Joe, when Russia reduced its military spending, the US continually humiliated it by moving into its former empire, surrounding it with NATO dependencies, grotesque Yankee pimps setting up corrupt energy deals, backing local gangsters stealing everything that could be moved. The US backed Yeltsin's disastrous neoliberal policies that collapsed life expectancy in Russia, overseen by Jeffrey Sachs, then he sent in the military when the parliament resisted him. When 9/11 occurred, Putin tried to be our "partner" in exchange for some respect, and Cheney basically spit on him when they were at the 2005 commemoration of the end of WW2. From that time on, Putin has been giving us hell, and that has made him very popular.
If we treat countries like dirt until they become our enemies, what do you expect? And by the way, our real military spending is still half a trillion dollars, more than the rest of the world combined.
"It all started when several prominent military reformers met with top brass at the Pentagon to express concern about, among other things, the persistent abuse of the rights of conscience of military personnel, especially by "dominionist" evangelicals. These included Mikey Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and himself a USAF Academy graduate and a former counsel in the Reagan White House..."
"Then Fox News falsely reported (further exaggerated and promoted by Breitbart.com) that a new Pentagon policy, under the influence of Weinstein, could lead to the court marshal of evangelicals for sharing their faith. This was quickly shown to be baloney. But The Christian Post went so far as to falsely report that the Pentagon was employing Weinstein to help make policy. It also attributed Weinstein's alleged anti-Christian views to his Judaism."
It appears that an alliance between two theocracies requires that each have an unlimited right to persecute other faiths within their own turf - even each other's.
Even though our attempt at global hegemony has been a horrible mistake, the American people now feel entitled to the false sense of security it once enabled. Thus as we lose our grip on the world, they will be easy suckers for demagogues who tell them that any unrest, people's revolution, or unfavorable election result anywhere on earth would have been prevented if we had just cut some more welfare money and spent it on stealth bombers.
After Wall Street was forced into a more normal relationship with Latin America, and the Pentagon is forced into a more normal relationship with the Arab world, what region will humiliate us and stir up the demagogues next? I read an alarming article on the right-wing Abe govt. in Japan, which in a classic neocon move violated traditional conservative economics by crashing the value of the yen to get the economy going again - but appears to have planned all this to gain the popularity to push thru changes to make constitutional amendments easier. According to the article, while we all pay attention to their goal of finishing off the no-war clause, the real goal of Abe's party is to expunge the guarantees of personal liberty written in by the postwar Occupation as alien intrusions in the sacred social order.
This is super bad news. Asians actually study history, unlike us, and at the first sign of a renewal of the racist cult of Japanese fascism, they will all begin to unite against Japan. America will be caught completely flat-footed, partly because we ourselves turned against Japan's adherence to the no-war clause in our desperation to have Japan's wealth added to our military might, and partly because moves to destroy women's rights, perhaps gay rights, and labor unions will appeal to our own demagogues.
I am half-Japanese, but I do not want the US to support a renewal of Japanese fascism in any way, shape or form. The human tragedy of a nuclear war in Asia, perhaps caused by Japanese overconfidence that they had US backing, would dwarf the sufferings of their last war.
As I've learned more about how FDR and the Democrats viewed the causes of WW2, I've come to believe he intended his new international organizations to provide a comprehensive solution to make war too unprofitable for advanced nations to pursue. The 1929 crash caused a trade war that the Great Powers could counteract by turning their empires into currency blocs, but this left Germany and Japan with no markets despite their citizens' intelligence, work ethic and willingness to modernize. Their sense of betrayal reversed these values into a vengeful fascism, and some fantastically advanced weaponry.
Thus FDR needed several things to prevent a repeat:
1. Keynesian economics
2. an enduring global free-trade system
3. a currency system that accommodated 1 and 2
4. the end of the colonial empires
5. a reinforcement of international laws of occupation, as we well know at this site, to prevent the profitability of expansionism
Much of this was achieved, but every new solution has its own problems. Since he masterminded this order without detailing the particulars, once he was gone, and Stalin was uncooperative, no one felt compelled to complete his dream - which included universal health insurance and college education for Americans. Much as Lincoln's death put Reconstruction into dubious hands which could not distinguish between punishment and reform, leaving a bitter, brutal flaw in seeming success.
I think it supremely ironic that if there are any places that could be called New Deal states in the postwar era, they are Germany and Japan, which the US restricted from having an independent military policy.
Actually, London was so violent in the Victorian era that gentlemen all went out armed to the teeth - yet another example of what our current right-wingers seem to be nostalgic for. The workers had their expectations beaten down until they just lived with it... but such people cannot shake an economy out of terminal decline.
I'm now reading the 1935 book "The Mysterious Death of Liberal England 1910-1914", which contends that the society was collapsing even then, that a national nervous breakdown was underway in which the suppressed desires of various factions were erupting in bizarre violence. The author details a shocking Tory seditious conspiracy with Ulster Protestants to foment armed rebellion, the widely destructive terror campaign that gained women the vote, and a wave of wildcat strikes that grew into a mass movement without any clear program of action. Another phenomenon he notes is a wave of UFO sightings, all proclaimed in the media as German spy zeppelins. It was as if people had become so restless after 80 years of Victorianism that they needed someone to fight, and the Germans finally obliged them before they resorted to civil war.
In your universe, Eisenhower never gave that farewell speech. Everything he warned of happened a dozen times over.
Either our military-industrial complex was always absolutely necessary in its magnitude, and you're blaming something else for our national debt (as the right-wingers do - blacks, equality, ecology, everything modern), or the war machine is out of control and, as the protestor girl told Nixon in Oliver Stone's movie, "You can't stop it, can you?" Even if there is no USSR to justify it.
It's happening little by little, but the old model reigns supreme in the hearts of the investor class until it is violently overthrown. Think of decaying Britain, trying to switch from a coal empire to an oil empire at the last minute, while America was defining new industries and lifestyles that required cheap oil and exporting them around the world.
I.e., until there is a "Solar Empire" that can bully and overawe other countries, no one will abandon their status quo in sycophantic emulation. Since solar doesn't create the spectacular concentrations of wealth and power that fossil fuels did, people will be slow to recognize the need for change.
What, you think the NRA won't try to overturn that too?
The entire far-right position on guns is that they are there so the "people" (the right kind of Americans) can overthrow any government that doesn't let them monopolize power. Full automatic weapons are clearly required for that.
I've read a provocative book, "Broken Words", by Jonathan Dudley, about the war against science in the Christian Right. It argues that abortion was strictly a Catholic issue until the 1970s, with Evangelicals disagreeing but mostly disinterested in when life begins. But then right-wing provocateur Francis Schaeffer created films alleging that abortion was part of a sinister eugenics agenda from secular humanists that must inevitably lead to the extermination of inferior, backward Americans. Then he toured the redneck zones with this film and got an overwhelming response that completely shocked Evangelical Right leaders - who quickly fell into line. The question is, did the potency of this ridiculous smear come from a subconscious fear among the very folks infamous for their own racism that by objective standards they really were inferior to their enemies, and thus they had to fight back, literally with irrationalism, to avoid being consigned to the ashheap of history?
You're assuming that the Heritage Foundation actually took those past positions sincerely, as opposed to carrying out a long-term scheme to keep moving further Right as they succeeded in indoctrinating the public, including Democrats, to stomach reactionary barbarism. You can't imagine how much worse the Right Wing is intending to get, unless you read the words of their idea guys, or the extremist rags where they communicate honestly with their fellow fanatics until they get into elected office in turn.
Put it this way; one sign of far-right magazines, like militia-tinted gun mags, is the phrase "America is a republic, not a democracy." Understand the Constitutional implications of that, and you know how far back into the past we are to be led.
Oddly, there are quite a lot fewer dictators in the world today than during the Cold War. Between the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the collapse of the US-backed juntas of Latin America, things have gotten shaky for dictators everywhere. Now there are plenty of authoritarian leaders whose elections are fishy. But even Africa no longer has the flamboyant tyrants of the recent past like Mobutu or Charles Taylor who butchered at will. Consider also the fall of Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, the old juntas of South Korea, Turkey, and Thailand. Finally the ongoing struggle in the Arab world.
The problem is, regardless of whom the rulers are or how they got there, few of them seem to obey American orders anymore, and we Americans seem only to recognize human rights violations by those who don't follow orders. Both the peace problem and the human rights problem increasingly involve the wealthy and powerful countries, not least the United States of America.
It's not unfair when everyone assumes every terrorist is anti-American or anti-white, when so many terrorists are right-wing "patriots" tied together by homegrown political networks that corporate media easily has the resources to investigate. Did American news media even mention that Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik read prominent American anti-Moslem blowhards for inspiration?
Even if they reported it,it wouldn't impact the reptile brains of the audience. It's like intentionally telling a sensational lie and then retracting it, knowing the latter will have less of an emotional impact.
She didn't win a majority of the vote. She took advantage of Britain's 3-party system to rule with a minority, just like Cameron.
As for "rice bowl" talk, it sounds a lot like Reagan's racist myth of the streets being full of welfare queens in Cadillacs. Now they're in fact full of homeless veterans and the mentally ill. Are the beneficiaries of Thatcherism truly the angels you make them out to be, and the coal miners she ruined truly villains? Seems these angels created a Ponzi scheme of real estate speculation, which ate up much of the real wealth supposedly created by the oil she lucked into. So when things collapsed again in 2008, what was the right-wing solution? Blame the poor again, and sabotage national healthcare to prepare the way for corporate takeover. Just like our GOP, Bill, whom you ostensibly oppose.
Jesper, America was founded by rich people who imported slaves for a living, or stole land from Indians for a living. So don't tell me that people aren't evil enough to deliberately make life worse for others - we're living proof that it can be a winning strategy. As for the practical matter of hurting people who can vote, we are in the process of finding ways to take away the vote from blacks yet again, and branding them all as likely criminals who can be gunned down or wrongly convicted whenever a white sheriff or district attorney needs to scare up white votes in an election (bet you don't have that in Sweden). Hatred is a winning strategy if:
a. it increases the turnout of your faction more than it does the enemy's
b. if you have an end game to disenfranchise the enemy for good, by putting them in prison, or terrorizing them into moving away, in sufficient numbers
Note that the wealthy class of the South has always supported these actions, all the way to Civil War, just as the rich supported murderous tyrants against democracy in Spain, Chile, etc. How many millions died from Western colonialism backed by business interests?
You could say all the same things about her dear friend Pinochet saving Chile from Allende. Meaning from the evil poor. Say it, Bill, let's see what kind of man you are.
I double dare you to defend the poll tax, an anti-democratic trick right out of our own Jim Crow.
That is because what appears to be an ingenious trap that our masters set for us -
1. Drive down wages by busting unions and outsourcing
2. Then blame #1 on blacks and corporate regulation, creating a vast reactionary movement based on nostalgia for the "good old days"
You end up with people permanently feeling that they've been cheated out of money they ought to have, chasing it by the means the corporate right has indoctrinated - tax cuts, education cuts, but not military cuts, etc. It becomes an economic race to the bottom, as workers become less and less able to get relevant training, and education is increasingly demonized. Eventually we sacrifice civilized standards, compassion, even our neighbors, to regain an economic surplus that will simply get carted off by our bosses and investors anyway. The worse they make things for us, the more desperate we are to give them what they want, as we've seen with fracking.
People in Iceland and Germany don't feel they were cheated out of some birthright. Though they did feel that way in Germany in 1933, and you know how that turned out.
The people claiming Thatcher made Britons better off are wrong, simply because the normal advance of technology is doing that even in "socialist" countries. In fact, the standard of living of ordinary Britons was far higher in the 1960s than it had been before the war, when the Tories' precious empire and superpower status were intact.
Where is the proof that non-rich people are benefitting more from the Thatcher-Reagan era of letting the rich rape society, than from the increasingly egalitarian half-century that preceded it? In the era of high corporate and income taxes, people got radios, refrigerators, cars and TVs which they paid for with real wage increases. Under the neo-Victorian model, the capitalists increase their CEO salaries and investment returns by orders of magnitude, drive down the real wages of everyone else, and then find that no one can afford to buy the goods they're selling. So the banks come along with investment and real estate bubbles and vast amounts of credit to keep rebooting the economy - for which they are well rewarded by becoming too big to be allowed to fail. Yes, technological gadgets have gotten cheaper, but they were already doing that under the New Deal model.
Thatcher and Reagan wanted back the 19th century, forever, like the right-wingers who succeeded them. I would rather destroy civilization and let the roaches take over than have that racist, arrogant and imperialistic time be our species' final fate.
As the divide gets bigger, your politicians cease to be your politicians. Look at America, where the rich can afford to buy both parties. As a result, we regard you Brits as hopelessly pinko, and plot to make your society even more unequal. How much US corporate money will find its way into David Cameron's coffers in exchange for sabotaging NHS to prepare for US-run corporate medicine?
Eventually it becomes a return to debt-based feudalism. Do you think Medieval injustice becomes tolerable because you get cellphones with that?
So the rich blackmailed the government into punishing the poor in exchange for coming back. Essentially the scenario of "Atlas Shrugged" - where's the resulting libertarian paradise?
Oh yeah, because the rich came back, their money poured into speculation and real estate bubbles. Then the bubbles burst in 2008. How do the tax revenues benefit when that happens? They don't - the country is undergoing another round of brutal austerity to appease the rich into spending again.
You're right about Iran, but if this is applied to sanctions generally, what do we do when a country is clearly engaged in aggression, like Japan was in China circa 1940? Would it have been moral to continue to do business with Japan as if nothing were happening? And note that Japan in 1940 still had an elected parliament, just as Iran does today. Voters will support leaders blindly when they face foreign retaliation, so sanctions won't work any better than they would against a genuine totalitarian state.
Is the problem with sanctions, or the hypocritical standards that citizens allow their leaders to use as to when to impose them? Because if it's the former, then there's really no good choices at all.
He's more of a hypocrite than bastards like Cheney who got deferments and then sent others to die and kill? There's millions of people out there whose hearts are as wicked as Cheney, all of them waving US flags when we go to war, and then a few even talking secession when they think the federal government is spending too much on feeding the poor.
Stop with the moral equivalence crap when it comes to neocons. They use this country like a pimp uses a whore.
