Republicans only talk about Europe to blame everything on socialism. Since the implosion was caused by the American-style financial excesses of countries that the Bush Administration praised as "the New Europe", plus old capitalist stooge Britain, there will be no truths told on this subject.
That's like trying to get anyone important to admit that China has been propping up the US with massive loans and becoming the engine of the global economy.
Perry doesn't believe anything he says, and doesn't say anything the same from one year to the next. His whole right-wing extremist act started after he had a hard time winning against novelty act Kinky Friedman, in an election that was all jokes, no ideology. He was a Democrat until he could no longer win that way. A True Believer would never had flubbed the recitation of his sacred enemies list.
Abolish Commerce? That was Hoover's post before he became President. So Perry is to the right of Herbert Hoover?
Voter suppression is a long-term right wing project, one of the foundations of the movement.
In the '90s, I used to pick up the really hardline gun mags and see the term "14th Amendment citizen". It turned out there was a whole movement that demanded the restoration of pre-Civil War law that gave state legislatures a monopoly on deciding who could vote. Worse, this movement was hiding its racist agenda by appealing to libertarians on the internet. The agenda was made clear by constant smears of the poor as corruptors who would steal everything for themselves once enough of them voted. Now why would the poor become a majority unless either capitalism failed or non-whites were kept oppressed? A 14th Amendment citizen, by the way, is a euphemism for anyone who got the right to vote by Federal act, including citizens of Washington, D.C. (70% black).
I guess Kochs' sucker Herman Cain will be eager to explain why blacks must be presumed guilty of voter fraud until proven Republican.
1. it was OPEC in '71 that decided to denominate all oil sales in US $, in effect replacing Bretton Woods and gold that year. Iran is an OPEC member, so ditching the US $ might be a problem there.
2. China has been propping up the US $ and driving down the yuan for years so we can keep buying cheap Chinese crap so we can survive on the falling wages Wall Street allots us. If the Chinese let the $ fall to its real value, their holdings of hundreds of billions of US $ in Treasury bonds and other forms also collapses, leading to panic and anger among the Chinese population. But the same thing happens if they sell those holdings. See, we've trapped them just like we've trapped the Japanese and Saudis before them.
The sense is in demanding to know why so many anti-war leftists on the Internet actively praised Gadaffi for positions he had long since betrayed, just for the decaying scent of his past anti-Americanism and support for terrorism. They also demonized the rebels for destroying the country by daring to fight on, and denied that they even did any of the fighting by claiming that Tripoli was taken by NATO commanders and that all the news video was faked. Berube is being too kind at hinting that there is a problem on the Left with romantic love for ostensibly progressive dictators. It's a lazy attempt to dream of a shortcut, a Napoleonic figure who could somehow overthrow our corporate overlords instead of the massive endeavor of recreating the workers' movement that once kept those overlords in fear and at the bargaining table.
In the '60s, it was certainly appropriate for oppressed people in the 3rd world to make a big deal about Ho or Che as long as it didn't distract from hard thought about how they could create actual revolutionary democracy, but for their Western sympathizers like the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Weather Underground to fetishize those icons was ridiculous and pathetic, because it did not address the issues at stake in Western societies. But to keep fetishizing their inferior successors once the latter were proven to be tyrants and cranks is an abdication of any radical work ethic. For instance, we spend a lot of time arguing about Hugo Chavez, who I think is simply a latter-day Huey Long. We don't talk about the Bolivian Indians and their anarchism, but we make a big deal about Evo Morales, whom the Indians view as a sellout because he even is willing to hold an office. Those Bolivians are the hardest-working radicals of all, because it takes far more work for an entire population to try to govern themselves than to hand everything over to a representative government, and that in turn is more work than giving in to a guy in a uniform.
The Libyan rebels haven't united behind a single messianic leftist icon; that's why they have a hell of a hard job ahead of them making a working government. It also seems to scare the hell out of American left cultists, who probably still think Angela Davis will save us, that the masses are so ungrateful for what Gadaffi has done for them. Screw that, no one is going to do anything for the poor anywhere; the best Americans can do is elect leaders who will obey the Constitution and stand aside while the poor, who soon will be most Americans, exercise their rights to reorganize society to obtain life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It's already started in our Occupied streets, and if the capitalist response is to send in the Army to slaughter us, I demand we have the courage of the Libyans in moving to the logical next step.
Well, when the mob butchered Mussolini nobody regretted it. I miss the days when you could just kill a tyrant without everyone questioning your motives.
How big an improvement the new regime will be depends on how much of the $200,000,000,000 Gadafi is said to have stolen can be recovered, and how it is distributed between the regions, which was the proximate cause of the protests that led to the revolution.
By the way, has anyone heard any more about Gadafi's overseas booty and efforts to recover it?
Knowing too much military history makes you suspect in left-wing circles. Which is how you can tell America doesn't really have a militant left, which should be spending all its nights studying how rag-tag guerillas keep embarassing the Pentagon in wars. You never know what our future holds...
You're right, that's the debate we should be having. None of the tools at our disposal to influence the actions of foreign governments work well. Sanctions are a disaster, killing as many people as major wars. Humanitarian intervention is too elastic and easy to politicize. Drones, don't get me started on drones.
The actions of Congressman Kucinich disclosed in the article are very disappointing. The leader of the very anti-war movement that has worked tirelessly the last ten years to stomp out the "Arab dissent = al-Qaeda" meme sought to use it himself against Arabs who dissented against "socialism".
He has demanded explanations many times for outrageous actions by higher officeholders; now I demand to know why he was eager to stamp the al-Qaeda brand on the rebels in concert with Fox News, Palin, Bachmann, et al, a smear that he knows taints the entire Arab Spring movement in the eyes of easily-prejudiced Americans. Besides, I just want one of these guys to explain why they love Gaddafi so much for promises he broke years before Obama even made any. At least Ron Paul is consistent in his indifference to massacres by left-wing and right-wing tyrants alike.
But the solar and wind plants have no fuel bill; just maintenance and paying off their mortgages and construction costs. If fossil fuel costs gyrate wildly, current plants might have to be shut down during periods when prices are too high.
It hit 109 degrees here in Houston last August. It was over 100 almost every day of the month. Another 5 degrees, and I think people start emigrating out of here for good.
But we also are in a multi-year drought, and if we start having water rationing, and we lose the entire rice industry, people will be emigrating long before 2100.
The Occupy movement will lead to other movements, and they will flesh out the elements of the new America in a long-evolving process of interaction with the citizens. Problem is, the country will be going down the tubes during this entire process. An awful lot of the evils that now oppress us is due to movements spawned by the right-wing Ur-movement, the 1964 Goldwater campaign. The 1848 Revolution was the Ur-movement of the European left, spawning a broad spectrum of political parties, movements, and further revolutions. So I guess we're lucky to be here now, but we may have to spend the rest of our lives working on this.
You have nailed it. The United States has only operated at two extreme poles in its political relationship with the outside world. We refused to participate in it, until we could utterly dictate to it. And both those positions are at least subconsciously based on a supremacist bigotry.
I don't think Americans believe that Israel did not commit ethnic cleansing. I think the chilling thing that happened is that Americans still think ethnic cleansing can be justified when the cleansers are "right" enough and the victims are "wrong" enough. Israel took advantage of that archaic mentality and exploited all the prejudices which influence whom is seen as right and whom is seen as wrong.
Now why did that archaic mentality survive in America, the country that did the most 60 years ago to champion the universality of definitions of human rights? Will it take Americans experiencing all the horrors of the world wars before their own eyes to accept that the very idea that there are "good" races that must rule "bad" races is suicide?
It seems that we have reached the point where our only recourse is to create an alternative economy from scratch and then dare the "anti-big government" capitalists to outlaw it. Otherwise, they can always bribe us to betray each other, they can always brainwash us with paid ads (not just for elections; all commercial advertising sends the message that we depend on them), they can always threaten to move overseas.
I've been thinking for many years about how to do it, but all I can manage is to come up with pieces:
1. if you can't buy American, buy used; get it on ebay and ship USPS if you can
2. rent means the bad guys always get stronger
3. the more free services you can squeeze out of the internet the better
4. I guess I should have run Linux
It might be time to take another look at Bob Black, the '80s anarchist who argued in his book "The Abolition of Work" that the best weapon against capitalism was laziness; if we did the least necessary to survive the system would collapse. His slogan was, "Workers of the world, relax."
Since you've already decided that they will lose, my claim is that it is therefore time to consider violent revolution. I would rather die than live in what this country will become under corporate feudalism.
And then the One Percent grows its income to 20% of all income in the US, then 30%, then 40 and 50%...
So do you have any idea how to stop America from become Big El Salvador at all? Because at that point we will have perfectly replicated what Marx said would happen in the later days of capitalism, and as JFK pointed out, when peaceful revolution becomes impossible, all that's left is violence.
I think the old robber barons were monsters, but patriotic monsters. They had an occasional understanding, that they needed to make concessions to avoid revolution. T.R. Roosevelt justified the first permanent income tax exactly on these grounds. They also wanted to live in the US, in reasonable safety, and have access to US resources and skilled labor. In those days the workers really were marching in the streets waving red flags. The rich confronted them, escalated, and lost decisively. For a couple of generations they learned their lesson, accepting tax rates of over 90% and prospering anyway.
During this time the proletariat sort of unilaterally disarmed, de-radicalizing their unions and running in fear from any egalitarianism that might cost them their new suburban tract homes and big-block Chevys. Which left us wide open for Robber Baron 2.0, a bunch that has none of the virtues of the original. This time around, capital is infinitely mobile, there are plenty of nice places to live outside of America, and there are new growth markets, some of which do a better job of educating future workers than we do. Worst of all, we have all, rich and poor together, grown up in a world where traditional loyalties have been eroded, what Marx called the commoditization of all relationships. So why should a rich white guy regard a poor black guy as his fellow citizen, and take pride in his progress? In fact, why should we even love our own children if we can't be sure that they will forever dress like us or talk like us or worship like us?
So our allegiances are getting narrower and meaner and more short-term. Wreck America for a quick buck? Hey, why not wreck the world for two?
I don't doubt that America will be made to pay a price for fomenting ignorance. I am concerned about how many innocent bystanders will get dragged down with us.
As for truth, I think the Christian Right believes the facts change, while the truth is perpetual, which means you can ignore science or even buy favorable science if it converts more heathens to their monopoly of truth. I am very interested in how these monsters intend to keep America on top of the world once they've Lysenkofied our educational system; I am very concerned that they consider it Truth that God made America the recipient of nuclear supremacy, and He damn well meant for us to use it to dominate others.
