchy. The libertarian wing is sure the corporate whores can do it better than the Pentagon or the theocrats, so it opposes war. But the goal is always a global slave plantation with "our kind" living in the big house and the unentrepreneurial darkies happy in the fields. It is an addiction well worth feeding with our boys and our subsidies and our unregulated safety - until it becomes too much of a hassle and we withdraw and claim to have learned our lesson. Then it starts all over again in some new guise.
Drunken Economist -
Remove incumbents so we can put in Sarah Palin, who wants eternal war on all Moslems and witches? (See http://www.talk2action.org for where she's coming from.)
Ron Paul has muffled himself on peace issues to help his son in pro-war Kentucky. It's all Confederate now, and when have the "small-government" Southern states ever sincerely opposed any war overseas? They were only against the Serbian war to get back at Clinton.
Egypt's lifting of the Blockade likely Temporary
I have come to the depressing conclusion in recent days that Americans do not comprehend the basic premise of international law. Which is that all men are created equal, thus they have the right to form sovereign states and that those states also have the same rights regardless of the color of those men or their language or way of dress. If there is a Dred Scott rule, then international law simply is arbitrary power.
It wasn't just dealing with liberals on DailyKos in recent days, liberals who regard the war on Palestinians to be sacred above all moral limits. I really tried. I even pointed out that they were calling for a lower standard to be applied to Palestinians whose original crime was to merely live on land whites wanted to take, than the US applied in 1945 to the defeated peoples of Germany and Japan who were treated according to the laws of occupation despite having voted in fascist governments that committed genocide.
What really sickened me were comments on Yahoo stories about the fall of Japan's prime minister because he was voted into power with a promise to reduce the number of US bases on Okinawa, my birthplace. In other words, Obama overruled the will of the Japanese people. The replies were vile beyond belief. People repeatedly claimed that the US had conquered Japan and could do what it pleased to it in perpetuity. That they were lucky we let them live at all. That they were spoiled and ungrateful. They all presumed that America knew what was best in matters of war in every corner of an Earth they despise, that it was impossible that we were making up or building up enemies to inflate the profits of our special interest groups.
They said, essentially, what Hitler said about Germany.
Whereas nearly every person who said they had lived in Okinawa, presumably due to military service, expressed sympathy with the Okinawan people and their rights.
Maybe we should bring back the draft, make every testosterone-laced dumbass spend two years living off-base in several non-Western countries so they can have the experience my Dad from Jim Crow Texas had in Okinawa before he married an Asian woman. Of course, there's the problem of the inevitable increase in rapes.
World Body Demands release of Aid Activists, Ships
You think things are bad now when war is fought by tiny indoctrinated elites. Wait 'til the pendulum swings back to people's war.
Medieval era - elite war by knights and fiefs
The 30 Years' War - medieval model bloated into mass destruction by continent-wide holy war; 1/3 of Bohemia destroyed; elites sign Treaty of Westphalia to restore limited, non-ideological war
The Age of Reason - elite war by "professional" armies that go on inconclusively for decades but don't threaten the system
The Wars of the French Revolution - suddenly mobs of radical patriots find they can throw away the rules and crush the pros; elites use Congress of Vienna to restore limited, non-ideological war
World War I - as Churchill put it, "I blame it on technology and democracy." Elites use Treaty of Versailles to restore limited, non-ideological war but it doesn't even last 20 years.
The elites want to wage endless wars of policy, but keep the tools of warfare out of the hands of the masses. The masses get fed up, and suddenly an uprising exposes the military elite as bloated, incompetent and obsolete. Then we have mass war, total war, chess pieces removed from the board and smashed forever.
All the tools are out there for a new people's war. Industry has been exiled to the poorest corners of the earth. The richest, most right-wing armies left on Earth, Israel and the US, have failed time and again to win convincingly against hostile societies. The Israeli failures you describe are due to the males of rich nations becoming fat, cowardly couch potatoes who need the unjust global economic system just as much as we Americans do. The elitists have only one saving throw: to turn their couch potatoes into genocidal monsters using Fox News and extremist religion, and terrorize the world into handing over its resources.
I think it's already failed, but you know how it is with dying empires. Head cut off, body still stumbling around killing millions.
I applaud the involvement of Irish peace activists, whose whiteness makes them difficult to impeach, whose ethnicity gives them an audience in the USA, and who certainly would not have a country or justice if their forefathers had not turned to terrorism in 1919 against the might of a great empire.
Make our racists explain the difference between stealing land from an Irishman and a Palestinian.
It doesn't seem any other world leaders need any more investigation to condemn it outright. Given that even boarding the ship was unjustifiable.
wound over 50 as they Board, Capture Gaza Aid Flotilla
If every person - sorry, sand nigger - in Gaza starved to death, would you even blink?
Or would you celebrate?
Well, Iran is surrounded by enemies and beseiged now. So does that mean it's understandable that threatened countries actually increase their proliferation activities?
Sherm, Auntie:
You are right that the American model of capitalism will always turn any new technology into greater inequality. All that we've recently experienced parallels the 1920s, which was a dry run for modern consumerism. However, the New Deal showed that an active vision of how social improvement would work with technological improvement could prevail for a while. 1950s America was not the Tea Party fantasy (which really is based on 1850), but a society with a 91% top tax rate, high corporate taxes, burgeoning public university attendance, powerful unions, and the world's best artists, writers, architects, scientists, and engineers. World War II did not produce all that; the political interpretation of the War in the light of the sufferings of the Depression produced it.