Besides all the discerning reasons given by the other posters, I think that a war in the Korean peninsula is viewed as too damn disruptive of the global economy. The fantasy on Iran is that some sort of "surgical" strike can destabilize the regime enough that it will be overthrown from within, before it can blockade the Straits of Hormuz long enough to plunge the world into another depression. But a nuclear Korean war could shut down trade by Japan, South Korea, China, and the west coast of the US. That's a staggering amount of money. The investors view Asians as real, profitable human beings, not just abstractions like Moslems.
Because the big lie of "defense" is that we will ever have enough to be satisfied, instead of looking at our tax bill and demanding that our forces be used more aggressively to get more of the things we want besides legitimate security. Andrew Bacevich chronicled in his writings the ironic story of how the post-Vietnam Pentagon tried to protect its ass by demanding tons of spending, but also imposing the Powell Doctrine to prevent actually having to fight. Inevitably, politicians were elected who felt the spending had to be validated in the battlefield, no doubt with economic benefits in mind. This also happened with MAD. LBJ's people encouraged the USSR to build an arsenal similar to ours to create a stable deterrent balance; to prove they were different, Nixon and his DefSec Laird looked to build ABMs and load multiple warheads on missiles to overwhelm that advantage.
Actually, back in '07 or so I was hearing about talks between Saudi and Iran on settling some of their disputes. But the Bushites were on an all-out propaganda campaign to convince the Arab monarchies to fear Iran, in order to get their help in arresting the growing mess they themselves had made by creating a power vacuum in occupied Iraq. It sounds like Israel got its two cents' in first.
This obsession of a society with the forms of propriety and not the reality of injustice reminds me of an argument in Plato's Republic between Socrates and a young oligarch, Polemarchus, over the definition of justice. The latter's argument is the tribalist (now "patriot" or "conservative") position in its purest form, I think.
"Justice is doing good unto friends and harm unto enemies."
2500 years ago, the implications of this were obvious, and easily shot to pieces by Socrates. But there is a certain red meat there that is still delicious to our reptile brains. The sophistication of modern sophistry, at the command of Polemarchus' heirs, is to disguise our selfish cronyism (favors for our friends) under a myriad of causes, religions, moral habits, economic movements, and foreign alliances. Our friends might thus be tricking our enemies into voting for them, and we wink at that. But logical principles, in practice, will sometimes help our side, and sometimes the other side, and that's not tolerable. The adherence to ancient codes and scriptures, which have to be interpreted by wealthy specialists, solves the problem by somehow usually siding with the friends of the rich, and punishing their enemies. So religion and "traditional values" must be defended, even at a short-term cost to the defenders.
I think your observation is accurate, and it's partly because conservatives have to believe that rich people are superior to poor people to justify economic inequality, therefore the extent to which you are fully a person is based on how much property you have. The rich discharge their "responsibilities" by being greedy, aggressive and successful and thus making their tribe... uh, republic stronger. The poor are just holding it back with all their stupid rights.
Years ago a Reagan cabinet official admitted in his biography that the combo of tax cuts for the rich and big hikes in military spending were meant to create a future fiscal crisis that would force the dismantling of hated liberal social programs.
From that point on, militarism has been the most effective way for right-wingers to bleed money from social programs. It even allows them to insinuate that the supporters of the programs are sympathizers with the enemy du jour, whether Communist or Islamist.
Up until now, this ploy by corporate and racist conservatives has been so effective that the powerless libertarian faction has been able to safely condemn military spending, with no danger that actual military cuts would flow back to helping the people that they want Darwinistically expunged from the gene pool by the infallible Invisble Hand.
Now the country's broke, so again there is no danger of this. But now that one of them is a senator, what is he going to specify about military cuts in the future? Any dollar amount is potentially back on the table for the benefit of all us useless pinko welfare mothers in the real America. How many kids could get Head Start from cutting a single warplane from the budget?
Which of those two choices are more offensive to Paul's followers would be very interesting to know. Too bad they'll just turn it into another tax cut for the rich instead, as economically successful as all the other tax cuts they've gotten since America went into decline.
Because the same oppressive teachings are creeping back into Christian churches on the same grounds that you're spouting, and many Christians reject the idea that they must obey these teachings to be good Christians. Same for Judaism. If every religion is held hostage by its reactionary bigots, how long do you think it will be before we have a holy world war?
The problem here is, the capitalists starve the American people of education and science to cut taxes and to make them ignorant enough to lure back into 19th century deregulation and property rights. But they figure their corporations will be fine because they can always temporarily import Chinese and Indian tech-heads to brainstorm the profitable stuff. I.e, since our corporations are tied to our banks and our dollar, we can always outbid poor countries for brainpower. The Higgs boson does not deliver any royalty payments to the country that discovers it, so Wall Street doesn't give a damn.
In the long run, all of this is catastrophic. Basic paradigm shifts in technology can create huge swings in technological power. For instance, when a British hustler stole a state secret - the spinning jenny - and hightailed it to the US to create our textiles industry. Or the inability of America to understand the value of technologies it HAD developed - but which Japan exploited.
I guess if the Higgs boson could be used to nuke foreigners and get away with it, we'd be all over it.
The question is, how many things have to go wrong for a society before it becomes dysfunctional in the face of its competition? Historical researchers now look into past climate patterns to discover the causes of famines that ruined great empires like Rome, as well as self-inflicted environmental damage like lead poisoning.
How many things have to go wrong with the American way of life before we stop defending it as an absolute good?
The hidden assumption may be that the people of Arizona, as a whole, WANT cities to survive. If we look at the Tea Party ideology, it is rooted in the traditional hatred of cities in the South and West. Cities are full of Commies, faggots and ni**ers (formerly Jews too, but they've been recategorized), so the urban mentality must be to blame. Glenn Beck called one iteration of his hate cult "We Surround You". Meaning his redneck suburbs surround the pinko cities like Serb militias once surrounded and starved Sarajevo. Consider that a warning.
They live in a fantasy where the suburbs could go on by themselves once the cities are finally destroyed or turned into concentration camps. They think the suburbs are the lineal descendant of Jefferson's self-sufficient yeoman farmers and slave plantations and the King Ranch.
They are wrong, but they will refuse to quit until they've tested the proposition. Senator Ted Cruz's new obsession with supposed UN plans to destroy the American way of life by forcing everyone to live in cities ("Agenda 21") is the new conspiracy theory to motivate the GOP in the future, succeeding the International Communist Conspiracy, the Islamic Caliphate Conspiracy, and the Global Warming Conspiracy. It will support GOP plans to cut off cities from all government funding whatsoever, destroy their liberal school systems, and throw as many of their ghetto residents in privatized prisons (labor camps) as possible. By ruining the cities, they will ruin their enemies. That's the only measure that counts to them.
America doesn't have farmers anymore. It has monster conglomerates like Archer Daniels Midland. Only giant corporations have the cash and technology to keep cheap food flowing out of an unnatural environment. So their advantage is growing as the weather gets worse and smaller farms fail.
Consider the idea that there are people who wanted our public schools ruined and replaced by private institutions they could control, and then you see that the right-wing support of funding war has grown to justify the defunding of those parts of government that help the people it hates.
You mean 400,000 Indians murdered by Guatelmala's pro-US oligarchs? 600,000 Chinese and leftists murdered by the supporters of Suharto's junta in Indonesia, which the US became very friendly with, followed by hundreds of thousands more dead in East Timor and other Indonesian suppressions? Or all the people killed by the European empires that the US maintained business relations with - reciprocated by their ignoring our bloody conquest of the West and the Philippines?
Tell me how many Baluchis have been killed by the Pakistani military - while the US showered it with aid after it beheaded a leftist elected president?
I think your definition of liberty is very different than mine.
We don't see any problem with all that land we stole from the Indians either - as long as the Indians live under "freedom" as mainstream Americans define it. So stolen land good, Jim Crow buses bad.
To put it more bluntly, we believe that we need the economic value of that land to live as we deserve, but we live under the myth that racist practices are unnecessary to support our economic system. Before the latter view was seemingly obsoleted by America's postwar prosperity, Jim Crow was still a mainstream American belief. Reverse that prosperity in the 21st century for most folks, and Jim Crow will start to look pretty necessary again.
You can't plant colonies anymore. Violation of the international law of occupation. No one else has started a colony on foreign soil with legal extraterritoriality since 1945 - depending on what the legal status of Tibet was pre-1962.
The three biggest nuclear accidents happened in the three most powerful countries of the latter 20th century; Russia, the US, and Japan. The two superpowers that had done the most nuclear research, and the great economic miracle nation built on quality engineering. All their nuclear industries were exposed as corrupt... to the core.
France is the only one left to make it a dirty sweep of the major nuclear players you'd expect to know what they're doing. No chance that its statist model would be embraced by capitalist investors anywhere else. All the remaining countries are ones you'd be afraid of having any nuclear technology at all - given that Germany has opted out. Chinese earthquake, anyone?
I think your description of the sort of leader Chavez was is very discerning. They are the best their beleagured populations can do against wealthy oligarchies, but they're a terribly weak reed for US radicals to hang their hopes of world revolution on. But when those impoverished populations take matters into their own hands, like the mass Indian movements of modern Latin America, that's when progressives need to start taking notes.
Cheney didn't say America was weak and surrounded. He said that it was a superpower, that it was special, that it should not have to ask when it was born to demand.
In fact, Kissinger had to be careful to which audience he'd admit America needed allies, when he was playing the China card against the Soviets. Privately, he and Nixon were declinists, believing that relative US power would inevitably decline and that the US would have to submit to playing diplomatic power games, but that has never been acceptable to the GOP.
The problem is, I've never seen anyone in any faction of the far right say that there was anything BAD about the 19th century. But I've seen:
a. a movement to repeal the 13th Amendment
b. movements by a former slave state to secede (again)
c. a Tea Party congressman call for the repeal of general election of senators - a reform that dates all the way back to Andrew Jackson
d. Rep. Paul call Lincoln a tyrant
e. a consistent refusal by Republicans to categorize abortion clinic bombers or the KKK as terrorist groups
(a) is crucial. You talk as if the TP was spontaneous. In the '90s I was paying attention to right-wing extremists, who had not yet been given the opportunity by the Kochs, et al to go mainstream. Many extremist ideas are first broached in places like gun magazines, then mainstreamed over time. The right-wing argument against the 13th Amendment is chilling, and consistent with the neo-Confederate, theocratic, and libertarian wings of the movement. To wit: blacks can never be citizens of the USA unless state legislatures vote it in.
Now do you believe that any legislature that would go through the trouble to nullify the 13th Amendment or restart the Civil War would then grant blacks the right to vote?
I've never heard any of these people say that they MIND that their beloved, omnipotent, infallible (once reinterpreted by David Barton) Founding Fathers gave the vote to so few Americans.
If you ever see in a far-right publication the words "The Founding Fathers made America a Republic, not a Democracy" (as I have many times), what does that mean other than that the vote should be restricted the way it generally was in 1789 - meaning only white males who meet property quotas?
Our history was grotesque, and these folks embrace it without reservation. They must know that minorities will go to war to keep their right to vote. The gun magazines are full of articles about "civil unrest", almost salivating at the prospect. Again, it's unlikely that any movement that takes over a state with the intent to restore the white monopoly on power will desire any less of a monopoly on violent force.
I don't see any evidence that the Tea Party wants the military reduced. Now that Rep. Paul is retiring, we can see everyone who joined his movement only wants to cut the money that goes to "inferior", "lazy", pinko welfare Negroes because surely they are to blame for all our problems. And in case the victims resist, take away their right to vote with Voter ID laws, and if they fight, herd them into privatized prisons to serve as slave labor.
This has always been the plan. The Tea Party always wanted the 19th century back, so why wouldn't it want all the horrors of that time as well? The corporations will be the new plantation owners, and the Tea Party will be proud to be the rednecks who whip the slaves.
I agree with this, if only because we will never be able to restore any social spending in the future as long as the cult of the all-powerful military is not shattered. Because people don't have objective measures of "security" and they are easily frightened by the outside world due to their vast ignorance, warmongering has become the right wing's preferred tool to starve its enemies out of the federal budget.
We need to have a forced cut, and then wake up the next morning to realize that we're still alive. Only then will people even begin to question the premises of infinite military power.
Whereas the cuts on the domestic side will definitely hurt a lot of people, and they should be radicalized into disruptive action on getting their cuts restored. If we won't fight harder for justice than we do for our fantasies, what future could our country have anyway?
I think one unexamined phenonemon is that a colonial oppressor always creates a resistance that goes out of its way to hold the opposite views to the oppressor on every possible subject. Therefore it is unsurprising that right-wing European colonialists found so many natives turning to Communism, which offended them in every way.
The people you conquer have no means to get revenge on you except to hurt you in every non-material way. If your corporations bribe and co-opt their leaders, they will embrace an ideology that abolishes property rights or subjugates them to God's dictate. If you Westernize their co-opted elites with feminism and religious tolerance, they may wildly increase their traditional misogyny and anti-Semitism as a desperate "F**K You".
Whereas the best thing that ever happened to capitalism in East Asia seems to have been the end of the US propping up South Vietnam in 1975. It's as if the day there were no Yankees to negatively associate business with, Thailand was flooded with Japanese businessmen, and making stuff to export to America became a point of national pride.
Why is it so hard for an American to imagine that if his country was conquered by aliens, he'd go out of his way to defy their beliefs, no matter how barbaric he'd have to become? I'd sure do it.
So Christian folks are morally better because they slaughter each other over the relative power of their nation-states - all the way up to nuclear weapons? To me, it's pretty disgusting that Protestants and Catholics kill each other in one century, and then in the next they ally with those of the other religion to wage wars over the right to form republics, and then in the next century monarchists and republicans ally to wage wars over which state coalition will dominate Europe, and finally everyone who supports the bourgoise state allies against those who espouse global class revolution.
Years ago I noted that whenever rank & file opponents of teaching evolution were interviewed, they didn't care much as to whether it was true or not. They were full of fear that their kids no longer blindly obeyed them, and they clung to the indoctrination of an omnipotent God as the basis for parental authority. They expected the schools to do their dirty work on this front, and they turned to extremist theocrats when that didn't happen.
I don't think teaching Christian Fundamentalism (creationism is just a small part of the agenda) itself is what depressed grades, but the fact that kids get the message from their parents that facts, numbers, history, etc. must be twisted to support the tribe's self-justifying dogma. If the facts are being rewritten all the time, it's easier to just know what the ideology demands, and then prove your loyalty by yelling ever-more preposterous lies than your neighbors do.
Until the corporations consider this to be a negative rather than a positive, the "market" won't punish these regions. Now consider why the corporations prefer workers who are ignorant, innumerate, xenophobic, warlike, and filled with fear.