(For more evidence as to the depth of their schemings, go to talk2action.org and dig deep. The stuff on Christian extremist homeschooling curricula is exactly what I'm afraid of.)
Have you considered the possibility that the Right Wing wants to isolate Americans from the outside world so that it can prevent them from considering alternatives? Like single-payer health care?
A couple of years ago I was leaving a Kroger supermarket in the Houston Heights, a relatively progressive neighborhood, and outside the Christians were raising money to send missionaries to - Western Europe! Yes, those poor backward savages, tolerating mosques in their very midst, spending more money on social welfare than on weaponry, they have to be rescued from their darkness...
And the more propaganda I hear, from Fox, from gun magazines, even from the way our mainstream media covers Europe's remarkably non-lethal riots versus our ordinary, patriotic, wholesome white-on-white murder toll, I see what the bastards are trying to sell: the idea that the outside world is moving backward into the 21st century, while America is moving forward into the 19th century, with hip, cool privatized prisons and highways and social security, with the freedom to work 60-hour weeks with no safety regulations, with the opportunity to get rich off of labor reduced to Asian-level wages. Why, we even see business stories decrying China's rapidly rising wages. How backwards of them!
And that, ma'am, is why we must have a lifeline of sanity to the outside world. We will run out of educated people and money long before we run out of intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. What will our idiocracy do then?
Representative democracy doesn't have to be broken, but America's is. And yes, the longer wealth is entrenched, the more likely these conditions get. So in the long run, one of these things is going to have to go.
Massoud is dead. There is no one else. Massoud's legitimacy as a pan-tribal leader came from the wars against the Russians and the Taliban. How would one establish that legitimacy now, when the only native coalitions that can form are at the behest of Karzai's regime, and the grand strategy of the war is under NATO? Even the existence of democratic political parties seems to break down into ethnic factions.
I would think Karzai's dead brother in law the drug gangster would have the real money, because Afghanistan's opium is worth more than the foreign aid Karzai steals. Hope bro left Hamid the Swiss account numbers in his will.
Hard to believe that there was $200,000,000,000 to be gotten out of Libya, but then Mubarak stole $40 billion and Egypt hardly has any oil. If I'd stolen that much, I would have fled early on to buy an entire government in sub-Saharan Africa, then plot my return from there, but I guess Gadafy had too much of an ego. Good thing the rebels killed several of his sons too, because that money is going to be used for something bad unless it all gets tracked down and seized.
The only large success against entrenched non-Western corruption has been violent Communist revolutions, and they just reset the clock to start all over again. One could argue that "corruption" is simply the result of attempting to superimpose Western administrative-bureaucratic norms on societies that were quite comfortable with ruling families and nepotism. So under the bourgeoise order the corruption is resented and blamed, but in their hearts people still expect to get bribes and do favors for relatives. The Communist revolution in turn gets caught in an even more hypocritical contradiction. For a counter-example, look at how Japan has continued those feudal norms under bourgeoise structures; corruption has become normalized, ritualized and more or less stays under control. Perhaps this is because above all the corrupt loyaties that Japanese officials and businessmen have, they are loyal to the idea of Japan as a single blood tribe, and it restrains their corruption in ways that are not norms for elites in Russia, China, India, Africa, etc. Sharing your success with your undeserving (as defined by market norms) countrymen is the ultimate nepotism, the one great virtue of America's robber barons as opposed to the mindlessly acquisitive corporations that replaced them.
I think Najibullah is a good analogy. He couldn't rule outside of Kabul, he was only supported by a tiny secular faction there, and he was too beholden to an unpopular superpower and its alien ideology. Pakistan's role, oddly enough, hasn't changed much since then; it still wants its own puppet in Kabul and keeps finding that some annoying superpower has gotten there instead. So time to train up some terrorists and bleed the country until it all goes to a negotiating table.
Let Russia have this mess back and see if Putin can break the pattern.
The major issue that everyone failed to bring up in their commentary on Libya is the crisis of unequal development within countries. It's caused tragedies before; the Kwangju massacre in 1980 South Korea crushed a rebellion that arose from the junta's concentration of capital in the Seoul region at the cost of places like Pusan. Many countries are ruled by an elite from a particular region, cronies of the dictator.
The obvious solution for distributing state oil proceeds is to cut an equal-sized check for every citizen. Since Alaska has long been doing that, the US can hardly object to Libya doing the same.
In 2008 the plutocrats were facing the risk of a full-scale 1929-level Depression; of course they were afraid of a doddering McCain and his health problems. In 1933 the elites were willing to give FDR a chance, but he couldn't get results by giving them what they wanted (the National Recovery Act was actually price-fixing and other market manipulation and it proves a lot about how much capitalists really believe in free markets). So he went to the longstanding agenda of the Left during 1934-35, and the bastards turned on him with a vengeance when they saw he was literally governing around them instead of through them as they'd expected. The meanest of the bunch actually tried to create a Tea-Party militia to blackmail FDR into submission (Google the Dupont Plot or the Millionaires' Plot). Then he turned back to the Right in '37, then back to the Left once the War gave him carte blanche to truly reorganize the economy. However, a big faction of the plutocracy never forgave him, no matter what he did for them.
Because of the bond FDR formed with the masses, by '36 the GOP couldn't win even with total Wall Street support; that is where Obama failed. However, the plutocracy must still consider the consequences of an insane neo-Victorian Christer in the White House now that the rest of the world is moving left and has leverage over a declining America.
I'm a contractor for one of the very biggest corporations in the world and I've seen it too.
I'm not sure if the "sleek and efficient" lie is mostly manufactured so the white masses will believe it, or so they can cynically use it as a unifying mantra when they vote to destroy a government whose real sin in their eyes is that it lacks a righteous bias in favor of "good Americans". In other words, the barbarian mind expects tribal institutions to enforce conformity and punish deviance, just as he does to his children and wife.
Of course they are certain that a purge of minorities and queers will make things more efficient. Of course many are small businessmen or their henchmen and want to believe they can run the country better. But a lot of them probably are disturbed by corporate treason against the tribe, jobs going out and oil coming in. Right-wingers, back to Nazi times and before, deal with that cognitive dissonance by dividing the capitalist class into "good" capitalists - Protestant factory owners and landlords, versus "bad" capitalists - Jewish bankers and sin merchants. Of course there is no longer a difference; see GMAC.
Perhaps the biggest reason they love the corporations is that they are pathetic addicts to the brands they consume. They mistrust the corporation but love Coke and Mickey Mouse. Addicts make up all kinds of lies about their favorite drug and the bastards who sell it, so thinking that the purveyors are more "efficient" than the government that just takes things away from good white Christians is an easy trap to fall into. I recall that Charlie Parker loved his pusher so much he named a song after him.
The problem is, the Republican nut jobs are absolutely committed to revoking the right to vote of fast-growing minority groups the Democrats are counting on. They were actively suppressing minority votes under Bush, commanded by the sinister Hans von Spakovsky. But back then there was a tiny fringe of militia supporters who called minorities "14th Amendment citizens" with the implication that said amendment should be repealed. They are not a tiny fringe now.
In other words, once a certain faction of the GOP gets in power, you won't ever have a genuine election to kick them back out again. Notice that many recent authoritarian regimes have lasted about 40 years before popular uprisings took them down; the regimes imposed in Eastern Europe, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the Gadafy and Sadat/Mubarak machines in northern Africa.
Given that the corporate media will spin it so that the clock on the far-right regime will start fresh, instead of being properly dated back to Reagan's election in 1980, do you think it's worth laboring (and dying) the next 40 years building a full-scale revolution to overthrow it, rather than showing the initiative to escalate to full confrontation with the Right and the rich today while a weak, Weimar-like liberal regime dithers?
Although I don't think that's what BSC meant, you may actually have a point that people are looking for excuses to say that we're already past the point of no return, so why not whoop it up for our remaining years?
My belief has been that one day the heads of America's corporations will call a press conference in which they finally explain how they fooled us and what we Americans will have to do to survive the world's wrath:
"Yes, we deliberately withheld information and produced false counterinformation so you would keep consuming so as to prop up our paper economy. Our computers told us the worst consequences would be elsewhere; that the drying of the rivers that come from the Himalayas to India and China would cause far greater misery than the decline of the Colorado, that the swamping of coastal towns would most ruin the lives of those with the least money. The world would be weakened more than America and we would exploit this and you would profit from it too much to give it up. So we lied to you to make you pass up every chance at a solution that would involve taxing us and ruining the most successful civilization the world has ever seen, merely out of guilt for inferior weaklings.
So now the blood is on your hands, and the world of subhuman communists will demand reparations and mitigation from us, which are now so severe that you will never agree to them. You and we together have declared war on the rest of the world, and you have no choice but to obey us, your new commanders, and give us all you have to keep up a military that will draft all your children. We will turn the world into a forced labor camp to maintain just compensation for our genius and entrepreneurship, and you will become our henchmen, our soldiers and prison guards, to hold on to power for as long as we can or face utter extermination at the hands of 6 billion victims. You will use up the oil and then convert back to slave labor, but still all the money will go to us and we will give some of it back to you, and you will be happy that you are not one of the slaves. You will prod the slaves with tasers as they build the dikes that protect your homes from encroaching waves, scan their barcodes as they plow over the wheat fields that no longer have fertilizer to make them viable, machine-gun their riots in the streets of whatever countries we can expand our dominion to, and tell yourself that they deserve it because they would all be dead without our munificence.
If you work hard and obey, your children may eat. If not, you still ended up living better than you would under SOCIALISM-ism-ism-ism..."
Okay, not total extinction, but what about the biggest mass extinction events of the past, which eliminated 90% of all species? What we know about them is that CO2 levels got so high that it must have gotten very hot and it had to be due to some greenhouse source not currently in play. We have large amounts of CO2 and methane locked in the permafrost in Siberia, which is melting. That gets us to a higher level. Then there's the methane clathrate deposits in the polar oceans, which if evaporated would give us all the explanation we need. If the Siberian thaw gets us up high enough to melt the methane, then it becomes much bigger than a human problem.
Has any member of the Tea Party ever expressed anything but the most sickening nostalgia for the Good Old Days, when it just happens that America was fantastically unequal? In fact, doesn't every known faction of the Right Wing champion the most extreme reimposition of some aspect of the past?
Many of the right-wing activists who have resurfaced with this movement were spending the '90s talking about secession, nullification, and non-whites as "14th Amendment citizens", meaning not really citizens at all. We've heard all this before, except even the monsters who presided over Jim Crow lacked the balls to actually repeal the 14th Amendment, as is now being discussed.