This was all suffocated in its sleep by the corporations, who would side with "ex"-segregationists, religious fanatics, and John Birchers to reclaim their monopoly on power so that they would not have to share any profits from the next technological revolution. But Europe and Asia are at least trying to avoid our extremes. For them the new communications and media fit with their high-density urbanized populations, their lack of a car-centric culture, their need to hold down oil consumption, and quite possibly a more fundamental commitment to social interaction than America has really possessed.
The hopelessness of the Islamist goal of autarky lies in the fact that more than half the world's population is now urban. Cities change people. I think part of the big divergence between postwar Europe and America is that when Americans moved back out of cities into the new suburbs, their brains went into reverse too. The Islamic world has cities teeming with first-generation rural refugees, and they aren't any happier than the immigrants living in NYC's hell-ghettoes in the 1800s. The first response of a colonized or expelled people in ghettoes is to rile up their oppressor by falling back on their own traditions and insularity, to treat assimilation as a form of defeat. But the kids who grow up under these conditions will explore ideological options one after another until they find the politics that work, usually in concert with other groups trapped in those same slums. That's adaptation, not assimilation. I can't imagine that Hezbollah has been unchanged by so much of its base moving to cities and having contact with Lebanon's other factions. Muqtada al-Sadr's movement will be very different 20 years from now, but the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad will hamper that evolution. Bolivia has gone from the rural, xenophobic country where Che died from lack of support to the leading edge of modern radicalism - not Evo Morales, but the broad-based anarchist Indian movement that arose in the slums that considers Evo to be an Uncle Tom.
Somewhere in the cauldron of urbanization and technology will come movements that will be judged on their ability to bring objective improvement in living conditions. They will certainly not look anything like American corporate capitalism, nor like the Taliban. Those are already both religions, hiding from a present that they do not understand.
Wow, say anything against the Paul dynasty and suddenly you're a Commie.
Health care: if free markets work so well in health care, then why has every civilized country abandoned them? I mean, every one. And every one is spending a smaller % of GNP on health care, and almost every one has a longer life expectancy than the United States. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Costa Rica are following Switzerland in making health care a right, not a market reward. Ask Switzerland how it did it without "serving to glut and bloat" Bern.
As for Rand ending the empire, he also wants to take America back to the 1800s. In the 1800s, churches censored books, ranchers held the power of kings over Mexican serfs, corporations used hired thugs and a bought & paid-for National Guard to slaughter striking workers, immigrant women burned to death in unsafe factories, the Five Corners of Manhattan were as bad as any slum in modern India, and a terrorist organization ruled the South, lynching blacks but sometimes also persecuting labor organizers for its wealthy sponsors. Rand keeps claiming the free market will make everything wonderful. Didn't we have a free market back then?
And dirty little secret: where did the capital to build America's railroads and industries come from? Mostly the British empire, otherwise known as the world's biggest drug cartel. So much for our self-sufficiency.
Pons Seclorum: Note that Mexico has a right-wing, pro-free enterprise government. Are you willing to have us denounce Mexico's immigration policies if it means the country falls into the hands of the Socialists, or worse, the scary Zapatistas who dare to point out the collapse in the living standards of the Mexican poor since "market-based reforms"?
redneckdago: Plenty of small businessmen supported the New Deal. Their ethnic groups were crowded into ghettoes with no hope of improvement, their savings accounts were wiped out by frequent collapses of unregulated banks, and well, they had a certain sense of decency that was offended by someone like Herbert Hoover, who before becoming President said that "If you haven't made a million dollars by the time you're 30, you're not much of a man."
The following 25 years were the greatest explosion of economic growth our country has ever seen. Those small businessmen did very well for themselves, as did the rich and every other class. Adjusting for inflation, wages are now lower than they were when Reagan took office. Where has that left small businessmen? The capitalist pimp rag The Economist admitted two years ago that America has less class mobility than much of Europe, and that its small business sector is now a smaller part of the national economy than France's.
But of course, the solution to every failure is to go even further to the Right, where our infallible sacred traditions lie. Just what they used to say in the Spanish Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
Every private-sector TV commercial you've ever seen is a meta-commercial for corporate rule. They have spent your entire life telling you that they have all the answers, that they are the ones who care about you, that they will make your life easy and protect you from all dangers.
It all adds up.
We need to guard against namecalling such as "Stalinist" or "Nazi", even if specific policies are exactly the same as those used in those societies. It becomes the same as calling Obama a Stalinist or Nazi because those societies had some form of universal health care though dozens of democracies have universal health care. The ultimate goal of Israel is not the same as the USSR or 3rd Reich. What is chilling is that the ultimate goal of Israel is the same as the United States of America in 1776: to steal land from natives too obscure to possess sovereign status, and deform them until they can never recover it. There are a long line of colonist societies that have had similar agendas. Canada, Australia and New Zealand have also essentially gotten away with it. Rhodesia and French Algeria did not. South Africa - well, a tiny white minority still has all the money.
The US and Israel are reflections of each other, American settler crimes justified by reference to a "Promised Land", Israeli crimes justified by the success of the American crimes, American neo-cons using Israel to dehumanize Arabs to justify an American colony in Iraq, ad nauseum. You could argue that the US and Israel are the only two right-wing countries remaining in the advanced world. The settler mentality - God & me against the earth. Two black holes of insatiable greed, trapped in each other's orbit, spiraling inwards towards... merger? Collision?