The growing authoritarianism of religion is happening in the damnedest places.
For instance, Pentecostalism has a pretty wild history of independent congregations, but now it is falling under the sway of the theocratic New Apostolic Reformation, a movement that has been branded a heresy by Pentecostal clergymen twice before and yet keeps coming back stronger. Besides creating Manchurian candidates like its anointed hero (literally) Sarah Palin to sneak into secular power, these schemesters also send agents into other denominations' churches, a practice called "steeplejacking". The "apostle" part is important. He acts as a secret cult leader, attracting clergymen who then act as infiltrators to alter the doctrines of their churches to conform to the movement. They also kick back money to the apostle. Congregations are thus losing their historic power to elect and eject their pastors to these maniacs, who prophesize that they will lead God's army to earthly victory in the End Times by conquering the world(postmillenialism) and eliminating all other forms of religion.
And furthermore, Sedona, it was only 27 years between the coup and the hostage-taking. It's been 34 years since the hostage-taking and today. Yet when you say the coup should be left in the past, you imply the Iranians of 1980 should have just forgiven that essential usurpation of their sovereignity, but we Americans are still justified in being mad about the hostage-taking.
Your own words are proof that the US coup was based on a lie, that Mossadegh was a Soviet agent. Communism was the justification for our role in killing over a million Vietnamese, and for the killing of 600,000 ethnic Chinese by the US-backed Suharto regime, and the killing of 400,000 Indians by the US-backed government of Guatemala. So this is not an isolated incident. Now there are new lies about Iran being manufactured to justify what might well have to be a nuclear first-strike.
In Texas, to get state ID you have to go to a DPS, and as the article indicates ours are not distributed based on any notion of equity. If you're less likely to have a car you're less likely to even know where a DPS is, or have a schedule to allow you to wait out the long lines.
But all suburban whites have cars, and getting a driver's license automatically registers you as a voter if you qualify.
This demographic game is how blacks lost their right to vote under Jim Crow. The laws involved did not mention the race of the individual, only a sociological variable far more likely to be true of a black man than a white man. That's how we do it down South.
You're absolutely correct, but the Left focused on the wrong Carter sins. In retrospect, the decision to support the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan BEFORE the Soviets even invaded (a forgotten fact), was the one that got us screwed. His NSA, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later gloated to an interviewer that while he warned Carter that CIA intervention would trigger a Soviet invasion, he personally wanted it all to happen because he knew it would become the Soviets' Vietnam. Carter and Zbiggy refused to consider the bigger picture: the US was committing to using extremist Islam as a weapon to roll back Communism. This coincided with the Islamic Revolution in Iran and a very confused attempt to try to back the hardline Islamists to forestall Marxist factions getting the upper hand - which we were very quickly to regret. Not long after, Pakistan's Islamist army beheaded its socialist prime minister and set up its cabal with Reagan and Saudi Arabia to turn Afghanistan into a Mujahedeen theme park. We also forgave Egypt its fling with socialist Nasser by allying with his more conservative replacement and sending him a billion $ a year in aid.
I think the message that we sent to a billion Moslems was that we would kill them if they became Socialist, but we and our Saudi buddies would shower them with $ and guns if they became Salafis and killed Commies. Many embraced the message. We destroyed the USSR and now live in more fear than ever.
Nothing can really be changed unless Americans can be led away from their faith in the efficacy of violence to keep the world rigged in our favor. It goes without saying that we believe the world owes us a living, and hey, here's this neat arsenal in our hands!
However, as a practical matter we can do this:
(a) have a real debate on whether America requires global control, or whether it has a limited sphere of influence like any past empire. This is the only way to jettison our expensive commitments like NATO.
(b) prepare the replacement of the current dysfunctional military with completely new services that reflect the technological landscape. Do we need a manned air force? Does the Marine Corps have the tools to take care of the vast majority of our overseas activities? Should the Navy have any other job but to transport the Marines and patrol the seaways with a handful of invincible submarines? What is the Army for?!
As part of the derangement of empire, it has become impossible even for conservatives to question any of this. The peace movement, on the other hand, is so absolute in its opposition to any US armed force at all that it has zero credibility with the public. Not surprising. I am proposing that America merely demote itself from an unsustainable Superpower to a long-term Great Power. Most Americans, left, right, and viewless, have no idea what these concepts mean or how they function in a complex international system. They just see our arsenals piling up and either assume it is the root of all good or the root of all evil.
Hagel probably represents most closely the conservatism of Dwight Eisenhower, the one who warned us about the Military-Industrial Complex on his way out the door. Point being, if the Cold War had ended on Ike's watch he would have been glad to shut 4/5ths of the Pentagon down (thus turning it into a Unigon) because he understood that there were no other existential threats out there, and the effects of the war machine were not at all conservative, deforming markets and putting obligations on the working class (taxes, the draft) that made them rightly demand that the government do things for them too.
The fact that this sort of logic is now considered treasonous by so many current Republicans opens some interesting peepholes into their plans for the world's future.
See Richard Rosecrance's "The Rise and Fall of the Trading State", on the problem of profitable trading empires degenerating into expensive bureaucratic empires because of the problem of getting committed to local conflicts. As always, Thucydides was there first.
I just checked the DVD box for "Syriana", and indeed George Clooney was one of the producers of both Argo and this movie, which takes a far darker view of America's role in the world and has a more ambiguous story. "Syriana" was not a success. Any opinions on whether that was because it was less pro-American, or because it simply didn't give the audience anyone it wanted to cheer for?
But that's the problem with Americans, isn't it? We want clear heroes and villains, regardless of where we are on the political spectrum.
Addressing the movie's refusal to confront the belief of Iranians that the seizure was just retribution for America's past crimes there:
I think what's worst of all is that even if you spent 2 hours explaining to the average ignoramus what crimes we committed, he would still say the Iranian people have no right to punish America. Why?
"Because it's different when we do it."
In other words, we Americans dominate the world for its own good. Any crimes we committed to stop Communism are instantly justified, because ANY loss ANYWHERE to the Reds could have lost the ENTIRE planet! So sacrificing one, or a dozen, ordinary countries (Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) to "improve our strategic position" was a regrettable necessity because we're a special country and our enemies are special villians. The victims of our crimes are just small-minded, thinking only of their own petty justice when that might serve the cause of the greater evil we're battling.
And now the same is true of those villagers we're bombing, because if we don't some guys in caves might conquer the world for Allah!
If it were only a matter of morality, you'd have a point. However, diplomatic immunity is part of the rules that make it possible for governments to communicate with each other, a system accreted painfully over centuries. Embassies have always been used for spying and chicanery, but kings put up with this because they needed to not be in total darkness about each other. The alternative would be a real state of nature, every kingdom out to destroy every other one all the time like in Mongol days.
However, the problem you're pointing out is that diplomacy operates on a fiction of equality between states. In the past, when technology limited their military reach, big empires either ate all their small neighbors or ran up against a big neighbor. So the problem of big powers screwing small powers tended to reach an equilibrium. Now you have a superpower, America, something unprecedented in its power, its reach, and relative to that its ignorance and indifference about the outside world. There is no countervailing power that can make the US behave sensibly.
So the question is, why should anyone in the world respect diplomacy when the interstate system is so horribly unequal?
You probably still believe Lyndon Johnson's version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident... and that it justifies the million Vietnamese who died as a result. Oh yeah, and the Spanish blew up the Maine.
The patriotic lies are the ones that get people killed with our tax dollars.
Because it's not like mainstream apolitical Americans aren't being continually bombarded with nationalistic and even racist bias about our history that Stone needs to offset, right?
Well, Sedona, I'm sure Iran will look better after your neocon buddies send the Pentagon to do to it what we did to Iraq... and Afghanistan... and Vietnam... and Cambodia. The way was prepared by hatemongering propagandists, anti-Communists and anti-Moslems, putting out bullshit about the _____ Menace. Lurid tales about babies pulled from incubators, weapons of mass destruction, etc.
Are you auditioning to join this proud lineage? Or do you ever bother to soil your hands with suggestions for a non-violent solution that doesn't violate international law?
True, but with local weather patterns changing so wildly, is there any region where it's safe to grow a certain crop without massive human intervention? Here in Houston the rice industry has to wonder what it will do if we have another big drought like the one that (barely) ended last year. The beef industry has already announced big price hikes because that drought disrupted cattle feeding.
But you need electricity to desalinate the water. So did the Saudis really know they would have solar power available when they started this process all those years ago? And will they actually build solar for that purpose, or will they cheap out and burn some hydrocarbons instead?
Furthermore, even if they install solar to run a desalinization plant, that solar could have been installed near a city instead to provide more electricity to local consumers. Then the food could be replaced by food produced in a less hostile climate where you don't have to expend so much energy, like some of the poorer east Mediterranean states. Not like Saudi has a problem with its trade deficit.
Energy decisions are complex, you see. Opportunity costs, offsetting effects, regional price differentials. It would prevent more CO2 if all those solar cells being installed in Germany were installed in Italy, Greece and Spain instead - helping to relieve their desperately beleagured balance sheets as well. But existing practices always get in the way.
This year might be seen as a tipping point about what you can say about Palestinians in Hollywood, a liberal gatekeeper town and certainly a gatekeeper town on Israeli issues.
You mean like the system that collapsed in 1929 after 60 years of increasingly heinous "panics"?
What good does it do to put tax cuts back in people's pockets when the bosses keep driving down our wages via outsourcing? How many Americans have suffered double-digit real wage cuts since Reagan sent the word that it was open season on union jobs? Meaning they've lost more to the relentless demands of the investor class than they ever paid in Federal taxes.
All private property systems tend towards infinite inequality of wealth - barring some effective redistributive practice, or extinction. Normally there's either a revolution, or conquest by outsiders.
Well, other than the entire drill-baby-drill party in the US continually telling us that if we sacrifice each others' health and safety to suck out more oil and gas it will usher in a nirvana of cheap energy that will bring back the good old days.
Looks more to me that oil prices are acting as a choker collar, making a real recovery impossible. Whenever there's too much good economic news, the oil price spikes, and then people get scared and stop buying and investing, and then oil goes down a little. And it's destroying the lives of Americans descended from ten generations who considered growth a birthright, thus leaving them unable to adapt.
Well hell, the capitalists get to establish how much is too much by raising prices until they can't find a scam for getting away with it anymore.
Labor markets suck because there are many "sellers", few "buyers". Markets always favor the side with few bidders. When those same workers go home and become consumers, they usually find they in their millions are up against a handful of sellers. There is no relationship between what I get paid to make an object and how much it sells for, until I and my fellow consumers go broke, as they have with increasing frequency in recent decades.
If you mean that "decent", middle-class people are being raped by lazy welfare negroes, how about the $750,000,000,000 a year that goes to the military and its consequent debts - both from past deficits and obligations to veterans? Is our military installed in over 130 countries really serving the middle class, or creating pacified zones to ship their jobs to? And when have money from right-wing tax cuts ever gone to anyone but the rich?
Oh, and Bill, great work completely distracting us from the point of the article you're attacking - that Latin America stopped torturing when it stopped obeying the United States of America. Is there a reason you don't want to discuss that or its moral implications?
Also largely successful. That's the part the corporate media doesn't want us to know. We, and especially our billionaires, do not know or want what's best for the developing world.
Milton Friedman and his acolytes laid the hyper-capitalist ideological foundation used by Pinochet to justify his brutality against the poor and leftist. The CIA assisted Friedman's boys all over Latin America in doing this. Read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", a book whose truthfulness was borne out by its forecast of the homecoming of Friedmanite "libertarian" tyranny in the form of Scott Walker and his war to destroy public sector unions and state universities - coordinated with many other GOP governors and legislatures all introducing similar bills simultaneously.
And if we were glad for what happened to Chile, we are sick and have no business running the world.
As for the actual assassination and "suicide", I don't think the readers of lurid spy novels from the Cold War would be too surprised. It's normal-level ruthlessness from any government in wartime, even if its supportive voters refuse to mind that the government keeps the war going for economic and political benefits.
The problem is the censorship, because of the slippery slope. In Israel, much more so than the US, EVERYTHING can be branded a security risk, even a drop in the stock market, or proof of a pollution problem, or an expose of any member of the economic elite. To say nothing of treatment of Palestinians.
There's no profit in just letting natural occurrences destroy private property. At least the private property of anyone that matters.
But if it's a man-made occurrence, that means men are getting paid to cause destruction, and they will pay to shield themselves from the law so they can continue.
My point, Bill, is that Christiane is delusional that the US is pushing Turkey into the EU as part of a conspiracy to destroy the latter. Turkey wants in, so it must be a benefit to be in, and there are still plenty of Bush stay-behinds in the foreign policy establishment who will oppose anything Turkey wants just because they're neocon bastards. Hegel needs to wield a mighty meat-cleaver when he gets to the Pentagon to clean out these moles, but there's no willingness to accept that GOP presidents play these games with personnel.
Besides, Turkey's economy looks a hell of a lot better right now than the "Christian" Mediterranean.
Secular humanism was simply the freeing of humans from the monstrous beliefs and superstitions of Medieval Europe (witchhunting, Crusades, the Inquisition). Meaning that since then people's beliefs have changed many times on many issues, not held in place by a monolithic, self-interested clergy that claims inerrancy.
And if your faith requires that women and gays be treated as subhuman non-citizens, and mine doesn't, human rights says our faiths are not morally equivalent. So be honest and denounce human rights as "secular humanism", and see whom you will be in bed with.
I don't think Ratzinger would quit unless he had a plan to get a younger, more vigorous far-right pig to replace him, a Pope Scalia if you will.
I have very limited knowledge of Catholic politics, but something strange has been going on for a couple of years now, documented by articles in http://www.talk2action.com, where the Ratzinger acolytes in the high US church leadership are aggressively embracing all far-right GOP views. Before that time, these clergymen focused on two big bugaboos, abortion/contraception and total submission to their authority. But then not long before the stage-managed rise of Paul Ryan, Santorum, et al, they went all Tea Party, attacking the very legitimacy of Federal power, becoming capitalist sycophants, and of course dropping the fig leaf of pacifism. Ryan's last-second "conversion" from Ayn Rand to Opus Dei was so transparent that it was as if the whole gang was signalling that Rand's vicious Darwinism was now the doctrine of the inner church.
What was that all about? Were Ratzinger's boys preparing for the Orwellian rewriting of Catholic doctrine to be carried out by the next Pope? Were they trying to compete with the extremist evangelical/Tea Party movement, or were they signalling their surrender to it, giving it the valuable disguise of "diversity" in exchange for a protected status of junior partner in the incoming capitalist theocracy?