As the following article explains, the Tea Party does not exist in isolation from the history of right-wing extremism:
It seems inevitable that the Army would draw the line somewhere. It still dominates the economy, and I can't imagine it willingly giving up its companies. If Egyptians keep poking into the details of how their economy got into its current state, the Army and its companies are bound to come out looking bad, and become the targets of populist redistribution. Something will be needed to put the brakes on.
It is the normal behavior of political parties in a functioning democracy to move to their center to grab as big a share of the vote as possible, just as economic theory predicts of competing companies. That is the difference between a party and a movement, whose impulse to every problem is always to move towards its extreme.
However, sometimes movements move towards their extreme and win anyway. And sometimes two movements polarize a country between them and cause a civil war. If any of these appear to be happening, you know you no longer have a functioning democracy. In the case of the United States, I would argue that we no longer have a functioning democracy because we no longer have a genuine public.
If Romney is only as bad as W, that would make him by far the least bad contender for the nomination. People keep saying there's no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, but the difference is that the Republicans have major factions who want to strip existing Hispanic citizens of their citizenship, repeal the 14th Amendment entirely, demand open favoritism towards Christians as an American birthright (see David Barton), eliminate the minimum wage, persecute witches and exorcise demons in every city in the land, prepare for all-out war with Russian and China, and inexorably expand the use of prison slave labor (which in the Jim Crow South always meant the framing of innocent blacks to provide the slaves).
If we are angry at Obama for striving to protect an intolerable status quo, we must not think that means that the Right is not planning something far worse than the status quo. Would any of us volunteer to go back to the 19th century?
The issue here is what competing right-wing Protestant factions have in common: an increasingly open belief that the adherents of the "wrong" religion will bring down a divine punishment on the entire country unless it appeases God via persecution, exclusion, and possibly elimination. This is, after all, exactly what the Old Testament advises, and these groups are defined by rabid competition to escalate their Biblical literalism.
You can accuse Democrats of many things, but you can't accuse them of imposing the Old Testament as the only source of law.
Hooray! One of the theocrats finally let his guard down and showed his true face!
Now will the media get around to exploring Perry's Catholic-hating allies in the New Apostolic Reformation, who regard the Virgin Mary as a demon called the Queen of Heaven? They were all up on the podium with him during his giant prayer rally.
Strange? Believing that Jesus sailed to America and evangelized the Indians.
Also, first century Christians were horribly divided. Some viewed themselves as a sort of Jew, others hated the Jews. Many in Alexandria believed in Gnosticism, which completely rejected Paul's pursuit of control and expansion, and even the reality of the human body. There were Christians who believed in female clergy, the right to be a homosexual, and suicide.
Why did the Catholics crush all the others? They attacked homosexuality, abortion and suicide - all of them things likely to reduce their group's rate of population growth. They won the battle of the wombs, and the lesson was not lost on later religious hustlers. Polygamy, of course, is a fantastic way to accelerate birth rates.
We don't have any leverage until we can make the rich expendable. They can threaten to leave America if we don't cave in to their destructive demands, but we can't do the same to them.
Solve this problem, and we can go from marching to building.
America was plenty Keynesian from 1933 to 1971; in '33 FDR outlawed private ownership of gold coins, which was a pretty damn extreme act to keep money circulating instead of sitting in vaults. Bretton Woods was not a contradiction of Keynesianism. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve was established 20 years before Keynesianism, because fly-by-night banks had been collapsing for decades and wiping out people's savings.
WHY did Nixon terminate Bretton Woods? Because the dollar was overpriced due to Vietnam and the unwillingness of politicians to raise taxes to pay for it. But also, the US had been the world's largest oil exporter in the '60s, a situation which changed with breathtaking speed. By 1971, US oil production peaked at an amount similar to Saudi Arabia's current output, and has been falling ever since, while consumption was exploding, creating a huge trade deficit that logically would wreck the dollar's value. However, in that same year, OPEC voted to denominate all its members' oil sales in US dollars. This historic act meant that the dollar went from being tied to gold to being tied to oil. All over the world people now had to have dollars to buy oil. All OPEC member profits were in dollars, and where could they invest them? It is probably not a coincidence that after Kissinger threatened to invade Saudi Arabia in 1973, the petrodollars began to be invested right back in the USA.
The Fed is merely a cog in the machinations of the forces that have propped up the dollar and America artificially. The question is, what would have happened if the dollar had been allowed to fall all at once then instead of stretching it out over 40 years? Who would have benefitted or suffered?
A Reagan cabinet official made the mistake of boasting in his biography that Reagan's crew intentionally built massive deficits into their budget so as to cause a budget crisis in the future that would be used to destroy social programs.
So stop acting like Wall Street is an innocent victim of liberal fiscal miscalculation. The elites came to the conclusion decades ago that it was worth it to reign in a broken, impoverished Hell rather than share the wealth in a functioning Heaven. More evidence as to the extent to which all of this was a long-planned crime:
But gee, Mike, the "basket of goods" in 1971 was a heckuva lot better than the basket of goods in 1931 because of technological improvements, yet the workers demanded and got massive wage increases on top of that in the interim and America prospered at all levels.
In other words, the workers refused to accept that they had to let capitalists rape, starve and shoot them in order to obtain technological improvements. One is not a tradeoff for the other; look at Northern Europe where there continues to be plenty of technological progress.
In fact, less and less of that technological progress is the product of Americans, whether entrepreneurs or engineers. So why should our bosses get all the added profits?
I guess the argument in America, then, is over what a visionary should be paid. The sociopathic Right sees Jobs as a flesh and blood John Galt, to whom all earnings must flow. But there have been many visionaries, in many economies, who did not need to become billionaires to do great work. There have also been visionaries under laissez-faire capitalism who were screwed out of everything by the corporations. I'm amazed at how many stories about the history of automobile companies and other Edwardian technology firms have a part where the firm's inventor-founder gets forced out by the financiers on his board of directors.
So we should be very careful in making assumptions about what Steve Jobs proves or disproves about how our economy works in general. Your country cannot become or stay great by cutting off the poor from education, dismantling basic health care, promoting ancient superstitions as a low-tax way to make the masses more moral, or terrorizing your workforce with the threat of starvation. There might be any number of potential Steve Jobs among our youth today, but how many will be lost as their communities and society are dismantled for short-term profit?
Robert Rubin and Larry Summers would have been Republicans if they'd been come along in the mid-20th century. The Democrats are conservatives now, the Republicans are outright reactionaries, and I shouldn't have to explain the difference.
But in fact Watt knew what to do with his steam engine because steam engines were already being built. These were condension-powered engines used to pump water out of mines. There's an impressive collection of some of these in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. Bigger than your living room, but only putting out a few horsepower. By switching to expansion, Watt improved performance so much that he got all the credit for a vast array of new applications that became known as the Steam Age. But he didn't really invent the steam engine.
Of course, there were many brilliant nerds working on personal computers before Mr. Jobs figured out how to utilize Mr. Wozniak's engineering genius.
You can't have too much electricity. In the future, global investors will look at the energy security of the factories they want to build in deciding where to locate them.
Maybe Iran just believes in supply-side economics?
It's not that the Chinese and Iranians are environmental saints.
It's that the world in general is passing America by, including its entire religion of faith-driven greed and cheap oil. We're as ridiculous today as Great Britain's tweedy self-aggrandizement and pathetic colonial maintenance wars were by the 1920s. Tourists must have been shocked to visit London back then, looking at undernourished people through a thick coal fog, and then thinking, "Wait, these guys rule the world?"
Meanwhile, we look back at the rest of the world through a fog of Yankee corporate censorship, so we can't understand how much progress is occurring. In fact, we can't even call it progress because it is so antithetical to our dogmas. Our rulers don't need Chinese-style Internet censorship, because our population censors itself from learning about the "outside".
Does it bother you that the black murderers are much more likely to get the death penalty than the white murderers? Or that Texas DAs will frame innocent men whom they think they can more easily execute and thus get re-elected (Errol Morris' famous documentary "The Thin Blue Line" exposed such a case)? Or that the Republican governor of Illinois was so offended by the obvious bias in handing out death penalties that he suspended executions until the problem was fixed? Or that Europe and East Asia are largely lacking in these monsters you speak of, based on their much lower murder and execution rates?
I think many of us Texans are willing to execute innocent black men because they see it as a form of collective punishment against the crime-ridden black race. If they execute enough blacks, it will terrify the survivors into submission. Juan has commented at this site enough times about the evils of collective punishment and the position of human rights law that I need say no more here.
Elected district attorneys are public murderers; they execute people to get bigots to vote for them. Make them appointees, firmly incentivized to obey civil rights law, and we will begin to look more like the civilized world.
There have always been antiwar activists who claim that Israelis are operating in US-occupied Kurdistan. Given the wide range of mercenary and death-merchant activities on which the new Israeli economy is dependent, there could be any number of reasons Israelis are there.
But the key is "US-occupied". Our remaining forces would become hostages if Israel tried to escalate the PKK war from its Iraqi strongholds. Turkish troops have crossed that border with impunity in recent years in unsuccessful searches for the PKK; the warlord pair that controls Iraqi Kurdistan probably is intimately tied to the PKK, and the Turks might go after the Kurdish government, which is hardly popular with either the Shias or Sunni Arabs. What will we do then?
Furthermore, the Iraqi state oil employees' union repeatedly threatened to wreck the entire production system, which they had kept running by heroic efforts during the sanctions, if any move were made to turn their facilities over to foreigners. No one ever moved against the union.
We can expect that problem to be a hundred times worse with Saudi Arabia. They've not only observed what happened in Iraq, but they've had 40 years since Kissinger blackmailed them with an invasion threat to prepare a response. Many beleive that the Saudi fields are booby-trapped as a deterrent to invaders.
Part of that response was that the US has become dependent on the very thing that we probably extorted out of the Arabs after '73; that petrodollars be recycled as US investments. Without Saudi billions propping up our currency and real estate markets, what is America really worth?
I saw a study some years ago that analyzed the cause-and-effect relationship with political candidates who get big campaign money from the fatcats. It showed not that politicians usually changed their views after they got big money, but that candidates who had the "right" views were chosen to get the big money.
So all we have to do is learn how to detect those views and do everything we can to destroy those candidates. However, once they've been rewarded for their views with tons of TV money and favorable media platforms, they can hide those real positions with fluff and hot-button bigotry. It's too late, since the public always relies on those outlets to develop their image of what the candidate really stands for.