Did you pay no attention to the growing conflict between Israel and Turkey over Gaza? The neocons hate everyone who criticizes Israel in any way, and try to isolate and destroy them. In fact, Turkey's resistance to the US and Israel is dangerous to them because it might inspire other NATO countries to be more independent.
But how easy access between countries affecting everyone outisde the US? Doesn't it seem that for some years there has been a growing gulf between the beliefs of Americans and the beliefs of the Rest of the World? Many cynics always believed that our fellow Americans are just stupid bigots and nothing can be done about it. What would happen if American kids were in fact constantly reading foreign websites and their stupid bigot parents didn't know about it - or didn't understand how much their own attitudes are the product of ignorance and xenophobia?
Anyway, the genie is out of the bottle. All the technology mags have suddenly started running cover stories about civilian applications of drones.
Well, civilians in America are too broke to buy drones built by the ripoff artists of the military-industrial complex. Actually, everyone's too broke for that.
So the drones will be built in China, just like I warned everyone years ago, and then it will be outsourced to really poor and messed-up countries - the very ones America and Wall Street seem to demand the right to screw over. Soon, they will cost less than your monthly cell-phone bill.
Do we all see how this turns out? DARPA is working on stuff scarier than Terminator, robot fish, robot insects, the ability to infest everything in normal life with spies and killers, and all of it will get copied in a few product cycles by people whom we've exploited.
It's too late to stop drones, or to repair the international law we've dismantled. We've thus lowered the moral threshhold for molesting people in foreign countries such that ever more-trivial causes, like resource shortages or intellectual-property violations, will be good enough reason.
That's why America was isolationist until the minute we had the power to be on top of the world. The assumption of internationalism was that we could share power with other nations. But Americans have never wanted to share. We've always hated diplomacy, balance of power, alliance politics, etc. We only want to deal with the outside world when we have a monopoly of power. Now that this monopoly is naturally eroding, we're going crazy trying to either hold onto it or go back to isolationism.
Drones don't operate on real-time intelligence, because some pimply idiot at a console in New Mexico knows nothing about the society he's blowing up, any more than he did last year when he was playing video games in his parents' basement. The Green Beanies at least try to learn something about the people they're dealing with.
Of course, if American didn't declare its right to control everything that happens everywhere on Earth, it would be much less of a handicap for us that we are, from the leadership down to the classes the grunts are recruited from, xenophobic morons and if anything are worse now than during World War 2. Even if such a right existed, which I think is absurd, it would come with the sacred responsibility for our entire polity to know everything possible about the societies we molest when we put military installations in over 130 countries. This website continually runs stories about American ignorance in just one region of the world.
That, JT, is why having fewer and fewer people participating in the political process puts more and more power into the hands of tiny special interest groups. America has, as we all know, much lower voter turnout rates than are normal in the rest of the First World, and we get the politics we get, held hostage by crazies because the rest of us have had our cynicism magnified by a deliberate program to make us drop out.
You are also being ridiculously simplistic in saying that the Marshall Plan was the only foreign initiative the US was engaged in during the early Cold War. The new CIA was recruiting Nazis wholesale for their expertise in Eastern Europe - with many in Washington calling for "rolling back" Communism, you can't help but see the utility in using those Nazis to organize covert actions and subversion.
Furthermore, Kennan himself argued that the US needed to keep the rivaly with the USSR a European matter. Instead, it arrogantly took to viewing any Communist, Marxist, Socialist, or labor organizer anywhere on the planet as a beast to be bombed or assassinated. Our worst crimes, Bill, were all outside of Europe.
I once read "The Pentagon Papers" to search for the moment when the US was inexorably committed to destoying Vietnam in order to save it. I found it in a State Dept. paper from '47 or '48. It literally rolled together the very different countries of Thailand, Burma, and the French and British colonies of Southeast Asia with the language of a corporate report read by wealthy idiots in a Wall Street boardroom, as one undifferentiated mass of brown people who needed new management to be kept under control. It was as if Coca-Cola was looking for a new advertising agency because "those people just don't get it".
This dictating of how these people were to be governed violated both US and international law. Of course their analysis was shallow - they were trying to dictate events in every corner of the world, with no real guide but ideology.
To add to Prof. Cole's comments, Cheney and his acolytes in the Project for a New American Century, who all got jobs in the Administration, rejected anything short of US control of the oil of Iraq and Iran in their articles. Buying oil from Saddam Hussein was not acceptable. They claimed that the US could maintain global dominance - not something Chomsky made up, but what they really said - via the leverage that came from controlling the regimes that sat on these two critical pools of oil.
Cheney also said in his American Petroleum Institute speech before he became VP that the state oil companies would be the main obstacle to the great increase of oil production needed for the expansion of the global economy in the next century. Now which states was he talking about? Obviously Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq and Iran mattered most. The neocons wanted to relocate the US bases from Saudi, a point of embarassment for the King, to Iraq. Bush and Cheney also insulted and embarassed Putin repeatedly during their time in office, and plotted the BTC pipeline to screw him out of the markets of Europe. So what we have here was the US trying to curry favor with the one state oil company that had a deep relationship with the US oil giants, invading two others, and marginalizing the last and making it as hostile as possible.
We invaded Iraq for its place in what the neocons thought was a grand strategy for extorting compliance from countries desperate for what Cheney ADMITTED would become a scarce resource - which incoming scarcity Bush, Cheney, the GOP and the oil companies refused to inform the American public about. The US was trying to control everything from pipeline routes to nations, so it could make things harder for the producers and consumers that defied it, and easier for the ones that obeyed it. Investors logically would punish the former and reward the latter.
In fact, that power has been exercised by Saudi Arabia every time it chooses to increase or decrease production due to political events - from the Reagan-Saudi scheme to crash oil prices to destroy the USSR (a historical fact), to the Saudi increase in production to cover the losses from Libya during its civil war. Before that, the state of Texas literally had the power to increase production quotas to stabilize the global economy during a crisis. Think about how much weaker America became after that era ended circa 1970.
Too bad the banksters aren't held under the much broader standards of RICO and anti-terrorist laws, where the government gets to seize everything. Investors need to be punished into taking a close look at the crimes of their hirelings. Instead, investors legally can sue those hirelings if they haven't done everything to maximize profits that they think they can get away with under the law, cutting the margin closer and closer.
The corporation, under American law, is an institution designed to screw everything and everyone, privatize the gains, immunize the investors, and socialize the damage. Whatever beliefs the Founding Fathers had about the incentives our propertied class had in protecting society and its future mean nothing to a computerized stock-trading program crunching profit figures. The citizens cannot win.
To me, it's fascinating to watch the American people indoctrinated into treating Israel as an extension of their own values surrounded by the dark-skinned "Other". Precisely because most people haven't considered Middle Eastern issues in any factual depth, they react to their emotions. What emotions are at work here?
This is why I wanted to know how the Tea Party in Congress would deal with Hegel, whose foreign policy is the closest thing they will ever get to their supposed hero Ron Paul. Since the real TP maniacs are in the House, we won't get to find out unless Hegel is confirmed. But I've long suspected that under their supposed libertarian, isolationist skins, most are just Christian Zionists, white supremacists, and imperialists who not only wish to return America, but the entire world, to the 19th Century by force to resolve their unquenchable paranoia.
I don't think Hegel's concern is with just causes, but with the national interest. Which is exactly what we citizens should require. The case that just causes support the national interest exists, but not in all cases. Stopping Hitler was an extraordinary case because Hitler was propounding the economic model of a state turned into a pure predator, invading its neighbors, stripping their resources, then invading the next country over, to the ends of the Earth. It gets much tougher when you're trying to distinguish our national interest in stopping ethnic cleansing in the Balkans versus stopping genocide in Rwanda. I think there was a difference, but it takes a tough-minded person to draw the distinction and stick to it. If Hegel can't get this job because of an arrogant special interest group employing insane arguments, then forget about a rational accounting of national interest.
It's absurd to say that Cheney and the neocons weren't trying to use color revolutions to weaken Russia. They turned Georgia into a US weapons proxy - they were just idiots to think the Georgians would stand up to a Russian retaliation. They tried damn hard to tilt the Ukrainian elections. They tried to buy or muscle control of all the ex-Soviet 'Stans. They built the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, whose truly bizarre route serves no purpose but to link what were thought to be anti-Russian states, to block Russian energy sales to Europe.
So the question you all should be asking is,
a. Do the Russians have the right to do the same nasty things to maintain a sphere of influence that the US does?
b. Should Putin think that things are completely different with Obama instead of Bush in charge?
Putin would rightly argue that Obama won't be around forever, and he has to grab every advantage while he can against future US craziness.
The solution for this would be for Obama to talk seriously with Putin about what the balance of power should be between their states, with solid guarantees and the understanding of retaliation if those guarantees are violated. This is what the rulers of the old Great Powers used to do. But it's now impossible for any US president to vocalize any limits on US power, because the people are taught that everyone else in the world who isn't our lackey is the New Hitler.
There's getting to be a new wave of African immigration too. It's been going on in Houston for years, bourgeoise Nigerians following the trail blazed by basketball immortal Hakeem Olajuwon. They actually have an ethnic, English-language newspaper here, as well as a digital subchannel on broadcast TV. Nigerian soap operas are a trip.
Hard to figure out the effects of this incoming group. I'd hate to see a brain drain further retard Africa's development. They also seem to include a lot of extremist Pentecostals (like those pushing the death-to-gays law in Uganda). However, they could become so successful as to be a positive influence in America. I think this will be yet another ethnic group you can count on the Democratic side as we get to the 2nd generation.
I think the GOP's problem is more fundamental than that, which ironically makes its followers more vigorous and intimidating.
I think the bubble of received beliefs are entirely self-serving for the followers, given what they want out of life. We may say that a working-class white man who opposes decent wages and living conditions for the poor just to spite non-whites is voting against his own interests. He may say that it is not his "place" to demand a greater share of the profits of his bosses, whom he instinctively feels are leaders of his tribe, his blood, his volk. He may feel that being part of the Master Race is all that makes him special, and unions won't change that. Anything that weakens his tribe threatens his status.
This is the way in which the rich have profited from destroying the rational aspirations of the successful working class of 50 years ago. The irrational aspirations are actually more powerful than the rational ones ever could be. The racist tribalist, and his cousin the religious fanatic, is capable of feats, monstrous feats, that the ordinary bourgeoise consumer can't imagine. Those elites which can manipulate these ancient and reactionary beliefs thus can bully vast numbers of ordinary people who lack the will to fight back.
When division is not enough, subdivide. It's not like the Pashtuns voted in Karzai as head Pashtun. He was a "resistance figure" who, along with Zalmay Khalizad, lobbied the Taliban on behalf of Unocal Oil getting the pipeline deal over a rival Pakistani bid. The Taliban, a creature of the Pakistani ISI, chose Pakistan. When the Taliban were defeated and we had no way to make our Northern Alliance partners palatable to the Pashtuns, we rewarded these two men.
I think grudges are held pretty long in that part of the world.
The reason why every conqueror fails in Afghanistan is that every conqueror wants the same thing - for the place to be kept quiet so it can't disrupt more important places.
So you go in to install a strongman and the Afghans pull out their ultimate weapon: disintegration. They have evolved the perfect defense for their situation, institutions that collapse before a conqueror can employ them. Since Afghans, unlike most people, don't need functioning institutions to organize themselves for violence, are in fact better at do-it-yourself, the conqueror can never stabilize the country.
Too bad that this evolutionary strategy leaves them with no legal means of survival, but that's where the narcotics rackets kick in.
The bigger problem, we see, is that there's always another conquerer who thinks he will do better.
You must be right, because if the American people had really believed the bullshit they were told that any of the wars since 1945 were as important as the war against the Nazi and Japanese empires, they would have immediately demanded a debate on how the necessary sacrifices in comfort and wealth would be distributed. In 2001 did the government immediately open war factories to get the unemployed off the streets? Did it sell war bonds in every movie theater? Did taxes even go up? No, they were immediately cut. The president even told everyone to go out and buy stuff so the terrorists could not claim the victory of having started a US depression.
In other words, the masses are in on this scam as much as the elites. It's just that the masses comply because they can't bear to sacrifice anything but their liberties due to their rapacious, dope-addict-like appetites.
This is not the first revolution to be violently divided between urban and rural populations. Recall the conflicts in Russia, where the rural-oriented Social Revolutionary party carried out the February Revolution, but that party's hardline wing (including Leon Trotsky!) turned on the new pro-war leader, and allied with the urban Bolsheviks to carry out the October Revolution.
We also see the urban-rural hatred in Mao's China, in Kampuchea, and apparently in the back-and-forth fighting in Thailand in recent years. Let's not forget some nasty business in the early USA - Shay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion involved rural anger with the new arrangements.
However, the historical trend is for poor, fast-reproducing rural populations to flood into cities. The question is, can religious fundamentalists really hold onto the extremity of their beliefs for more than a generation once they're living in a cosmopolitan and interdependent environment?
This is way beyond the Lewinsky scandal, because it is the GOP and Tea Party desperately spinning out a darker narrative repeated on hundreds of issues by thousands of propagandists: that Democrats, in fact anyone to the left of them, are not real Americans, and even are supernaturally punished by God if they are elected into any office.
This is something that leftists ought to easily recognize and unite against. But as we see in these comments, the Left always has too many internal grudges to recognize an existential threat.
Would (D) include getting "us" out of their country so they could deliver it unto the control of their Wahhabist masters in Saudi Arabia?
It's very telling that you consider both Gaddafi and hardline Islamists - whose doctrines opposed each other in every way, and who did everything in their power to exterminate each other last year - to be better than any government that the Libyan people would elect. Do you reserve the right of sovereignity only to a tiny fringe of extremist lunatics who know better than the masses?
It sort of parallels extreme haters of Obama from both the American Right and Left looking to destroy the current empire out of certainty that only their own kind will rule the rubble.
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Joe, when Russia reduced its military spending, the US continually humiliated it by moving into its former empire, surrounding it with NATO dependencies, grotesque Yankee pimps setting up corrupt energy deals, backing local gangsters stealing everything that could be moved. The US backed Yeltsin's disastrous neoliberal policies that collapsed life expectancy in Russia, overseen by Jeffrey Sachs, then he sent in the military when the parliament resisted him. When 9/11 occurred, Putin tried to be our "partner" in exchange for some respect, and Cheney basically spit on him when they were at the 2005 commemoration of the end of WW2. From that time on, Putin has been giving us hell, and that has made him very popular.