This is why our progressive forefathers relied on unions, ethnic activists and political machines as their own filter to weed out Wall Street henchmen.
There is another disturbing trend that helped put the US into a situation where it cannot capture people for trial or kill them in a gunfight. Namely, America doesn't win wars anymore.
I mean, the Lord Haw-Haw example depended on Germany actually losing the war and having to be exposed to a thorough Allied occupation. Any comparisons to the American Civil War are affected by the fact that the US was able to eliminate the organization that was making all the trouble that justified the use of lethal force, thus rendering its partisans ordinary criminals on US soil who could reasonably be captured. US wars ended in only a few years with its troops in control of the enemy's capital and the ability to sort out the status and threat levels of those still at large.
But now we're stuck in a world where people fight against the US, but live in a country that is not at war with the US but not about to be its toady. There will never again be a time when we can "win" any war in the traditional sense. So the war lasts until we hunt down every last partisan, but we can't shoot him unless he's shooting at us, and we can't capture him because we're illegally in a sovereign country and it's not worth the lives of dozens of our men to take him back alive. When in the past have we had to wage war this way?
America, by the way, has carried out large assassination programs before. There was Operation Phoenix, which had legal cover in the form of the fake government of South Vietnam, on whose fake soil the targets were living. Nowadays we can't even obtain that level of cover.
20 years ago my great fear was that the tradition of working-class activism would be broken, that the movement that rose from neglected mines and factories and despised immigrants after the Civil War until it made possible the New Deal would no longer be handed down from parent to child. For once it was lost and forgotten, we would have to start all over from scratch, and the first time it required a lot of bloodshed. The National Guard was called out an average of twice a year between the Civil War and WW2 to crush labor protests.
Well, it happened. We lost everything. Without a workers' movement to define social and economic justice, it's not enough for people to get angry and take to the streets. They haven't formed a consensus as to what America's future should be like. Just like the angry protestors of the 1870s, we are having to define the enemy and its nature, and then define the weapons we will build to defeat it. This will take years, too long for America to be saved as we know it. The capitalists of the Gilded Age were making more money in America than they could elsewhere, so when they eventually wrecked the country they had to negotiate with the workers to rebuild it. Now the capitalists are making the last big killings on their way out the door to new host bodies overseas. They won't negotiate; they will kill and tyrannize us until they're ready to pull the plug on America.
Yet we will still need the movement, and we will still need to rebuild a society as ruined as Mubarak's Egypt.
The workers are what made it possible for FDR to be a progressive; their network of unions, radical parties, and leftist media played the bad cop, he played the good cop who told his rich pals that he couldn't hold those crazy proles back if he didn't get some cooperation. Obama doesn't have that, and neither has any Democratic president since LBJ. It was never about the opinion of the people, it was about the leverage of those people who were willing to go beyond their personal vote to disrupt the usurpations of their enemies and force negotiations. Once liberals thought voting was enough, they were doomed.
I think the way it works is that as an empire grows more beleagured, its loyalists become ever more willing to hold onto what preserves their way of life for a shorter future time frame, and think less and less about the subsequent consequences.
The ultimate example would be, say, Berlin or Tokyo in 1945. In the world view of the people in those cities, there was no 1946 to imagine.
Thus, in my childhood Americans used to speculate all the time about life in the year 2000, or 2020, or whatever, usually in a positive light. Not just technological improvements, but a better life for the ordinary and the poor. Now, huge numbers of Americans are expecting God to terminate the world any day now because they can't lord over it anymore. Shame, just when they finally got the giant flat-panel TVs on our walls after all these years.
I think this psychological reaction is an example of Alvin Toffler's "future shock". People become more and more dependent on technology, but have less and less understanding of it. In this case, we seize on threats that our primitive brains can visualize (rock on head bad) regardless of the odds, and transfer to it our fears about technological problems we really don't understand or are too spoiled to make sacrifices to reverse. It's also been shown that fear has little to do with statistical probability; we fear the big boom more than the silent poison.
The mob reaction to suicide is probably more of a rural versus urban thing. In rural societies, someone attempting suicide probably has relatives that you know. In cities, everyone's a stranger. The cliche of New Yorkers encouraging people to jump off of ledges goes back a long way.
On the other hand, I don't expect that a crowd in the city of Tunis would actively be cheering on someone to jump. There are issues of alienation and projected hostility to consider in America's case.
When Mr. Evans uses the word "oppose", he means with economic sanctions, bombs, invasions, stuff the West can do to Egypt but not vice versa. So if it ceases to be democratic when one country has the power to violently coerce the other, we're the ones who are undemocratic based on actual history. And you know we have always had double standards in what we choose to coercively oppose around the world, based on alliances, race, and economic power.
Wow, that sinister Erdogan undermined your Islam-bashing narrative by making those remarks, so you now have to accuse him of being a double-talking tyrant who steals aid from the West to act as its henchman against Iran.
There just isn't anything a Moslem can do to make you happy, is there? There will never be an end to the hoops you will erect, the insinuations you will make, the convoluted conspiracy theories you will sincerely profess. No, only a US-investing monarch or US-trained praetorian regime ashamed to not be white Christians can earn your trust.
And you probably represent the upper 1% of American intellectual capacity. Thank Allah that the US is passing from the scene, along with the archaic prejudices it preserved in its splendid imperial isolation from reality, which the Tea Party and right-wing radio demagogues have amplified from the whispers of executive suites and churchgoers. I just had to argue with an old Tea Partier at Exxon who believes that all Moslems are out to convert us and enslave the world. He really believes that they all think like al Qaeda. Thanks, Mr. Miller, for your little contribution in making that kind of thinking the New Normal.
When Israel was at those 1967 borders, it didn't have over 200 nuclear bombs. You know, the ones it refuses to admit it has so that it can claim that its existence is threatened, which then allows it to steal more Palestinian land.
Carter outed the Israeli nukes recently. So why are they not part of the conversation as to Israel's true level of security?
Hey, it took a lot of your tax dollars to bribe, corrupt, and overthrow Arab governments to get them to ignore their citizens' sentiments on the Palestinian issue. Show some appreciation for 32 years of hard work!
I would not discount the size of future Turkish trade with Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization states as well. Interestingly, I heard a report before 9/11 that the Israelis were looking to start buying oil from Russia, for the obvious reason that no one else was going to sell it to them. After 9/11, I heard nothing about this, even as oil supplies tightened. The neocon chains binding Washington and Jerusalem might have been the cause; Cheney's PNAC clearly defined oil states acting independently of Washington as a threat, but his bullying drove Russia into greater hostility and an interest in getting its naval base in Syria back. Israel could hardly buy Russian oil and betray the neocon agenda.
Presumably the alternative Israel was waiting for was oil sent thru the Neocon Express pipeline from Central Asia to Israel-friendly Turkey. Well, that Turkey doesn't exist anymore. Not that Turkey won't sell Israel oil, but Israel would then face the danger of a sudden Turkish embargo the next time it does something spectacularly offensive. Which could be any day now.
An additional point about how 9/11 weakened America: economic policy. In 2001, the US was dealing with the burst of the tech bubble, and was flirting with recession. The attacks were used as an excuse to artificially resuscitate the bubble. Greenspan cut interest rates and used his great influence over the next several years to encourage the worst banking practices. This in turn created trillions of dollars in private credit. We keep forgetting the 2008 crash was a collapse of PRIVATE credit and asset prices that had been overvalued since 9/11. Greenspan and Bush simply held off that crash for seven years. I would argue that their excuse was that they could not let al Qaeda claim that it had caused a recession in '01. But stringing things out for 7 years made it far worse, with a derivatives market tangled beyond comprehension, and China moving in as the world's great saver while American savings vanished.
If we'd created a war economy like we did in 1942, then at least much of the debt would have been used to create factories that could be converted back to peaceful uses, and infrastructure would have been improved and people would have gotten real jobs. That's not how modern military spending works, though. It is meant to produce as few jobs as politics can bear, and create overspecialized gear to fight imaginary threats. The profits go straight to that real estate and stock bubble. (Much as they did in the UK and Israel, such that we could call it Neocon-nomics.)
So the worst damage was not the actual size of the military spending, but the size of the fake civilian boom that had to be created to make the wars politically palatable. Whether al Qaeda planned it or not, we chose a very self-destructive economics for this conflict.
I think you are mostly right about this, but I would disagree that al Qaeda failed to weaken the American empire or drive it out of the Moslem world. Recall that in the '90s US fatcats were sneaking all over Central Asia looking to turn it into more banana republics for Exxon. When the US used 9/11 as an excuse to bully Russia with NATO expansion instead of using it as an excuse to aid Russia with its Chechen quagmire (culminating in Cheney's famous dissing of Putin at the ceremony for the 60th anniversary of V-E Day), Russia moved harshly to reassert itself in Central Asia. We've really been powerless to stop it, and risk Russia moving actively to further burden us in Afghanistan as it easily could.
Furthermore, with our military engaged far away in our revenge wars, Latin America erupted in radical populism, costing us almost all of our long-established, neoliberal-whipped banana republics. I can't believe that we would have refrained from CIA operations, vicious sanctions and other forms of interference against the new egalitarianism of Latin America.
Finally, I think the militants would make a strong argument that the wars also helped bring down Mubarak. Our actions in Iraq were terribly humiliating to Arabs even if they disagreed with al Qaeda, and the helplessness of their pro-Western autocrats to do anything to stand up to America certainly was added to their helplessness against Israel. A guerrilla would say that his job is to expose the true agenda of a government by putting it under pressure, and then trust the people to judge correctly.
It happens that most of what al Qaeda wanted the people to choose, they rejected in favor of other choices not originally imagined. That's how it is with revolutionary activity, though. A lot of countries have been destabilized by one type of radical, only to fall into the hands of another type of radical. Russia was terrorized by anarchists, including Lenin's executed brother. Lenin was no anarchist, but he exploited the end of a long process that they began. The Communists tried very hard to take over the Weimar Republic, but the backlash against them put in place the parts that led to Nazism.
My favorite example is that of the Japanese fascists, put in power by young officers whose families often had been ruined by the trade war that the US began with the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. Those officers really did blame white capitalists for everything and thought Japanese rule would somehow be better for Asia. While the Japanese army behaved very differently in Burma and Indonesia, where it was hailed as a liberator, than in the Philippines, where it was extremely cruel, it did accomplish one great thing. It destroyed the cult of white supremacy, the memory of tiny handfuls of white soldiers and technology massacreing vast native armies. Once Asians saw other Asians give Westerners the fight of their lives, the genie could not be put back in the bottle. Yet the de-colonized Asia that resulted was hardly what the Japanese fascists imagined.