If we treat countries like dirt until they become our enemies, what do you expect? And by the way, our real military spending is still half a trillion dollars, more than the rest of the world combined.
Here is an example of how quickly right-wing militant Christians reveal their true feelings about Jews:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2013/5/5/02911/62326/Front_Page/Christian_Right_Default_Blame_the_Jews
"It all started when several prominent military reformers met with top brass at the Pentagon to express concern about, among other things, the persistent abuse of the rights of conscience of military personnel, especially by "dominionist" evangelicals. These included Mikey Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and himself a USAF Academy graduate and a former counsel in the Reagan White House..."
"Then Fox News falsely reported (further exaggerated and promoted by Breitbart.com) that a new Pentagon policy, under the influence of Weinstein, could lead to the court marshal of evangelicals for sharing their faith. This was quickly shown to be baloney. But The Christian Post went so far as to falsely report that the Pentagon was employing Weinstein to help make policy. It also attributed Weinstein's alleged anti-Christian views to his Judaism."
It appears that an alliance between two theocracies requires that each have an unlimited right to persecute other faiths within their own turf - even each other's.
Even though our attempt at global hegemony has been a horrible mistake, the American people now feel entitled to the false sense of security it once enabled. Thus as we lose our grip on the world, they will be easy suckers for demagogues who tell them that any unrest, people's revolution, or unfavorable election result anywhere on earth would have been prevented if we had just cut some more welfare money and spent it on stealth bombers.
After Wall Street was forced into a more normal relationship with Latin America, and the Pentagon is forced into a more normal relationship with the Arab world, what region will humiliate us and stir up the demagogues next? I read an alarming article on the right-wing Abe govt. in Japan, which in a classic neocon move violated traditional conservative economics by crashing the value of the yen to get the economy going again - but appears to have planned all this to gain the popularity to push thru changes to make constitutional amendments easier. According to the article, while we all pay attention to their goal of finishing off the no-war clause, the real goal of Abe's party is to expunge the guarantees of personal liberty written in by the postwar Occupation as alien intrusions in the sacred social order.
This is super bad news. Asians actually study history, unlike us, and at the first sign of a renewal of the racist cult of Japanese fascism, they will all begin to unite against Japan. America will be caught completely flat-footed, partly because we ourselves turned against Japan's adherence to the no-war clause in our desperation to have Japan's wealth added to our military might, and partly because moves to destroy women's rights, perhaps gay rights, and labor unions will appeal to our own demagogues.
I am half-Japanese, but I do not want the US to support a renewal of Japanese fascism in any way, shape or form. The human tragedy of a nuclear war in Asia, perhaps caused by Japanese overconfidence that they had US backing, would dwarf the sufferings of their last war.
As I've learned more about how FDR and the Democrats viewed the causes of WW2, I've come to believe he intended his new international organizations to provide a comprehensive solution to make war too unprofitable for advanced nations to pursue. The 1929 crash caused a trade war that the Great Powers could counteract by turning their empires into currency blocs, but this left Germany and Japan with no markets despite their citizens' intelligence, work ethic and willingness to modernize. Their sense of betrayal reversed these values into a vengeful fascism, and some fantastically advanced weaponry.
Thus FDR needed several things to prevent a repeat:
1. Keynesian economics
2. an enduring global free-trade system
3. a currency system that accommodated 1 and 2
4. the end of the colonial empires
5. a reinforcement of international laws of occupation, as we well know at this site, to prevent the profitability of expansionism
Much of this was achieved, but every new solution has its own problems. Since he masterminded this order without detailing the particulars, once he was gone, and Stalin was uncooperative, no one felt compelled to complete his dream - which included universal health insurance and college education for Americans. Much as Lincoln's death put Reconstruction into dubious hands which could not distinguish between punishment and reform, leaving a bitter, brutal flaw in seeming success.
I think it supremely ironic that if there are any places that could be called New Deal states in the postwar era, they are Germany and Japan, which the US restricted from having an independent military policy.
Actually, London was so violent in the Victorian era that gentlemen all went out armed to the teeth - yet another example of what our current right-wingers seem to be nostalgic for. The workers had their expectations beaten down until they just lived with it... but such people cannot shake an economy out of terminal decline.
I'm now reading the 1935 book "The Mysterious Death of Liberal England 1910-1914", which contends that the society was collapsing even then, that a national nervous breakdown was underway in which the suppressed desires of various factions were erupting in bizarre violence. The author details a shocking Tory seditious conspiracy with Ulster Protestants to foment armed rebellion, the widely destructive terror campaign that gained women the vote, and a wave of wildcat strikes that grew into a mass movement without any clear program of action. Another phenomenon he notes is a wave of UFO sightings, all proclaimed in the media as German spy zeppelins. It was as if people had become so restless after 80 years of Victorianism that they needed someone to fight, and the Germans finally obliged them before they resorted to civil war.
In your universe, Eisenhower never gave that farewell speech. Everything he warned of happened a dozen times over.
Either our military-industrial complex was always absolutely necessary in its magnitude, and you're blaming something else for our national debt (as the right-wingers do - blacks, equality, ecology, everything modern), or the war machine is out of control and, as the protestor girl told Nixon in Oliver Stone's movie, "You can't stop it, can you?" Even if there is no USSR to justify it.
It's happening little by little, but the old model reigns supreme in the hearts of the investor class until it is violently overthrown. Think of decaying Britain, trying to switch from a coal empire to an oil empire at the last minute, while America was defining new industries and lifestyles that required cheap oil and exporting them around the world.
I.e., until there is a "Solar Empire" that can bully and overawe other countries, no one will abandon their status quo in sycophantic emulation. Since solar doesn't create the spectacular concentrations of wealth and power that fossil fuels did, people will be slow to recognize the need for change.
What, you think the NRA won't try to overturn that too?
The entire far-right position on guns is that they are there so the "people" (the right kind of Americans) can overthrow any government that doesn't let them monopolize power. Full automatic weapons are clearly required for that.
I've read a provocative book, "Broken Words", by Jonathan Dudley, about the war against science in the Christian Right. It argues that abortion was strictly a Catholic issue until the 1970s, with Evangelicals disagreeing but mostly disinterested in when life begins. But then right-wing provocateur Francis Schaeffer created films alleging that abortion was part of a sinister eugenics agenda from secular humanists that must inevitably lead to the extermination of inferior, backward Americans. Then he toured the redneck zones with this film and got an overwhelming response that completely shocked Evangelical Right leaders - who quickly fell into line. The question is, did the potency of this ridiculous smear come from a subconscious fear among the very folks infamous for their own racism that by objective standards they really were inferior to their enemies, and thus they had to fight back, literally with irrationalism, to avoid being consigned to the ashheap of history?
You're assuming that the Heritage Foundation actually took those past positions sincerely, as opposed to carrying out a long-term scheme to keep moving further Right as they succeeded in indoctrinating the public, including Democrats, to stomach reactionary barbarism. You can't imagine how much worse the Right Wing is intending to get, unless you read the words of their idea guys, or the extremist rags where they communicate honestly with their fellow fanatics until they get into elected office in turn.
Put it this way; one sign of far-right magazines, like militia-tinted gun mags, is the phrase "America is a republic, not a democracy." Understand the Constitutional implications of that, and you know how far back into the past we are to be led.
Oddly, there are quite a lot fewer dictators in the world today than during the Cold War. Between the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the collapse of the US-backed juntas of Latin America, things have gotten shaky for dictators everywhere. Now there are plenty of authoritarian leaders whose elections are fishy. But even Africa no longer has the flamboyant tyrants of the recent past like Mobutu or Charles Taylor who butchered at will. Consider also the fall of Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, the old juntas of South Korea, Turkey, and Thailand. Finally the ongoing struggle in the Arab world.
The problem is, regardless of whom the rulers are or how they got there, few of them seem to obey American orders anymore, and we Americans seem only to recognize human rights violations by those who don't follow orders. Both the peace problem and the human rights problem increasingly involve the wealthy and powerful countries, not least the United States of America.
It's not unfair when everyone assumes every terrorist is anti-American or anti-white, when so many terrorists are right-wing "patriots" tied together by homegrown political networks that corporate media easily has the resources to investigate. Did American news media even mention that Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik read prominent American anti-Moslem blowhards for inspiration?
Even if they reported it,it wouldn't impact the reptile brains of the audience. It's like intentionally telling a sensational lie and then retracting it, knowing the latter will have less of an emotional impact.
She didn't win a majority of the vote. She took advantage of Britain's 3-party system to rule with a minority, just like Cameron.
As for "rice bowl" talk, it sounds a lot like Reagan's racist myth of the streets being full of welfare queens in Cadillacs. Now they're in fact full of homeless veterans and the mentally ill. Are the beneficiaries of Thatcherism truly the angels you make them out to be, and the coal miners she ruined truly villains? Seems these angels created a Ponzi scheme of real estate speculation, which ate up much of the real wealth supposedly created by the oil she lucked into. So when things collapsed again in 2008, what was the right-wing solution? Blame the poor again, and sabotage national healthcare to prepare the way for corporate takeover. Just like our GOP, Bill, whom you ostensibly oppose.
Jesper, America was founded by rich people who imported slaves for a living, or stole land from Indians for a living. So don't tell me that people aren't evil enough to deliberately make life worse for others - we're living proof that it can be a winning strategy. As for the practical matter of hurting people who can vote, we are in the process of finding ways to take away the vote from blacks yet again, and branding them all as likely criminals who can be gunned down or wrongly convicted whenever a white sheriff or district attorney needs to scare up white votes in an election (bet you don't have that in Sweden). Hatred is a winning strategy if:
a. it increases the turnout of your faction more than it does the enemy's
b. if you have an end game to disenfranchise the enemy for good, by putting them in prison, or terrorizing them into moving away, in sufficient numbers
Note that the wealthy class of the South has always supported these actions, all the way to Civil War, just as the rich supported murderous tyrants against democracy in Spain, Chile, etc. How many millions died from Western colonialism backed by business interests?
You could say all the same things about her dear friend Pinochet saving Chile from Allende. Meaning from the evil poor. Say it, Bill, let's see what kind of man you are.
I double dare you to defend the poll tax, an anti-democratic trick right out of our own Jim Crow.
That is because what appears to be an ingenious trap that our masters set for us -
1. Drive down wages by busting unions and outsourcing
2. Then blame #1 on blacks and corporate regulation, creating a vast reactionary movement based on nostalgia for the "good old days"
You end up with people permanently feeling that they've been cheated out of money they ought to have, chasing it by the means the corporate right has indoctrinated - tax cuts, education cuts, but not military cuts, etc. It becomes an economic race to the bottom, as workers become less and less able to get relevant training, and education is increasingly demonized. Eventually we sacrifice civilized standards, compassion, even our neighbors, to regain an economic surplus that will simply get carted off by our bosses and investors anyway. The worse they make things for us, the more desperate we are to give them what they want, as we've seen with fracking.
People in Iceland and Germany don't feel they were cheated out of some birthright. Though they did feel that way in Germany in 1933, and you know how that turned out.
The people claiming Thatcher made Britons better off are wrong, simply because the normal advance of technology is doing that even in "socialist" countries. In fact, the standard of living of ordinary Britons was far higher in the 1960s than it had been before the war, when the Tories' precious empire and superpower status were intact.
Where is the proof that non-rich people are benefitting more from the Thatcher-Reagan era of letting the rich rape society, than from the increasingly egalitarian half-century that preceded it? In the era of high corporate and income taxes, people got radios, refrigerators, cars and TVs which they paid for with real wage increases. Under the neo-Victorian model, the capitalists increase their CEO salaries and investment returns by orders of magnitude, drive down the real wages of everyone else, and then find that no one can afford to buy the goods they're selling. So the banks come along with investment and real estate bubbles and vast amounts of credit to keep rebooting the economy - for which they are well rewarded by becoming too big to be allowed to fail. Yes, technological gadgets have gotten cheaper, but they were already doing that under the New Deal model.
Thatcher and Reagan wanted back the 19th century, forever, like the right-wingers who succeeded them. I would rather destroy civilization and let the roaches take over than have that racist, arrogant and imperialistic time be our species' final fate.
As the divide gets bigger, your politicians cease to be your politicians. Look at America, where the rich can afford to buy both parties. As a result, we regard you Brits as hopelessly pinko, and plot to make your society even more unequal. How much US corporate money will find its way into David Cameron's coffers in exchange for sabotaging NHS to prepare for US-run corporate medicine?
Eventually it becomes a return to debt-based feudalism. Do you think Medieval injustice becomes tolerable because you get cellphones with that?
So the rich blackmailed the government into punishing the poor in exchange for coming back. Essentially the scenario of "Atlas Shrugged" - where's the resulting libertarian paradise?
Oh yeah, because the rich came back, their money poured into speculation and real estate bubbles. Then the bubbles burst in 2008. How do the tax revenues benefit when that happens? They don't - the country is undergoing another round of brutal austerity to appease the rich into spending again.
You're right about Iran, but if this is applied to sanctions generally, what do we do when a country is clearly engaged in aggression, like Japan was in China circa 1940? Would it have been moral to continue to do business with Japan as if nothing were happening? And note that Japan in 1940 still had an elected parliament, just as Iran does today. Voters will support leaders blindly when they face foreign retaliation, so sanctions won't work any better than they would against a genuine totalitarian state.
Is the problem with sanctions, or the hypocritical standards that citizens allow their leaders to use as to when to impose them? Because if it's the former, then there's really no good choices at all.
He's more of a hypocrite than bastards like Cheney who got deferments and then sent others to die and kill? There's millions of people out there whose hearts are as wicked as Cheney, all of them waving US flags when we go to war, and then a few even talking secession when they think the federal government is spending too much on feeding the poor.
Stop with the moral equivalence crap when it comes to neocons. They use this country like a pimp uses a whore.
Besides all the discerning reasons given by the other posters, I think that a war in the Korean peninsula is viewed as too damn disruptive of the global economy. The fantasy on Iran is that some sort of "surgical" strike can destabilize the regime enough that it will be overthrown from within, before it can blockade the Straits of Hormuz long enough to plunge the world into another depression. But a nuclear Korean war could shut down trade by Japan, South Korea, China, and the west coast of the US. That's a staggering amount of money. The investors view Asians as real, profitable human beings, not just abstractions like Moslems.