I think that is the role that bin Laden played, and it shouldn't be minimized just to make mainstream America feel good about outlasting him. We've lost control of vast areas of the world since 9/11, and we are still in complete denial that our owners counted on the exploitation of those regions, and others we will soon lose, to keep our economy working without many people making actual goods, or possessing any skills besides marketing and fearmongering.
The good news is, mostly the Left is winning in these places. The bad news is, America has long been pre-programmed to view the Left as an existential threat, and we will simply change fairy tales from the Moslem Peril one back to the Red Menace one, only now we are much more stupid, afraid of our own minorities' numbers, and apocalyptically religious. We've still got thousands of nukes, and we haven't learned a damn thing.
IDF officers siding with Turkey over Israel? All I can imagine is that those officers' involvement with Turkey included weapons sales, which in turn would lead to lucrative post-military careers with the Israeli arms industry. No Turkey means canceled contracts.
I can't imagine that those officers are actually capable of overcoming Israel's increasing tunnel vision and recognizing the danger that Turkey could turn its strategic position into real leverage in realigning the Mediterranean and possibility popping the cork and letting in the Russian Navy. Remember the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, aka The Neocon Express? Ceyhan is in Turkey. The grand US strategy was going to send a flood of Central Asian oil to Turkey, so a friendly Turkey meant oil to Israel forever. Now all these plans are going awry.
Actually, a lot of Kurds voted for the AK Party. Either it was just that much better than the old nationalist-at-bayonet-point parties, or they thought that re-emphasizing Islam over Turkish ethnicism would be a net gain. Or it's just that a rising tide lifts all boats, as we used to say in America when we actually still had a rising tide.
No, but there are a lot of white Americans who would vote for a President who could find a way to do such a thing without them having to face any consequences.
Phoenix Woman, your link led to a site with an even better story involving falling solar power prices in Italy - because electricity is quite expensive there now, rooftop and big ground solar installations will reach price parity in about 3 years - without feed-in tariffs.
This is really quite startling. The current wholesale price noted for Italy is 10.7 cents per kwh; I'm paying that much retail in Texas, but it wasn't long ago that I was paying substantially more.
They might not have to build solar arrays across North Africa and send the electricity across the Mediterranean as I'd hoped. Or they could go ahead and do it anyway and create electricity so dirt cheap that it would constitute a significant advantage for manufacturers who use a lot of power.
"things that are not real and are not going to happen."
You mean like all that fracking gas and coal bed gas and shale oil that we're continually told by the business media will save America & free enterprise? Or those offshore oil deposits located nearer to the center of the Earth than to Brazil? Or all that dirty sand in Venezuela that OPEC just reclassified as "oil"?
It's all longshot territory now, yet the capital goes to support what looks most like the status quo.
Yeah, yeah, and 90 years ago Douhet told all the flyboys that if they dropped enough bombs on civilian cities, armies would no longer be needed to fight wars. How has that worked out?
The drones are sloppy, weak, and blind in the deeper sense that you can never fight without knowing something about the society you are fighting. We got that first quick victory in Afghanistan in 2002 because Special Forces guys with laser target designators were welcomed by the Northern Alliance, who were a genuine coalition of anti-Pashtun rebels, and that meant they had an understanding of what they were calling airstrikes against. We don't have that in Pakistan, which is by the way a nuclear power and doesn't just let these drone strikes happen helplessly, no matter how it postures in its own media.
Drones are entirely the response of a weak, cowardly democracy to a public that has deliberately kept so ignorant of foreign affairs that it is reluctant to sacrifice anything for any reason. They won't be worth a damn in a Great Power war, just like all the other weapons we've developed since Vietnam started. They look equally useless in a battle against a mass revolution based on modern communications and decentralization.
Unless, of course, you have cheap enough high-tech labor and big enough factories to build (and operate) them by the millions. There's nothing America can make 1000 of that China can't eventually copy 1,000,000 of. Yet again, America has created its own worst enemy.
The Brazilians aren't afraid of NATO, but of the CIA, which helped install military dictatorships all over South America back before 1975. Consider this their idea of payback.
However, you must understand that consent of the governed is always relative. To say that Putin has no consent is to whitewash the monstrous economic crimes carried out by the pro-US Yeltsin regime, which the public definitely did not consent to. Yet dazzled by Yeltsin's American corporate brainwashing... uh, campaign team, they voted for him, and boy do they regret it. Similarly, the Chinese government maintains breakneck economic growth, I've heard, because its own economists believe mass rebellion will occur if growth falls below 7% per year. Yet I think China's regime is in a stronger position that it believes, because of the rising nationalism of the Chinese and their pride in their accomplishments under one-party rule. They like being strong.
Meanwhile, note the mass demonstrations roiling Indian cities in recent weeks over an elderly activist's hunger strike against corruption and his arrest by a centrist government. Consent is a tricky matter in hard times, and right now no government across the political spectrum, or even capitalism itself, is perfectly safe.
As mentioned in my links above, the polarization of Israeli wealth is a recent phenomenon, apparently tied to an economic crisis in the early 1980s and a great increase in the cost of maintaining the Occupation. Of course, this ties everything directly to the Likud. The problem is that once the Likud got away with using wars to privatize public goods and market the Israeli military-industrial complex, all the parties on the Left began giving in to it, for the obvious reason of not wanting to be accused of treason. Since Kadima was formed largely by Likud people who felt it had gone too far, it only represents an earlier version of Likud capitalist extremism.
But it was definitely the Likud's intent to do this. Google the "Clean Break" paper, in which Dick Cheney's own neocon lieutenants outlined to the Likud how to do what the GOP later did to the US.
To keep your post on-topic, compare the American events you describe to this 7-part interview with a radical Israeli economist about the rise of the rich there and their use of the Occupation to distract the public from the ills of privatization and wealth polarization.
The similarities between Israel and the US are so great as to be sickening. It's as if Israel was taken over by a bunch of sleazy hustlers to use as a testbed for a much bigger target: the USA. He even parallels your point about sneaking in oligarchy from the bottom; that Israel created plausible deniability for its growing tyranny, apartheid and race-based lawlessness by letting soldiers and settlers in the OT come up with all the violations of international law right on the spot, and then have its courts refuse to punish them. The argument that our boys on the battlefield have impunity from international law is the doppelganger to the ancient US worship of the idea that local government, cops, property owners, and churches can lynch, enslave, pollute and discriminate free from centralized tyranny.
The revolution against the rich has begun everywhere but in North America.
There are a few places where the Right rules because the Left is hopelessly split between several parties run by prima-donnas, like France and Britain, but the real people are in the streets there too.
We should have seen it coming. It all began in Latin America and its rebellion against the Washington Consensus, beginning 10 years ago. Our media found a flawed villain in Hugo Chavez to blame, thus making all the ordinary activists into "outside agitators". The truth was far more remarkable. When the Bolivian native peoples literally chased their neoliberal government from city to city - on foot - I began to see I was way behind on the most important political development of our time (not 9/11). Our media portrays Evo Morales as an unrepresentative radical who hijacked Bolivia for his master Chavez. The Bolivian poor view him as some sort of useless mainstream sellout, because they've moved past Marxism all the way to anarchism. Real anarchism, grassroots and faceless, the kind that we've all been taught can't exist because all Socialism is really a plot by longhaired elitists.
That's the story that ties everything together from South America to Greece to Egypt. Of course disgust with the American empire has led normal, mostly capitalist states like Russia, China, Brazil and South Africa to turn against us as well, even though their socialist credentials are damn thin. It's allowed their leaders to stay ahead of the marchers, who are on a hair trigger against privatization and government layoffs. It's allowed them to rebel against America's new monopoly center, Microsoft, by propagating Linux as an alternative system to avoid paying licensing fees to the little crook with the eyeglasses whom our antitrust regulators refuse to punish.
However, too many people on the Left, and even isolationist Right, are obsessed with man-love for anti-American strongmen like Putin who put nationalism over Wall Street. There are more genuine revolutions, playing out over a longer time scale than the career of a single autocrat. In the streets of Mexico's cities, Javier Sicilia is gathering a broad coalition outside the entire party system to march and march until the use of the army against drug gangs is halted. That is a vote against America's hypocrisy in buying the drugs, selling the guns to both sides, and demanding that Mexicans must stop it all on their end. The Zapatistas, anarchists who did not go away when our media stopped covering them, are now in alliance with Sicilia. Imagine the Fox/GOP/mainstream Democrat/NYT outrage explosion once we suddenly discover that most Mexicans are sick of being ordered around by us. We'll have to prove they've been infiltrated by al-Qaeda.
That's the looming tragedy; a panic when Americans all at once realize the world has turned against them, and the rush to scapegoat and crush all Democrats and progressives for having let things get this way - not for the claimed reason that it's actually their fault; we know in our hearts that we're greedy, violent bastards and that one day we won't get away with it. The real reason will be our certainty that once we crush all internal dissent, all stand in perfect subservience to our corporate masters, and they are rewarded with enough tax cuts from sacrificed public services, the capitalist system will automagically make America so strong and pure that all in the world will fall to their knees in awe and worship us again.
Once THAT fails, nothing for it but to build a giant wall around the country, cut all the Internet connections at the borders, put our fingers in our ears and sing loud hymns as we slowly crumble to a neo-Confederate economy and the rest of the world goes on thankfully without us.
Wake me up when the poor are marching in our streets with red banners again.
I wasn't very enthusiastic about the Libyan revolution when it started. It was mostly because Meteor Blades at Daily Kos kept posting diaries about an in-law who was Libyan and involved in the revolution that I started to worry about the consequences of Gadafy successfully rolling over Benghazi and ending the entire tide of Arab Spring.
But after I supported the NATO bailout, which is what it was, a stupid, clumsy, poorly planned bailout, not an invasion, I was aghast at all the people coming out of the woodwork cheering for Gadafy. (I spell his name that way because it's the fewest letters.) I'm still not sure what the Hell that's about. Some only talked in very vague ways about his Socialist credentials. None of them actually seemed to remember the '70s and '80s when Gadafy was (a) really involved in financing armed movements and (b) really on the US hit list. So what was this all about?
But then my real horror began when the supposedly anti-war voices began to ape the Fox News/ Ziocon dogma that any Arab who would stand up against his government must be an al-Qaeda monster, that Arabs are such haters that even one Islamist in their midst would turn them into a zombie mob, that NATO was really behind a bin Laden takeover of Libya as though it were still Afghanistan in 1981 and nothing had changed since.