Because the big lie of "defense" is that we will ever have enough to be satisfied, instead of looking at our tax bill and demanding that our forces be used more aggressively to get more of the things we want besides legitimate security. Andrew Bacevich chronicled in his writings the ironic story of how the post-Vietnam Pentagon tried to protect its ass by demanding tons of spending, but also imposing the Powell Doctrine to prevent actually having to fight. Inevitably, politicians were elected who felt the spending had to be validated in the battlefield, no doubt with economic benefits in mind. This also happened with MAD. LBJ's people encouraged the USSR to build an arsenal similar to ours to create a stable deterrent balance; to prove they were different, Nixon and his DefSec Laird looked to build ABMs and load multiple warheads on missiles to overwhelm that advantage.
Actually, back in '07 or so I was hearing about talks between Saudi and Iran on settling some of their disputes. But the Bushites were on an all-out propaganda campaign to convince the Arab monarchies to fear Iran, in order to get their help in arresting the growing mess they themselves had made by creating a power vacuum in occupied Iraq. It sounds like Israel got its two cents' in first.
They are lunatic groups.
It's just that in Israel and the US, lunatic groups have real power over governments with real weaponry.
This obsession of a society with the forms of propriety and not the reality of injustice reminds me of an argument in Plato's Republic between Socrates and a young oligarch, Polemarchus, over the definition of justice. The latter's argument is the tribalist (now "patriot" or "conservative") position in its purest form, I think.
"Justice is doing good unto friends and harm unto enemies."
2500 years ago, the implications of this were obvious, and easily shot to pieces by Socrates. But there is a certain red meat there that is still delicious to our reptile brains. The sophistication of modern sophistry, at the command of Polemarchus' heirs, is to disguise our selfish cronyism (favors for our friends) under a myriad of causes, religions, moral habits, economic movements, and foreign alliances. Our friends might thus be tricking our enemies into voting for them, and we wink at that. But logical principles, in practice, will sometimes help our side, and sometimes the other side, and that's not tolerable. The adherence to ancient codes and scriptures, which have to be interpreted by wealthy specialists, solves the problem by somehow usually siding with the friends of the rich, and punishing their enemies. So religion and "traditional values" must be defended, even at a short-term cost to the defenders.
I think your observation is accurate, and it's partly because conservatives have to believe that rich people are superior to poor people to justify economic inequality, therefore the extent to which you are fully a person is based on how much property you have. The rich discharge their "responsibilities" by being greedy, aggressive and successful and thus making their tribe... uh, republic stronger. The poor are just holding it back with all their stupid rights.
Palestina delenda est.
Ultimately it's all about the bucks.
Years ago a Reagan cabinet official admitted in his biography that the combo of tax cuts for the rich and big hikes in military spending were meant to create a future fiscal crisis that would force the dismantling of hated liberal social programs.
From that point on, militarism has been the most effective way for right-wingers to bleed money from social programs. It even allows them to insinuate that the supporters of the programs are sympathizers with the enemy du jour, whether Communist or Islamist.
Up until now, this ploy by corporate and racist conservatives has been so effective that the powerless libertarian faction has been able to safely condemn military spending, with no danger that actual military cuts would flow back to helping the people that they want Darwinistically expunged from the gene pool by the infallible Invisble Hand.
Now the country's broke, so again there is no danger of this. But now that one of them is a senator, what is he going to specify about military cuts in the future? Any dollar amount is potentially back on the table for the benefit of all us useless pinko welfare mothers in the real America. How many kids could get Head Start from cutting a single warplane from the budget?
Which of those two choices are more offensive to Paul's followers would be very interesting to know. Too bad they'll just turn it into another tax cut for the rich instead, as economically successful as all the other tax cuts they've gotten since America went into decline.
Because the same oppressive teachings are creeping back into Christian churches on the same grounds that you're spouting, and many Christians reject the idea that they must obey these teachings to be good Christians. Same for Judaism. If every religion is held hostage by its reactionary bigots, how long do you think it will be before we have a holy world war?
The problem here is, the capitalists starve the American people of education and science to cut taxes and to make them ignorant enough to lure back into 19th century deregulation and property rights. But they figure their corporations will be fine because they can always temporarily import Chinese and Indian tech-heads to brainstorm the profitable stuff. I.e, since our corporations are tied to our banks and our dollar, we can always outbid poor countries for brainpower. The Higgs boson does not deliver any royalty payments to the country that discovers it, so Wall Street doesn't give a damn.
In the long run, all of this is catastrophic. Basic paradigm shifts in technology can create huge swings in technological power. For instance, when a British hustler stole a state secret - the spinning jenny - and hightailed it to the US to create our textiles industry. Or the inability of America to understand the value of technologies it HAD developed - but which Japan exploited.
I guess if the Higgs boson could be used to nuke foreigners and get away with it, we'd be all over it.
The question is, how many things have to go wrong for a society before it becomes dysfunctional in the face of its competition? Historical researchers now look into past climate patterns to discover the causes of famines that ruined great empires like Rome, as well as self-inflicted environmental damage like lead poisoning.
How many things have to go wrong with the American way of life before we stop defending it as an absolute good?
The hidden assumption may be that the people of Arizona, as a whole, WANT cities to survive. If we look at the Tea Party ideology, it is rooted in the traditional hatred of cities in the South and West. Cities are full of Commies, faggots and ni**ers (formerly Jews too, but they've been recategorized), so the urban mentality must be to blame. Glenn Beck called one iteration of his hate cult "We Surround You". Meaning his redneck suburbs surround the pinko cities like Serb militias once surrounded and starved Sarajevo. Consider that a warning.
They live in a fantasy where the suburbs could go on by themselves once the cities are finally destroyed or turned into concentration camps. They think the suburbs are the lineal descendant of Jefferson's self-sufficient yeoman farmers and slave plantations and the King Ranch.
They are wrong, but they will refuse to quit until they've tested the proposition. Senator Ted Cruz's new obsession with supposed UN plans to destroy the American way of life by forcing everyone to live in cities ("Agenda 21") is the new conspiracy theory to motivate the GOP in the future, succeeding the International Communist Conspiracy, the Islamic Caliphate Conspiracy, and the Global Warming Conspiracy. It will support GOP plans to cut off cities from all government funding whatsoever, destroy their liberal school systems, and throw as many of their ghetto residents in privatized prisons (labor camps) as possible. By ruining the cities, they will ruin their enemies. That's the only measure that counts to them.
America doesn't have farmers anymore. It has monster conglomerates like Archer Daniels Midland. Only giant corporations have the cash and technology to keep cheap food flowing out of an unnatural environment. So their advantage is growing as the weather gets worse and smaller farms fail.
Consider the idea that there are people who wanted our public schools ruined and replaced by private institutions they could control, and then you see that the right-wing support of funding war has grown to justify the defunding of those parts of government that help the people it hates.
This is a reply to DesTex.
US support for oppressed people?
You mean 400,000 Indians murdered by Guatelmala's pro-US oligarchs? 600,000 Chinese and leftists murdered by the supporters of Suharto's junta in Indonesia, which the US became very friendly with, followed by hundreds of thousands more dead in East Timor and other Indonesian suppressions? Or all the people killed by the European empires that the US maintained business relations with - reciprocated by their ignoring our bloody conquest of the West and the Philippines?
Tell me how many Baluchis have been killed by the Pakistani military - while the US showered it with aid after it beheaded a leftist elected president?
I think your definition of liberty is very different than mine.
We don't see any problem with all that land we stole from the Indians either - as long as the Indians live under "freedom" as mainstream Americans define it. So stolen land good, Jim Crow buses bad.
To put it more bluntly, we believe that we need the economic value of that land to live as we deserve, but we live under the myth that racist practices are unnecessary to support our economic system. Before the latter view was seemingly obsoleted by America's postwar prosperity, Jim Crow was still a mainstream American belief. Reverse that prosperity in the 21st century for most folks, and Jim Crow will start to look pretty necessary again.
You can't plant colonies anymore. Violation of the international law of occupation. No one else has started a colony on foreign soil with legal extraterritoriality since 1945 - depending on what the legal status of Tibet was pre-1962.
The three biggest nuclear accidents happened in the three most powerful countries of the latter 20th century; Russia, the US, and Japan. The two superpowers that had done the most nuclear research, and the great economic miracle nation built on quality engineering. All their nuclear industries were exposed as corrupt... to the core.
France is the only one left to make it a dirty sweep of the major nuclear players you'd expect to know what they're doing. No chance that its statist model would be embraced by capitalist investors anywhere else. All the remaining countries are ones you'd be afraid of having any nuclear technology at all - given that Germany has opted out. Chinese earthquake, anyone?
I think your description of the sort of leader Chavez was is very discerning. They are the best their beleagured populations can do against wealthy oligarchies, but they're a terribly weak reed for US radicals to hang their hopes of world revolution on. But when those impoverished populations take matters into their own hands, like the mass Indian movements of modern Latin America, that's when progressives need to start taking notes.
Cheney didn't say America was weak and surrounded. He said that it was a superpower, that it was special, that it should not have to ask when it was born to demand.
In fact, Kissinger had to be careful to which audience he'd admit America needed allies, when he was playing the China card against the Soviets. Privately, he and Nixon were declinists, believing that relative US power would inevitably decline and that the US would have to submit to playing diplomatic power games, but that has never been acceptable to the GOP.
Brian,
The problem is, I've never seen anyone in any faction of the far right say that there was anything BAD about the 19th century. But I've seen:
a. a movement to repeal the 13th Amendment
b. movements by a former slave state to secede (again)
c. a Tea Party congressman call for the repeal of general election of senators - a reform that dates all the way back to Andrew Jackson
d. Rep. Paul call Lincoln a tyrant
e. a consistent refusal by Republicans to categorize abortion clinic bombers or the KKK as terrorist groups
(a) is crucial. You talk as if the TP was spontaneous. In the '90s I was paying attention to right-wing extremists, who had not yet been given the opportunity by the Kochs, et al to go mainstream. Many extremist ideas are first broached in places like gun magazines, then mainstreamed over time. The right-wing argument against the 13th Amendment is chilling, and consistent with the neo-Confederate, theocratic, and libertarian wings of the movement. To wit: blacks can never be citizens of the USA unless state legislatures vote it in.
Now do you believe that any legislature that would go through the trouble to nullify the 13th Amendment or restart the Civil War would then grant blacks the right to vote?
I've never heard any of these people say that they MIND that their beloved, omnipotent, infallible (once reinterpreted by David Barton) Founding Fathers gave the vote to so few Americans.
If you ever see in a far-right publication the words "The Founding Fathers made America a Republic, not a Democracy" (as I have many times), what does that mean other than that the vote should be restricted the way it generally was in 1789 - meaning only white males who meet property quotas?
Our history was grotesque, and these folks embrace it without reservation. They must know that minorities will go to war to keep their right to vote. The gun magazines are full of articles about "civil unrest", almost salivating at the prospect. Again, it's unlikely that any movement that takes over a state with the intent to restore the white monopoly on power will desire any less of a monopoly on violent force.
I don't see any evidence that the Tea Party wants the military reduced. Now that Rep. Paul is retiring, we can see everyone who joined his movement only wants to cut the money that goes to "inferior", "lazy", pinko welfare Negroes because surely they are to blame for all our problems. And in case the victims resist, take away their right to vote with Voter ID laws, and if they fight, herd them into privatized prisons to serve as slave labor.
This has always been the plan. The Tea Party always wanted the 19th century back, so why wouldn't it want all the horrors of that time as well? The corporations will be the new plantation owners, and the Tea Party will be proud to be the rednecks who whip the slaves.
I agree with this, if only because we will never be able to restore any social spending in the future as long as the cult of the all-powerful military is not shattered. Because people don't have objective measures of "security" and they are easily frightened by the outside world due to their vast ignorance, warmongering has become the right wing's preferred tool to starve its enemies out of the federal budget.
We need to have a forced cut, and then wake up the next morning to realize that we're still alive. Only then will people even begin to question the premises of infinite military power.
Whereas the cuts on the domestic side will definitely hurt a lot of people, and they should be radicalized into disruptive action on getting their cuts restored. If we won't fight harder for justice than we do for our fantasies, what future could our country have anyway?
I think one unexamined phenonemon is that a colonial oppressor always creates a resistance that goes out of its way to hold the opposite views to the oppressor on every possible subject. Therefore it is unsurprising that right-wing European colonialists found so many natives turning to Communism, which offended them in every way.
The people you conquer have no means to get revenge on you except to hurt you in every non-material way. If your corporations bribe and co-opt their leaders, they will embrace an ideology that abolishes property rights or subjugates them to God's dictate. If you Westernize their co-opted elites with feminism and religious tolerance, they may wildly increase their traditional misogyny and anti-Semitism as a desperate "F**K You".
Whereas the best thing that ever happened to capitalism in East Asia seems to have been the end of the US propping up South Vietnam in 1975. It's as if the day there were no Yankees to negatively associate business with, Thailand was flooded with Japanese businessmen, and making stuff to export to America became a point of national pride.
Why is it so hard for an American to imagine that if his country was conquered by aliens, he'd go out of his way to defy their beliefs, no matter how barbaric he'd have to become? I'd sure do it.
So Christian folks are morally better because they slaughter each other over the relative power of their nation-states - all the way up to nuclear weapons? To me, it's pretty disgusting that Protestants and Catholics kill each other in one century, and then in the next they ally with those of the other religion to wage wars over the right to form republics, and then in the next century monarchists and republicans ally to wage wars over which state coalition will dominate Europe, and finally everyone who supports the bourgoise state allies against those who espouse global class revolution.
We must look pretty stupid to the Moslems.
Years ago I noted that whenever rank & file opponents of teaching evolution were interviewed, they didn't care much as to whether it was true or not. They were full of fear that their kids no longer blindly obeyed them, and they clung to the indoctrination of an omnipotent God as the basis for parental authority. They expected the schools to do their dirty work on this front, and they turned to extremist theocrats when that didn't happen.
I don't think teaching Christian Fundamentalism (creationism is just a small part of the agenda) itself is what depressed grades, but the fact that kids get the message from their parents that facts, numbers, history, etc. must be twisted to support the tribe's self-justifying dogma. If the facts are being rewritten all the time, it's easier to just know what the ideology demands, and then prove your loyalty by yelling ever-more preposterous lies than your neighbors do.
Until the corporations consider this to be a negative rather than a positive, the "market" won't punish these regions. Now consider why the corporations prefer workers who are ignorant, innumerate, xenophobic, warlike, and filled with fear.