If there was one thing that the peace movement was to be proud of was that it stood up to the hateful anti-Arab, anti-Islam bigotry streaming from most American institutions across 3/4 of the political spectrum after 2001.
Yet after NATO bombed Libya, I read plenty of hatred for the actual rebels of Libya, and nothing but praise for the mythical horde of rank & file Gadafy supporters. Does this mean that an Arab only has human dignity as a registered member of the "anti-imperialist" brigade, with all credentials cleared by Alexander Cockburn to assure that no single action said Arab will ever take will ever benefit a single Westerner or (gasp!) Jew? It seems little different than the Bushites heaping praises on their Iraqi pets or whatever Palestinian faction Israel tells us is less bad this week while most actual Iraqis and Palestinians suffered under their rulers. A right-winger thinks an Arab only has the right to exist to provide us oil; a left-winger, I guess, only thinks an Arab has a right to exist to give oil money to terrorists fighting capitalism and Zionism.
That can't be the peace movement, can it? Surely the microphone has simply been grabbed by the Alex Jones/Ron Paul gang, or any of the millions of Bush dead-enders who wanted this war to be Obama's Iraq out of pure spite, like the pure spite that put Bush in the White House in the first place in revenge for 1992. No one in the peace movement really believes that the only way to keep the evil Arabs from their dark Islamist instincts is for left-wing tyrants to point bayonets at them.
And yet, now that I think back, where was most of the peace movement on Egypt and Tunisia? They just seemed to be confused like the rest of us. The handful who really embraced popular organization for non-violent change in Cairo just went nuts when their Libyan counterparts dared to shoot back. I guess they will never forgive that apostasy. These were the ones who kept talking about the rebels having to be hung out to dry until they negotiated with the man who was ranting on TV that they were all al-Qaeda and must be exterminated.
And that's where the vultures flew in, with a far nastier message unopposed by those we expect to oppose such racism. Do we always depend on the former group to vet the "anti-war" position so we don't get fooled by Astroturfers? No wonder the supporters of peace come off as so pathetic to everyone else.
I would have said last year that Mubarak was more competent than Gadafi, given that Egypt has little oil and many mouths to feed. Mubarak had to squeeze his billions out of Washington at the price of his people's contempt.
The thing is, an oil dictator can afford to sacrifice his population, because the oil under their feet is more valuable than their own ability to pay taxes. Assad has to actually have people working in order to keep his soldiers paid, and probably so do the governments of Algeria and Morocco. Obviously the reactionary oil monarchies have a huge advantage in staying in power.
But we're seeing people's uprisings everywhere now - in Chile, in Greece, in London, in India, the poor are getting sick of, essentially, the neo-Victorian era inaugurated by Reagan and Thatcher 30 years ago. Instead of microanalyzing the supposed conspiracies behind the peoples' uprisings that we don't think are "left-wing" enough, and saying that whomever the US or NATO supports is irredeemably evil, we need to look at the macro picture of how quickly the forces of capitalism, corporatism, or all the 3rd world tyrants across the political spectrum who all cut their own deals with the corporations, are being overwhelmed by popular anger. We don't see it because we're stuck here in the States, where all populist anger is diverted to the Right by generations of ideological conditioning and censorship. America is being left alone on a right-wing island while the rest of the world is recapitulating the history of workers' movements in the late 19th and early 20th century. Screw Fukuyama, history is starting again.
There is no point in slandering the Libyan people for being ungrateful for the things Muammar Gadafy did long ago. They had to live with the things he was doing today, and for the last decade, and they chose to risk their lives to put an end to that.
So those who would eulogize Gadafy, use Robert Penn Warren's words, and remember his warning:
"I have to believe he was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together so that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that."
Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" frames the intentional sabotage of Iraq's remaining economy by the Bush carpetbaggers as the ultimate example of neoliberal destruction of mixed economies. She writes about how Iraqis were practically forbidden to get any industries on line to make goods to repair anything, because contractors friendly to the Bush Administration had already been given royal charters to rule those industries.
But the point is that Chalabi did not ultimately prove loyal to the US Occupation. He seems to have deeper loyalties to Iran, but who can say for sure? He's still in politics, now hostile to the US.
And that was the best we could do with 150,000 troops on the ground and an unlimited war budget, following a decade of massive fabrication of an Iraqi capitalist exile movement by Dick Cheney with the resources of the American Enterprise Institute and Halliburton and the Project for a New American Century - done openly and clearly their top priority, complete with countless Congressional hearings to regurgitate fake evidence.
It was hard to get good help in 2003; it's impossible now.
Why didn't the Arab Spring happen in 2004 then? Why didn't Bush put sanctions on Mubarak instead of continuing to deliver his billion per year in aid? We did nothing to contribute to the Arab Spring except prop up hated dictators beyond the people's ability to bear, and turn Iraq into a hellhole, and snuggle up ever closer to Israel - which you might notice now has a street uprising going on against Netanyahu, whose party practically cohabits Washington D.C. How can you not notice that most of the uprisings have been against US allies?
So having been shut out of Libya, the Chinese will dig a little more deeply into the THREE TRILLION DOLLARS of foreign currency they're sitting on to bid up the price of oil on the open market, and we will all have to pay it.
See how markets work?
And if we conspire against China too much, China finally stops propping up the dollar at the detriment of the yuan, letting the latter appreciate and thus buy more oil while impoverished Americans can no longer afford the Chinese crap they buy to make ends meet.
China already owns our asses, don't you get it? They've already won, in human terms. Their big enemy is the strain they had to place on the planet in order to rapidly overcome American domination.
You couldn't even be bothered to do the research to discover North Vietnam's population during the war was only 17 million?! Or that Gadafy had 40 years of oil sales with which to build up his defenses, especially after 1986? He could have bought half the Soviet Army after 1990. Or that America had up to 500,000 troops in South Vietnam at one time, and was nowhere near being able to march to Hanoi, much less enter it on Toyota pickup trucks?
You're a fool if you claim Gadafy's legitimacy among his people was even a tiny fraction that of the regime of Ho Chi Minh among the Vietnamese, though even he was a tyrant. Conventional bombing, in fact, is a proven failure in changing the political allegiance of citizens. The bombing did not break the will of the Libyan people to resist the rebels; there was no will to begin with.
We bombed North Vietnamese cities relentlessly for years. And the fall of Iraq's government was just the beginning of the war. What Cole's critics are saying is that there ARE NO REBELS, just foreign mercenaries and CIA stooges (and even al-Qaeda), and that resistance collapsed because NATO bombing has completely destroyed the will of a population that still loves Muamar Gadafy.
I am struck by one commonality in all the threads attacking the intervention:
Their utter, absolute contempt for the rebels. They are continually characterized as Western henchmen, rats who scurried into power on the backs of bombing, traitors who will sell all their oil, scheming tribesmen who will betray other factions, and murderous marauders. One even implied that Libya would be better off if they had been killed off in the first weeks to prevent (all!) of the subsequent suffering.
But mostly, they are portrayed as not having mattered in any way at all.
I would have more respect for the hardline anti-war position if it had a single representative who would even admit that the rebels started this, and they finished it, at extreme danger to themselves and a sacrifice in comfort and well-being utterly unimaginable by modern Americans, despite thousands of them having come from ordinary jobs and backgrounds that we should be able to relate to as human beings.
In other words, not that different than many of the people who rose against us in Iraq.
But you folks must deprive them of any identity so as to give US bombing awesome, Godlike powers to break peoples' real allegiances - which Iraq and Vietnam long ago disproved. Whatever the sins and conspiracies of their leaders, the rebels really were willing to die for a gamble at replacing their government with something they considered ordinary and reasonable. They didn't all sign the Project for A New American Century manifesto, or buy oil stocks on Wall Street. They, not NATO mercenaries or US killer robots, got into those Toyotas on Friday morning bound and determined to end this war in a weekend before conditions got much worse, with no idea what bizarre defenses and traps might await them.
Yeah, we Americans are hypocrites. But not all our allies are as low and cynical as we've become.
America is an empire with interests. As empires go, we are far from the worst. You should go over to War Nerd's stuff at exiledonline.com and see him rake Britain over the coals for massive war crimes as recently as the 1950s - they didn't really get much nicer as they declined, and I guess we won't either.
What makes us monstrous is that we won't admit that we're an empire. That's a decision that all of us participate in, and thus removes all moral restraint - as long as the public thinks it's getting what it secretly wants - and also makes it impossible to have useful conversations about policy, because we're all speaking in code words. The most important policy of all is, who is the primary beneficiary of the empire? The public does not want to know what a poor return it gets for its tax dollars in exchange for a taste of conqueror's pride.
But if I'd been raised as a citizen of an honest empire, I'd probably approve of some pretty horrific acts to perpetuate it. Now all that's left is to decide which of the two fates of declining empires the United States will suffer - Sweden, or Spain?
But the Right in America has been extremely successful with ideological blinkers, angry sneering, loud yelling, snark and unclear thinking. Why shouldn't we have some of those guys working on our side for a change?
And if the democratic elements spent 20 years overthrowing Gaddafi, besides the massive effects on infrastructure and the creation of a generation of refugee camp survivors (which has deformed Afghanistan and other societies), how much would those democratic elements have been mutated by their long struggle? It was the problem of Ho Chi Minh and his successors that the longer they fought, the more doctrinaire and authoritarian they got - when he first declared independence in 1945, he simply translated the US Declaration of Independence and read it from a balcony.
But the problem is not NATO, it is the United States. NATO did not create Karzai's regime; that was entirely our doing. The problem is getting NATO away from the corrupting influence of a desperate, declining empire, and Obama's lack of enthusiasm for this operation provides an opening, which the troubles in Afghanistan could open into a chasm. Essentially, Europe should be a federal republic with a real national economic policy (instead of the chaos that the southern tier visited upon the Euro) and a real military, a democratic superpower with a sphere of influence in the Mediterranean. NATO was the logical precursor to that, but the Bush administration perverted it into an organization that has very little to do with European interests. It's time for Europeans to stop abdicating their sovereign responsibilities and stand up to us before our right-wing whackos get back in the White House and realize that our remaining nuclear arsenal is the only thing left that America can use to extort a living from the world.
The capitalist West is now in such a deep economic crisis that it's fighting to keep afloat on a week by week basis. Long-term means November 2012. That's it.
That definitely was a surprise. If Tripoli has the kind of sprawl that lets mountain tribesmen drive their tacticals in from the desert and link up unchallenged, then Gadafi did a lot less to prepare than I expected. How many African laborers does it take to build a stupid trench line?
Problem is, NATO's slowness and clumsiness will prevent it from quickly establishing airdrops and even boat landings to get in supplies to the uprising. Once you're the neighborhood that has all the food and gasoline, you become very popular. It would be a tragedy to miss this opportunity to avoid a prolonged seige, like the day in 1864 when Union forces dithered outside Petersburg, Virginia because the generals didn't trust the black troops they had available, and when white reinforcements arrived it was already getting dark. That cost America another 9 months of war.
Great, the only movement to ever fight effectively for the poor Shia of Lebanon will be gone and the Shia will return to the bottom caste under a Hariri family owned by Saudi Arabia. Yeah, you just advocated putting what is soon to be Lebanon's majority to the fate of the people of Bahrain - except that being neoliberals, the Hariris will keep the Shia much poorer.
Perry was a Democrat until he had to switch sides to hold onto his government job. He then became Bush's shadow, but easily avoided the Bush collapse in '08 by joining those who said Bush wasn't extreme enough. He's not crazy, he's a barometer of the craziness of voters.
So the next time he calls FDR or Al Gore a Socialist, someone needs to ask him why he spent so many years in their party.
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Republicans only talk about Europe to blame everything on socialism. Since the implosion was caused by the American-style financial excesses of countries that the Bush Administration praised as "the New Europe", plus old capitalist stooge Britain, there will be no truths told on this subject.
That's like trying to get anyone important to admit that China has been propping up the US with massive loans and becoming the engine of the global economy.
Perry doesn't believe anything he says, and doesn't say anything the same from one year to the next. His whole right-wing extremist act started after he had a hard time winning against novelty act Kinky Friedman, in an election that was all jokes, no ideology. He was a Democrat until he could no longer win that way. A True Believer would never had flubbed the recitation of his sacred enemies list.
Abolish Commerce? That was Hoover's post before he became President. So Perry is to the right of Herbert Hoover?
Voter suppression is a long-term right wing project, one of the foundations of the movement.
In the '90s, I used to pick up the really hardline gun mags and see the term "14th Amendment citizen". It turned out there was a whole movement that demanded the restoration of pre-Civil War law that gave state legislatures a monopoly on deciding who could vote. Worse, this movement was hiding its racist agenda by appealing to libertarians on the internet. The agenda was made clear by constant smears of the poor as corruptors who would steal everything for themselves once enough of them voted. Now why would the poor become a majority unless either capitalism failed or non-whites were kept oppressed? A 14th Amendment citizen, by the way, is a euphemism for anyone who got the right to vote by Federal act, including citizens of Washington, D.C. (70% black).
I guess Kochs' sucker Herman Cain will be eager to explain why blacks must be presumed guilty of voter fraud until proven Republican.
1. it was OPEC in '71 that decided to denominate all oil sales in US $, in effect replacing Bretton Woods and gold that year. Iran is an OPEC member, so ditching the US $ might be a problem there.
2. China has been propping up the US $ and driving down the yuan for years so we can keep buying cheap Chinese crap so we can survive on the falling wages Wall Street allots us. If the Chinese let the $ fall to its real value, their holdings of hundreds of billions of US $ in Treasury bonds and other forms also collapses, leading to panic and anger among the Chinese population. But the same thing happens if they sell those holdings. See, we've trapped them just like we've trapped the Japanese and Saudis before them.
The sense is in demanding to know why so many anti-war leftists on the Internet actively praised Gadaffi for positions he had long since betrayed, just for the decaying scent of his past anti-Americanism and support for terrorism. They also demonized the rebels for destroying the country by daring to fight on, and denied that they even did any of the fighting by claiming that Tripoli was taken by NATO commanders and that all the news video was faked. Berube is being too kind at hinting that there is a problem on the Left with romantic love for ostensibly progressive dictators. It's a lazy attempt to dream of a shortcut, a Napoleonic figure who could somehow overthrow our corporate overlords instead of the massive endeavor of recreating the workers' movement that once kept those overlords in fear and at the bargaining table.
In the '60s, it was certainly appropriate for oppressed people in the 3rd world to make a big deal about Ho or Che as long as it didn't distract from hard thought about how they could create actual revolutionary democracy, but for their Western sympathizers like the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Weather Underground to fetishize those icons was ridiculous and pathetic, because it did not address the issues at stake in Western societies. But to keep fetishizing their inferior successors once the latter were proven to be tyrants and cranks is an abdication of any radical work ethic. For instance, we spend a lot of time arguing about Hugo Chavez, who I think is simply a latter-day Huey Long. We don't talk about the Bolivian Indians and their anarchism, but we make a big deal about Evo Morales, whom the Indians view as a sellout because he even is willing to hold an office. Those Bolivians are the hardest-working radicals of all, because it takes far more work for an entire population to try to govern themselves than to hand everything over to a representative government, and that in turn is more work than giving in to a guy in a uniform.
The Libyan rebels haven't united behind a single messianic leftist icon; that's why they have a hell of a hard job ahead of them making a working government. It also seems to scare the hell out of American left cultists, who probably still think Angela Davis will save us, that the masses are so ungrateful for what Gadaffi has done for them. Screw that, no one is going to do anything for the poor anywhere; the best Americans can do is elect leaders who will obey the Constitution and stand aside while the poor, who soon will be most Americans, exercise their rights to reorganize society to obtain life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It's already started in our Occupied streets, and if the capitalist response is to send in the Army to slaughter us, I demand we have the courage of the Libyans in moving to the logical next step.
Well, when the mob butchered Mussolini nobody regretted it. I miss the days when you could just kill a tyrant without everyone questioning your motives.
How big an improvement the new regime will be depends on how much of the $200,000,000,000 Gadafi is said to have stolen can be recovered, and how it is distributed between the regions, which was the proximate cause of the protests that led to the revolution.
By the way, has anyone heard any more about Gadafi's overseas booty and efforts to recover it?
Knowing too much military history makes you suspect in left-wing circles. Which is how you can tell America doesn't really have a militant left, which should be spending all its nights studying how rag-tag guerillas keep embarassing the Pentagon in wars. You never know what our future holds...
You're right, that's the debate we should be having. None of the tools at our disposal to influence the actions of foreign governments work well. Sanctions are a disaster, killing as many people as major wars. Humanitarian intervention is too elastic and easy to politicize. Drones, don't get me started on drones.
The actions of Congressman Kucinich disclosed in the article are very disappointing. The leader of the very anti-war movement that has worked tirelessly the last ten years to stomp out the "Arab dissent = al-Qaeda" meme sought to use it himself against Arabs who dissented against "socialism".
He has demanded explanations many times for outrageous actions by higher officeholders; now I demand to know why he was eager to stamp the al-Qaeda brand on the rebels in concert with Fox News, Palin, Bachmann, et al, a smear that he knows taints the entire Arab Spring movement in the eyes of easily-prejudiced Americans. Besides, I just want one of these guys to explain why they love Gaddafi so much for promises he broke years before Obama even made any. At least Ron Paul is consistent in his indifference to massacres by left-wing and right-wing tyrants alike.
But the solar and wind plants have no fuel bill; just maintenance and paying off their mortgages and construction costs. If fossil fuel costs gyrate wildly, current plants might have to be shut down during periods when prices are too high.
It hit 109 degrees here in Houston last August. It was over 100 almost every day of the month. Another 5 degrees, and I think people start emigrating out of here for good.
But we also are in a multi-year drought, and if we start having water rationing, and we lose the entire rice industry, people will be emigrating long before 2100.
So watch the water, folks.
The Occupy movement will lead to other movements, and they will flesh out the elements of the new America in a long-evolving process of interaction with the citizens. Problem is, the country will be going down the tubes during this entire process. An awful lot of the evils that now oppress us is due to movements spawned by the right-wing Ur-movement, the 1964 Goldwater campaign. The 1848 Revolution was the Ur-movement of the European left, spawning a broad spectrum of political parties, movements, and further revolutions. So I guess we're lucky to be here now, but we may have to spend the rest of our lives working on this.
Answer: read Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy"
You have nailed it. The United States has only operated at two extreme poles in its political relationship with the outside world. We refused to participate in it, until we could utterly dictate to it. And both those positions are at least subconsciously based on a supremacist bigotry.
I don't think Americans believe that Israel did not commit ethnic cleansing. I think the chilling thing that happened is that Americans still think ethnic cleansing can be justified when the cleansers are "right" enough and the victims are "wrong" enough. Israel took advantage of that archaic mentality and exploited all the prejudices which influence whom is seen as right and whom is seen as wrong.
Now why did that archaic mentality survive in America, the country that did the most 60 years ago to champion the universality of definitions of human rights? Will it take Americans experiencing all the horrors of the world wars before their own eyes to accept that the very idea that there are "good" races that must rule "bad" races is suicide?
It seems that we have reached the point where our only recourse is to create an alternative economy from scratch and then dare the "anti-big government" capitalists to outlaw it. Otherwise, they can always bribe us to betray each other, they can always brainwash us with paid ads (not just for elections; all commercial advertising sends the message that we depend on them), they can always threaten to move overseas.
I've been thinking for many years about how to do it, but all I can manage is to come up with pieces:
1. if you can't buy American, buy used; get it on ebay and ship USPS if you can
2. rent means the bad guys always get stronger
3. the more free services you can squeeze out of the internet the better
4. I guess I should have run Linux
It might be time to take another look at Bob Black, the '80s anarchist who argued in his book "The Abolition of Work" that the best weapon against capitalism was laziness; if we did the least necessary to survive the system would collapse. His slogan was, "Workers of the world, relax."
For-profit prisons lobbying for deregulation of prison slave labor = the Confederacy has won.
Yeah, in America we call it "voter ID".
Since you've already decided that they will lose, my claim is that it is therefore time to consider violent revolution. I would rather die than live in what this country will become under corporate feudalism.
And then the One Percent grows its income to 20% of all income in the US, then 30%, then 40 and 50%...
So do you have any idea how to stop America from become Big El Salvador at all? Because at that point we will have perfectly replicated what Marx said would happen in the later days of capitalism, and as JFK pointed out, when peaceful revolution becomes impossible, all that's left is violence.
Aren't we all sharecroppers already?
Mr. McPhee,
I think the old robber barons were monsters, but patriotic monsters. They had an occasional understanding, that they needed to make concessions to avoid revolution. T.R. Roosevelt justified the first permanent income tax exactly on these grounds. They also wanted to live in the US, in reasonable safety, and have access to US resources and skilled labor. In those days the workers really were marching in the streets waving red flags. The rich confronted them, escalated, and lost decisively. For a couple of generations they learned their lesson, accepting tax rates of over 90% and prospering anyway.