The growing authoritarianism of religion is happening in the damnedest places.
For instance, Pentecostalism has a pretty wild history of independent congregations, but now it is falling under the sway of the theocratic New Apostolic Reformation, a movement that has been branded a heresy by Pentecostal clergymen twice before and yet keeps coming back stronger. Besides creating Manchurian candidates like its anointed hero (literally) Sarah Palin to sneak into secular power, these schemesters also send agents into other denominations' churches, a practice called "steeplejacking". The "apostle" part is important. He acts as a secret cult leader, attracting clergymen who then act as infiltrators to alter the doctrines of their churches to conform to the movement. They also kick back money to the apostle. Congregations are thus losing their historic power to elect and eject their pastors to these maniacs, who prophesize that they will lead God's army to earthly victory in the End Times by conquering the world(postmillenialism) and eliminating all other forms of religion.
I would not leave. I would conspire to overthrow the leadership, or the parts of which I blamed for the crimes.
Terrifyingly, Reagan may have been a better president when he was senile than when he wasn't. Would the Reagan of 1980 have made peace with Gorbachev?
The trick is to get these conservatives past their Clint Eastwood phase into their doddering kindly grandfather phase.
And furthermore, Sedona, it was only 27 years between the coup and the hostage-taking. It's been 34 years since the hostage-taking and today. Yet when you say the coup should be left in the past, you imply the Iranians of 1980 should have just forgiven that essential usurpation of their sovereignity, but we Americans are still justified in being mad about the hostage-taking.
Your own words are proof that the US coup was based on a lie, that Mossadegh was a Soviet agent. Communism was the justification for our role in killing over a million Vietnamese, and for the killing of 600,000 ethnic Chinese by the US-backed Suharto regime, and the killing of 400,000 Indians by the US-backed government of Guatemala. So this is not an isolated incident. Now there are new lies about Iran being manufactured to justify what might well have to be a nuclear first-strike.
In Texas, to get state ID you have to go to a DPS, and as the article indicates ours are not distributed based on any notion of equity. If you're less likely to have a car you're less likely to even know where a DPS is, or have a schedule to allow you to wait out the long lines.
But all suburban whites have cars, and getting a driver's license automatically registers you as a voter if you qualify.
This demographic game is how blacks lost their right to vote under Jim Crow. The laws involved did not mention the race of the individual, only a sociological variable far more likely to be true of a black man than a white man. That's how we do it down South.
You're absolutely correct, but the Left focused on the wrong Carter sins. In retrospect, the decision to support the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan BEFORE the Soviets even invaded (a forgotten fact), was the one that got us screwed. His NSA, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later gloated to an interviewer that while he warned Carter that CIA intervention would trigger a Soviet invasion, he personally wanted it all to happen because he knew it would become the Soviets' Vietnam. Carter and Zbiggy refused to consider the bigger picture: the US was committing to using extremist Islam as a weapon to roll back Communism. This coincided with the Islamic Revolution in Iran and a very confused attempt to try to back the hardline Islamists to forestall Marxist factions getting the upper hand - which we were very quickly to regret. Not long after, Pakistan's Islamist army beheaded its socialist prime minister and set up its cabal with Reagan and Saudi Arabia to turn Afghanistan into a Mujahedeen theme park. We also forgave Egypt its fling with socialist Nasser by allying with his more conservative replacement and sending him a billion $ a year in aid.
I think the message that we sent to a billion Moslems was that we would kill them if they became Socialist, but we and our Saudi buddies would shower them with $ and guns if they became Salafis and killed Commies. Many embraced the message. We destroyed the USSR and now live in more fear than ever.
Nothing can really be changed unless Americans can be led away from their faith in the efficacy of violence to keep the world rigged in our favor. It goes without saying that we believe the world owes us a living, and hey, here's this neat arsenal in our hands!
However, as a practical matter we can do this:
(a) have a real debate on whether America requires global control, or whether it has a limited sphere of influence like any past empire. This is the only way to jettison our expensive commitments like NATO.
(b) prepare the replacement of the current dysfunctional military with completely new services that reflect the technological landscape. Do we need a manned air force? Does the Marine Corps have the tools to take care of the vast majority of our overseas activities? Should the Navy have any other job but to transport the Marines and patrol the seaways with a handful of invincible submarines? What is the Army for?!
As part of the derangement of empire, it has become impossible even for conservatives to question any of this. The peace movement, on the other hand, is so absolute in its opposition to any US armed force at all that it has zero credibility with the public. Not surprising. I am proposing that America merely demote itself from an unsustainable Superpower to a long-term Great Power. Most Americans, left, right, and viewless, have no idea what these concepts mean or how they function in a complex international system. They just see our arsenals piling up and either assume it is the root of all good or the root of all evil.
Hagel probably represents most closely the conservatism of Dwight Eisenhower, the one who warned us about the Military-Industrial Complex on his way out the door. Point being, if the Cold War had ended on Ike's watch he would have been glad to shut 4/5ths of the Pentagon down (thus turning it into a Unigon) because he understood that there were no other existential threats out there, and the effects of the war machine were not at all conservative, deforming markets and putting obligations on the working class (taxes, the draft) that made them rightly demand that the government do things for them too.
The fact that this sort of logic is now considered treasonous by so many current Republicans opens some interesting peepholes into their plans for the world's future.
See Richard Rosecrance's "The Rise and Fall of the Trading State", on the problem of profitable trading empires degenerating into expensive bureaucratic empires because of the problem of getting committed to local conflicts. As always, Thucydides was there first.
I just checked the DVD box for "Syriana", and indeed George Clooney was one of the producers of both Argo and this movie, which takes a far darker view of America's role in the world and has a more ambiguous story. "Syriana" was not a success. Any opinions on whether that was because it was less pro-American, or because it simply didn't give the audience anyone it wanted to cheer for?
But that's the problem with Americans, isn't it? We want clear heroes and villains, regardless of where we are on the political spectrum.
Addressing the movie's refusal to confront the belief of Iranians that the seizure was just retribution for America's past crimes there:
I think what's worst of all is that even if you spent 2 hours explaining to the average ignoramus what crimes we committed, he would still say the Iranian people have no right to punish America. Why?
"Because it's different when we do it."
In other words, we Americans dominate the world for its own good. Any crimes we committed to stop Communism are instantly justified, because ANY loss ANYWHERE to the Reds could have lost the ENTIRE planet! So sacrificing one, or a dozen, ordinary countries (Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) to "improve our strategic position" was a regrettable necessity because we're a special country and our enemies are special villians. The victims of our crimes are just small-minded, thinking only of their own petty justice when that might serve the cause of the greater evil we're battling.
And now the same is true of those villagers we're bombing, because if we don't some guys in caves might conquer the world for Allah!
If it were only a matter of morality, you'd have a point. However, diplomatic immunity is part of the rules that make it possible for governments to communicate with each other, a system accreted painfully over centuries. Embassies have always been used for spying and chicanery, but kings put up with this because they needed to not be in total darkness about each other. The alternative would be a real state of nature, every kingdom out to destroy every other one all the time like in Mongol days.
However, the problem you're pointing out is that diplomacy operates on a fiction of equality between states. In the past, when technology limited their military reach, big empires either ate all their small neighbors or ran up against a big neighbor. So the problem of big powers screwing small powers tended to reach an equilibrium. Now you have a superpower, America, something unprecedented in its power, its reach, and relative to that its ignorance and indifference about the outside world. There is no countervailing power that can make the US behave sensibly.
So the question is, why should anyone in the world respect diplomacy when the interstate system is so horribly unequal?
You probably still believe Lyndon Johnson's version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident... and that it justifies the million Vietnamese who died as a result. Oh yeah, and the Spanish blew up the Maine.
The patriotic lies are the ones that get people killed with our tax dollars.
Because it's not like mainstream apolitical Americans aren't being continually bombarded with nationalistic and even racist bias about our history that Stone needs to offset, right?
Well, Sedona, I'm sure Iran will look better after your neocon buddies send the Pentagon to do to it what we did to Iraq... and Afghanistan... and Vietnam... and Cambodia. The way was prepared by hatemongering propagandists, anti-Communists and anti-Moslems, putting out bullshit about the _____ Menace. Lurid tales about babies pulled from incubators, weapons of mass destruction, etc.
Are you auditioning to join this proud lineage? Or do you ever bother to soil your hands with suggestions for a non-violent solution that doesn't violate international law?
True, but with local weather patterns changing so wildly, is there any region where it's safe to grow a certain crop without massive human intervention? Here in Houston the rice industry has to wonder what it will do if we have another big drought like the one that (barely) ended last year. The beef industry has already announced big price hikes because that drought disrupted cattle feeding.
But you need electricity to desalinate the water. So did the Saudis really know they would have solar power available when they started this process all those years ago? And will they actually build solar for that purpose, or will they cheap out and burn some hydrocarbons instead?
Furthermore, even if they install solar to run a desalinization plant, that solar could have been installed near a city instead to provide more electricity to local consumers. Then the food could be replaced by food produced in a less hostile climate where you don't have to expend so much energy, like some of the poorer east Mediterranean states. Not like Saudi has a problem with its trade deficit.
Energy decisions are complex, you see. Opportunity costs, offsetting effects, regional price differentials. It would prevent more CO2 if all those solar cells being installed in Germany were installed in Italy, Greece and Spain instead - helping to relieve their desperately beleagured balance sheets as well. But existing practices always get in the way.
This year might be seen as a tipping point about what you can say about Palestinians in Hollywood, a liberal gatekeeper town and certainly a gatekeeper town on Israeli issues.
The Lobby is under siege on both coasts.
You mean like the system that collapsed in 1929 after 60 years of increasingly heinous "panics"?
What good does it do to put tax cuts back in people's pockets when the bosses keep driving down our wages via outsourcing? How many Americans have suffered double-digit real wage cuts since Reagan sent the word that it was open season on union jobs? Meaning they've lost more to the relentless demands of the investor class than they ever paid in Federal taxes.
All private property systems tend towards infinite inequality of wealth - barring some effective redistributive practice, or extinction. Normally there's either a revolution, or conquest by outsiders.
Well, other than the entire drill-baby-drill party in the US continually telling us that if we sacrifice each others' health and safety to suck out more oil and gas it will usher in a nirvana of cheap energy that will bring back the good old days.
Looks more to me that oil prices are acting as a choker collar, making a real recovery impossible. Whenever there's too much good economic news, the oil price spikes, and then people get scared and stop buying and investing, and then oil goes down a little. And it's destroying the lives of Americans descended from ten generations who considered growth a birthright, thus leaving them unable to adapt.
Well hell, the capitalists get to establish how much is too much by raising prices until they can't find a scam for getting away with it anymore.
Labor markets suck because there are many "sellers", few "buyers". Markets always favor the side with few bidders. When those same workers go home and become consumers, they usually find they in their millions are up against a handful of sellers. There is no relationship between what I get paid to make an object and how much it sells for, until I and my fellow consumers go broke, as they have with increasing frequency in recent decades.
If you mean that "decent", middle-class people are being raped by lazy welfare negroes, how about the $750,000,000,000 a year that goes to the military and its consequent debts - both from past deficits and obligations to veterans? Is our military installed in over 130 countries really serving the middle class, or creating pacified zones to ship their jobs to? And when have money from right-wing tax cuts ever gone to anyone but the rich?
Oh, and Bill, great work completely distracting us from the point of the article you're attacking - that Latin America stopped torturing when it stopped obeying the United States of America. Is there a reason you don't want to discuss that or its moral implications?
Also largely successful. That's the part the corporate media doesn't want us to know. We, and especially our billionaires, do not know or want what's best for the developing world.
Milton Friedman and his acolytes laid the hyper-capitalist ideological foundation used by Pinochet to justify his brutality against the poor and leftist. The CIA assisted Friedman's boys all over Latin America in doing this. Read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", a book whose truthfulness was borne out by its forecast of the homecoming of Friedmanite "libertarian" tyranny in the form of Scott Walker and his war to destroy public sector unions and state universities - coordinated with many other GOP governors and legislatures all introducing similar bills simultaneously.
And if we were glad for what happened to Chile, we are sick and have no business running the world.
As for the actual assassination and "suicide", I don't think the readers of lurid spy novels from the Cold War would be too surprised. It's normal-level ruthlessness from any government in wartime, even if its supportive voters refuse to mind that the government keeps the war going for economic and political benefits.
The problem is the censorship, because of the slippery slope. In Israel, much more so than the US, EVERYTHING can be branded a security risk, even a drop in the stock market, or proof of a pollution problem, or an expose of any member of the economic elite. To say nothing of treatment of Palestinians.
There's no profit in just letting natural occurrences destroy private property. At least the private property of anyone that matters.
But if it's a man-made occurrence, that means men are getting paid to cause destruction, and they will pay to shield themselves from the law so they can continue.
My point, Bill, is that Christiane is delusional that the US is pushing Turkey into the EU as part of a conspiracy to destroy the latter. Turkey wants in, so it must be a benefit to be in, and there are still plenty of Bush stay-behinds in the foreign policy establishment who will oppose anything Turkey wants just because they're neocon bastards. Hegel needs to wield a mighty meat-cleaver when he gets to the Pentagon to clean out these moles, but there's no willingness to accept that GOP presidents play these games with personnel.
Besides, Turkey's economy looks a hell of a lot better right now than the "Christian" Mediterranean.
Secular humanism was simply the freeing of humans from the monstrous beliefs and superstitions of Medieval Europe (witchhunting, Crusades, the Inquisition). Meaning that since then people's beliefs have changed many times on many issues, not held in place by a monolithic, self-interested clergy that claims inerrancy.
And if your faith requires that women and gays be treated as subhuman non-citizens, and mine doesn't, human rights says our faiths are not morally equivalent. So be honest and denounce human rights as "secular humanism", and see whom you will be in bed with.
I don't think Ratzinger would quit unless he had a plan to get a younger, more vigorous far-right pig to replace him, a Pope Scalia if you will.
I have very limited knowledge of Catholic politics, but something strange has been going on for a couple of years now, documented by articles in http://www.talk2action.com, where the Ratzinger acolytes in the high US church leadership are aggressively embracing all far-right GOP views. Before that time, these clergymen focused on two big bugaboos, abortion/contraception and total submission to their authority. But then not long before the stage-managed rise of Paul Ryan, Santorum, et al, they went all Tea Party, attacking the very legitimacy of Federal power, becoming capitalist sycophants, and of course dropping the fig leaf of pacifism. Ryan's last-second "conversion" from Ayn Rand to Opus Dei was so transparent that it was as if the whole gang was signalling that Rand's vicious Darwinism was now the doctrine of the inner church.
What was that all about? Were Ratzinger's boys preparing for the Orwellian rewriting of Catholic doctrine to be carried out by the next Pope? Were they trying to compete with the extremist evangelical/Tea Party movement, or were they signalling their surrender to it, giving it the valuable disguise of "diversity" in exchange for a protected status of junior partner in the incoming capitalist theocracy?
Did you pay no attention to the growing conflict between Israel and Turkey over Gaza? The neocons hate everyone who criticizes Israel in any way, and try to isolate and destroy them. In fact, Turkey's resistance to the US and Israel is dangerous to them because it might inspire other NATO countries to be more independent.
But how easy access between countries affecting everyone outisde the US? Doesn't it seem that for some years there has been a growing gulf between the beliefs of Americans and the beliefs of the Rest of the World? Many cynics always believed that our fellow Americans are just stupid bigots and nothing can be done about it. What would happen if American kids were in fact constantly reading foreign websites and their stupid bigot parents didn't know about it - or didn't understand how much their own attitudes are the product of ignorance and xenophobia?
Anyway, the genie is out of the bottle. All the technology mags have suddenly started running cover stories about civilian applications of drones.
Well, civilians in America are too broke to buy drones built by the ripoff artists of the military-industrial complex. Actually, everyone's too broke for that.
So the drones will be built in China, just like I warned everyone years ago, and then it will be outsourced to really poor and messed-up countries - the very ones America and Wall Street seem to demand the right to screw over. Soon, they will cost less than your monthly cell-phone bill.
Do we all see how this turns out? DARPA is working on stuff scarier than Terminator, robot fish, robot insects, the ability to infest everything in normal life with spies and killers, and all of it will get copied in a few product cycles by people whom we've exploited.
It's too late to stop drones, or to repair the international law we've dismantled. We've thus lowered the moral threshhold for molesting people in foreign countries such that ever more-trivial causes, like resource shortages or intellectual-property violations, will be good enough reason.
That's why America was isolationist until the minute we had the power to be on top of the world. The assumption of internationalism was that we could share power with other nations. But Americans have never wanted to share. We've always hated diplomacy, balance of power, alliance politics, etc. We only want to deal with the outside world when we have a monopoly of power. Now that this monopoly is naturally eroding, we're going crazy trying to either hold onto it or go back to isolationism.
Drones don't operate on real-time intelligence, because some pimply idiot at a console in New Mexico knows nothing about the society he's blowing up, any more than he did last year when he was playing video games in his parents' basement. The Green Beanies at least try to learn something about the people they're dealing with.
Of course, if American didn't declare its right to control everything that happens everywhere on Earth, it would be much less of a handicap for us that we are, from the leadership down to the classes the grunts are recruited from, xenophobic morons and if anything are worse now than during World War 2. Even if such a right existed, which I think is absurd, it would come with the sacred responsibility for our entire polity to know everything possible about the societies we molest when we put military installations in over 130 countries. This website continually runs stories about American ignorance in just one region of the world.
That, JT, is why having fewer and fewer people participating in the political process puts more and more power into the hands of tiny special interest groups. America has, as we all know, much lower voter turnout rates than are normal in the rest of the First World, and we get the politics we get, held hostage by crazies because the rest of us have had our cynicism magnified by a deliberate program to make us drop out.
You are also being ridiculously simplistic in saying that the Marshall Plan was the only foreign initiative the US was engaged in during the early Cold War. The new CIA was recruiting Nazis wholesale for their expertise in Eastern Europe - with many in Washington calling for "rolling back" Communism, you can't help but see the utility in using those Nazis to organize covert actions and subversion.
Furthermore, Kennan himself argued that the US needed to keep the rivaly with the USSR a European matter. Instead, it arrogantly took to viewing any Communist, Marxist, Socialist, or labor organizer anywhere on the planet as a beast to be bombed or assassinated. Our worst crimes, Bill, were all outside of Europe.
I once read "The Pentagon Papers" to search for the moment when the US was inexorably committed to destoying Vietnam in order to save it. I found it in a State Dept. paper from '47 or '48. It literally rolled together the very different countries of Thailand, Burma, and the French and British colonies of Southeast Asia with the language of a corporate report read by wealthy idiots in a Wall Street boardroom, as one undifferentiated mass of brown people who needed new management to be kept under control. It was as if Coca-Cola was looking for a new advertising agency because "those people just don't get it".
This dictating of how these people were to be governed violated both US and international law. Of course their analysis was shallow - they were trying to dictate events in every corner of the world, with no real guide but ideology.
To add to Prof. Cole's comments, Cheney and his acolytes in the Project for a New American Century, who all got jobs in the Administration, rejected anything short of US control of the oil of Iraq and Iran in their articles. Buying oil from Saddam Hussein was not acceptable. They claimed that the US could maintain global dominance - not something Chomsky made up, but what they really said - via the leverage that came from controlling the regimes that sat on these two critical pools of oil.
Cheney also said in his American Petroleum Institute speech before he became VP that the state oil companies would be the main obstacle to the great increase of oil production needed for the expansion of the global economy in the next century. Now which states was he talking about? Obviously Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq and Iran mattered most. The neocons wanted to relocate the US bases from Saudi, a point of embarassment for the King, to Iraq. Bush and Cheney also insulted and embarassed Putin repeatedly during their time in office, and plotted the BTC pipeline to screw him out of the markets of Europe. So what we have here was the US trying to curry favor with the one state oil company that had a deep relationship with the US oil giants, invading two others, and marginalizing the last and making it as hostile as possible.
We invaded Iraq for its place in what the neocons thought was a grand strategy for extorting compliance from countries desperate for what Cheney ADMITTED would become a scarce resource - which incoming scarcity Bush, Cheney, the GOP and the oil companies refused to inform the American public about. The US was trying to control everything from pipeline routes to nations, so it could make things harder for the producers and consumers that defied it, and easier for the ones that obeyed it. Investors logically would punish the former and reward the latter.
In fact, that power has been exercised by Saudi Arabia every time it chooses to increase or decrease production due to political events - from the Reagan-Saudi scheme to crash oil prices to destroy the USSR (a historical fact), to the Saudi increase in production to cover the losses from Libya during its civil war. Before that, the state of Texas literally had the power to increase production quotas to stabilize the global economy during a crisis. Think about how much weaker America became after that era ended circa 1970.
Too bad the banksters aren't held under the much broader standards of RICO and anti-terrorist laws, where the government gets to seize everything. Investors need to be punished into taking a close look at the crimes of their hirelings. Instead, investors legally can sue those hirelings if they haven't done everything to maximize profits that they think they can get away with under the law, cutting the margin closer and closer.
The corporation, under American law, is an institution designed to screw everything and everyone, privatize the gains, immunize the investors, and socialize the damage. Whatever beliefs the Founding Fathers had about the incentives our propertied class had in protecting society and its future mean nothing to a computerized stock-trading program crunching profit figures. The citizens cannot win.
To me, it's fascinating to watch the American people indoctrinated into treating Israel as an extension of their own values surrounded by the dark-skinned "Other". Precisely because most people haven't considered Middle Eastern issues in any factual depth, they react to their emotions. What emotions are at work here?
This is why I wanted to know how the Tea Party in Congress would deal with Hegel, whose foreign policy is the closest thing they will ever get to their supposed hero Ron Paul. Since the real TP maniacs are in the House, we won't get to find out unless Hegel is confirmed. But I've long suspected that under their supposed libertarian, isolationist skins, most are just Christian Zionists, white supremacists, and imperialists who not only wish to return America, but the entire world, to the 19th Century by force to resolve their unquenchable paranoia.
I don't think Hegel's concern is with just causes, but with the national interest. Which is exactly what we citizens should require. The case that just causes support the national interest exists, but not in all cases. Stopping Hitler was an extraordinary case because Hitler was propounding the economic model of a state turned into a pure predator, invading its neighbors, stripping their resources, then invading the next country over, to the ends of the Earth. It gets much tougher when you're trying to distinguish our national interest in stopping ethnic cleansing in the Balkans versus stopping genocide in Rwanda. I think there was a difference, but it takes a tough-minded person to draw the distinction and stick to it. If Hegel can't get this job because of an arrogant special interest group employing insane arguments, then forget about a rational accounting of national interest.
It's absurd to say that Cheney and the neocons weren't trying to use color revolutions to weaken Russia. They turned Georgia into a US weapons proxy - they were just idiots to think the Georgians would stand up to a Russian retaliation. They tried damn hard to tilt the Ukrainian elections. They tried to buy or muscle control of all the ex-Soviet 'Stans. They built the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, whose truly bizarre route serves no purpose but to link what were thought to be anti-Russian states, to block Russian energy sales to Europe.
So the question you all should be asking is,
a. Do the Russians have the right to do the same nasty things to maintain a sphere of influence that the US does?
b. Should Putin think that things are completely different with Obama instead of Bush in charge?
Putin would rightly argue that Obama won't be around forever, and he has to grab every advantage while he can against future US craziness.
The solution for this would be for Obama to talk seriously with Putin about what the balance of power should be between their states, with solid guarantees and the understanding of retaliation if those guarantees are violated. This is what the rulers of the old Great Powers used to do. But it's now impossible for any US president to vocalize any limits on US power, because the people are taught that everyone else in the world who isn't our lackey is the New Hitler.
There's getting to be a new wave of African immigration too. It's been going on in Houston for years, bourgeoise Nigerians following the trail blazed by basketball immortal Hakeem Olajuwon. They actually have an ethnic, English-language newspaper here, as well as a digital subchannel on broadcast TV. Nigerian soap operas are a trip.
Hard to figure out the effects of this incoming group. I'd hate to see a brain drain further retard Africa's development. They also seem to include a lot of extremist Pentecostals (like those pushing the death-to-gays law in Uganda). However, they could become so successful as to be a positive influence in America. I think this will be yet another ethnic group you can count on the Democratic side as we get to the 2nd generation.
I think the GOP's problem is more fundamental than that, which ironically makes its followers more vigorous and intimidating.
I think the bubble of received beliefs are entirely self-serving for the followers, given what they want out of life. We may say that a working-class white man who opposes decent wages and living conditions for the poor just to spite non-whites is voting against his own interests. He may say that it is not his "place" to demand a greater share of the profits of his bosses, whom he instinctively feels are leaders of his tribe, his blood, his volk. He may feel that being part of the Master Race is all that makes him special, and unions won't change that. Anything that weakens his tribe threatens his status.
This is the way in which the rich have profited from destroying the rational aspirations of the successful working class of 50 years ago. The irrational aspirations are actually more powerful than the rational ones ever could be. The racist tribalist, and his cousin the religious fanatic, is capable of feats, monstrous feats, that the ordinary bourgeoise consumer can't imagine. Those elites which can manipulate these ancient and reactionary beliefs thus can bully vast numbers of ordinary people who lack the will to fight back.
When division is not enough, subdivide. It's not like the Pashtuns voted in Karzai as head Pashtun. He was a "resistance figure" who, along with Zalmay Khalizad, lobbied the Taliban on behalf of Unocal Oil getting the pipeline deal over a rival Pakistani bid. The Taliban, a creature of the Pakistani ISI, chose Pakistan. When the Taliban were defeated and we had no way to make our Northern Alliance partners palatable to the Pashtuns, we rewarded these two men.
I think grudges are held pretty long in that part of the world.
The reason why every conqueror fails in Afghanistan is that every conqueror wants the same thing - for the place to be kept quiet so it can't disrupt more important places.
So you go in to install a strongman and the Afghans pull out their ultimate weapon: disintegration. They have evolved the perfect defense for their situation, institutions that collapse before a conqueror can employ them. Since Afghans, unlike most people, don't need functioning institutions to organize themselves for violence, are in fact better at do-it-yourself, the conqueror can never stabilize the country.
Too bad that this evolutionary strategy leaves them with no legal means of survival, but that's where the narcotics rackets kick in.
The bigger problem, we see, is that there's always another conquerer who thinks he will do better.
You must be right, because if the American people had really believed the bullshit they were told that any of the wars since 1945 were as important as the war against the Nazi and Japanese empires, they would have immediately demanded a debate on how the necessary sacrifices in comfort and wealth would be distributed. In 2001 did the government immediately open war factories to get the unemployed off the streets? Did it sell war bonds in every movie theater? Did taxes even go up? No, they were immediately cut. The president even told everyone to go out and buy stuff so the terrorists could not claim the victory of having started a US depression.
In other words, the masses are in on this scam as much as the elites. It's just that the masses comply because they can't bear to sacrifice anything but their liberties due to their rapacious, dope-addict-like appetites.
This is not the first revolution to be violently divided between urban and rural populations. Recall the conflicts in Russia, where the rural-oriented Social Revolutionary party carried out the February Revolution, but that party's hardline wing (including Leon Trotsky!) turned on the new pro-war leader, and allied with the urban Bolsheviks to carry out the October Revolution.
We also see the urban-rural hatred in Mao's China, in Kampuchea, and apparently in the back-and-forth fighting in Thailand in recent years. Let's not forget some nasty business in the early USA - Shay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion involved rural anger with the new arrangements.
However, the historical trend is for poor, fast-reproducing rural populations to flood into cities. The question is, can religious fundamentalists really hold onto the extremity of their beliefs for more than a generation once they're living in a cosmopolitan and interdependent environment?
And say nothing about the Israeli nuclear arsenal.
This is way beyond the Lewinsky scandal, because it is the GOP and Tea Party desperately spinning out a darker narrative repeated on hundreds of issues by thousands of propagandists: that Democrats, in fact anyone to the left of them, are not real Americans, and even are supernaturally punished by God if they are elected into any office.
This is something that leftists ought to easily recognize and unite against. But as we see in these comments, the Left always has too many internal grudges to recognize an existential threat.
Would (D) include getting "us" out of their country so they could deliver it unto the control of their Wahhabist masters in Saudi Arabia?
It's very telling that you consider both Gaddafi and hardline Islamists - whose doctrines opposed each other in every way, and who did everything in their power to exterminate each other last year - to be better than any government that the Libyan people would elect. Do you reserve the right of sovereignity only to a tiny fringe of extremist lunatics who know better than the masses?
It sort of parallels extreme haters of Obama from both the American Right and Left looking to destroy the current empire out of certainty that only their own kind will rule the rubble.