During this time the proletariat sort of unilaterally disarmed, de-radicalizing their unions and running in fear from any egalitarianism that might cost them their new suburban tract homes and big-block Chevys. Which left us wide open for Robber Baron 2.0, a bunch that has none of the virtues of the original. This time around, capital is infinitely mobile, there are plenty of nice places to live outside of America, and there are new growth markets, some of which do a better job of educating future workers than we do. Worst of all, we have all, rich and poor together, grown up in a world where traditional loyalties have been eroded, what Marx called the commoditization of all relationships. So why should a rich white guy regard a poor black guy as his fellow citizen, and take pride in his progress? In fact, why should we even love our own children if we can't be sure that they will forever dress like us or talk like us or worship like us?
So our allegiances are getting narrower and meaner and more short-term. Wreck America for a quick buck? Hey, why not wreck the world for two?
Pirouz, you posted your reply in the wrong thread... yet somehow it seems strangely appropriate here.
Peggy,
I don't doubt that America will be made to pay a price for fomenting ignorance. I am concerned about how many innocent bystanders will get dragged down with us.
As for truth, I think the Christian Right believes the facts change, while the truth is perpetual, which means you can ignore science or even buy favorable science if it converts more heathens to their monopoly of truth. I am very interested in how these monsters intend to keep America on top of the world once they've Lysenkofied our educational system; I am very concerned that they consider it Truth that God made America the recipient of nuclear supremacy, and He damn well meant for us to use it to dominate others.
(For more evidence as to the depth of their schemings, go to talk2action.org and dig deep. The stuff on Christian extremist homeschooling curricula is exactly what I'm afraid of.)
Have you considered the possibility that the Right Wing wants to isolate Americans from the outside world so that it can prevent them from considering alternatives? Like single-payer health care?
A couple of years ago I was leaving a Kroger supermarket in the Houston Heights, a relatively progressive neighborhood, and outside the Christians were raising money to send missionaries to - Western Europe! Yes, those poor backward savages, tolerating mosques in their very midst, spending more money on social welfare than on weaponry, they have to be rescued from their darkness...
And the more propaganda I hear, from Fox, from gun magazines, even from the way our mainstream media covers Europe's remarkably non-lethal riots versus our ordinary, patriotic, wholesome white-on-white murder toll, I see what the bastards are trying to sell: the idea that the outside world is moving backward into the 21st century, while America is moving forward into the 19th century, with hip, cool privatized prisons and highways and social security, with the freedom to work 60-hour weeks with no safety regulations, with the opportunity to get rich off of labor reduced to Asian-level wages. Why, we even see business stories decrying China's rapidly rising wages. How backwards of them!
And that, ma'am, is why we must have a lifeline of sanity to the outside world. We will run out of educated people and money long before we run out of intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. What will our idiocracy do then?
Representative democracy doesn't have to be broken, but America's is. And yes, the longer wealth is entrenched, the more likely these conditions get. So in the long run, one of these things is going to have to go.
Massoud is dead. There is no one else. Massoud's legitimacy as a pan-tribal leader came from the wars against the Russians and the Taliban. How would one establish that legitimacy now, when the only native coalitions that can form are at the behest of Karzai's regime, and the grand strategy of the war is under NATO? Even the existence of democratic political parties seems to break down into ethnic factions.
I would think Karzai's dead brother in law the drug gangster would have the real money, because Afghanistan's opium is worth more than the foreign aid Karzai steals. Hope bro left Hamid the Swiss account numbers in his will.
Hard to believe that there was $200,000,000,000 to be gotten out of Libya, but then Mubarak stole $40 billion and Egypt hardly has any oil. If I'd stolen that much, I would have fled early on to buy an entire government in sub-Saharan Africa, then plot my return from there, but I guess Gadafy had too much of an ego. Good thing the rebels killed several of his sons too, because that money is going to be used for something bad unless it all gets tracked down and seized.
The only large success against entrenched non-Western corruption has been violent Communist revolutions, and they just reset the clock to start all over again. One could argue that "corruption" is simply the result of attempting to superimpose Western administrative-bureaucratic norms on societies that were quite comfortable with ruling families and nepotism. So under the bourgeoise order the corruption is resented and blamed, but in their hearts people still expect to get bribes and do favors for relatives. The Communist revolution in turn gets caught in an even more hypocritical contradiction. For a counter-example, look at how Japan has continued those feudal norms under bourgeoise structures; corruption has become normalized, ritualized and more or less stays under control. Perhaps this is because above all the corrupt loyaties that Japanese officials and businessmen have, they are loyal to the idea of Japan as a single blood tribe, and it restrains their corruption in ways that are not norms for elites in Russia, China, India, Africa, etc. Sharing your success with your undeserving (as defined by market norms) countrymen is the ultimate nepotism, the one great virtue of America's robber barons as opposed to the mindlessly acquisitive corporations that replaced them.
I think Najibullah is a good analogy. He couldn't rule outside of Kabul, he was only supported by a tiny secular faction there, and he was too beholden to an unpopular superpower and its alien ideology. Pakistan's role, oddly enough, hasn't changed much since then; it still wants its own puppet in Kabul and keeps finding that some annoying superpower has gotten there instead. So time to train up some terrorists and bleed the country until it all goes to a negotiating table.
Let Russia have this mess back and see if Putin can break the pattern.
The major issue that everyone failed to bring up in their commentary on Libya is the crisis of unequal development within countries. It's caused tragedies before; the Kwangju massacre in 1980 South Korea crushed a rebellion that arose from the junta's concentration of capital in the Seoul region at the cost of places like Pusan. Many countries are ruled by an elite from a particular region, cronies of the dictator.
The obvious solution for distributing state oil proceeds is to cut an equal-sized check for every citizen. Since Alaska has long been doing that, the US can hardly object to Libya doing the same.
In 2008 the plutocrats were facing the risk of a full-scale 1929-level Depression; of course they were afraid of a doddering McCain and his health problems. In 1933 the elites were willing to give FDR a chance, but he couldn't get results by giving them what they wanted (the National Recovery Act was actually price-fixing and other market manipulation and it proves a lot about how much capitalists really believe in free markets). So he went to the longstanding agenda of the Left during 1934-35, and the bastards turned on him with a vengeance when they saw he was literally governing around them instead of through them as they'd expected. The meanest of the bunch actually tried to create a Tea-Party militia to blackmail FDR into submission (Google the Dupont Plot or the Millionaires' Plot). Then he turned back to the Right in '37, then back to the Left once the War gave him carte blanche to truly reorganize the economy. However, a big faction of the plutocracy never forgave him, no matter what he did for them.
Because of the bond FDR formed with the masses, by '36 the GOP couldn't win even with total Wall Street support; that is where Obama failed. However, the plutocracy must still consider the consequences of an insane neo-Victorian Christer in the White House now that the rest of the world is moving left and has leverage over a declining America.
I'm a contractor for one of the very biggest corporations in the world and I've seen it too.
I'm not sure if the "sleek and efficient" lie is mostly manufactured so the white masses will believe it, or so they can cynically use it as a unifying mantra when they vote to destroy a government whose real sin in their eyes is that it lacks a righteous bias in favor of "good Americans". In other words, the barbarian mind expects tribal institutions to enforce conformity and punish deviance, just as he does to his children and wife.
Of course they are certain that a purge of minorities and queers will make things more efficient. Of course many are small businessmen or their henchmen and want to believe they can run the country better. But a lot of them probably are disturbed by corporate treason against the tribe, jobs going out and oil coming in. Right-wingers, back to Nazi times and before, deal with that cognitive dissonance by dividing the capitalist class into "good" capitalists - Protestant factory owners and landlords, versus "bad" capitalists - Jewish bankers and sin merchants. Of course there is no longer a difference; see GMAC.
Perhaps the biggest reason they love the corporations is that they are pathetic addicts to the brands they consume. They mistrust the corporation but love Coke and Mickey Mouse. Addicts make up all kinds of lies about their favorite drug and the bastards who sell it, so thinking that the purveyors are more "efficient" than the government that just takes things away from good white Christians is an easy trap to fall into. I recall that Charlie Parker loved his pusher so much he named a song after him.
The problem is, the Republican nut jobs are absolutely committed to revoking the right to vote of fast-growing minority groups the Democrats are counting on. They were actively suppressing minority votes under Bush, commanded by the sinister Hans von Spakovsky. But back then there was a tiny fringe of militia supporters who called minorities "14th Amendment citizens" with the implication that said amendment should be repealed. They are not a tiny fringe now.
In other words, once a certain faction of the GOP gets in power, you won't ever have a genuine election to kick them back out again. Notice that many recent authoritarian regimes have lasted about 40 years before popular uprisings took them down; the regimes imposed in Eastern Europe, the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the Gadafy and Sadat/Mubarak machines in northern Africa.
Given that the corporate media will spin it so that the clock on the far-right regime will start fresh, instead of being properly dated back to Reagan's election in 1980, do you think it's worth laboring (and dying) the next 40 years building a full-scale revolution to overthrow it, rather than showing the initiative to escalate to full confrontation with the Right and the rich today while a weak, Weimar-like liberal regime dithers?
Although I don't think that's what BSC meant, you may actually have a point that people are looking for excuses to say that we're already past the point of no return, so why not whoop it up for our remaining years?
My belief has been that one day the heads of America's corporations will call a press conference in which they finally explain how they fooled us and what we Americans will have to do to survive the world's wrath:
"Yes, we deliberately withheld information and produced false counterinformation so you would keep consuming so as to prop up our paper economy. Our computers told us the worst consequences would be elsewhere; that the drying of the rivers that come from the Himalayas to India and China would cause far greater misery than the decline of the Colorado, that the swamping of coastal towns would most ruin the lives of those with the least money. The world would be weakened more than America and we would exploit this and you would profit from it too much to give it up. So we lied to you to make you pass up every chance at a solution that would involve taxing us and ruining the most successful civilization the world has ever seen, merely out of guilt for inferior weaklings.
So now the blood is on your hands, and the world of subhuman communists will demand reparations and mitigation from us, which are now so severe that you will never agree to them. You and we together have declared war on the rest of the world, and you have no choice but to obey us, your new commanders, and give us all you have to keep up a military that will draft all your children. We will turn the world into a forced labor camp to maintain just compensation for our genius and entrepreneurship, and you will become our henchmen, our soldiers and prison guards, to hold on to power for as long as we can or face utter extermination at the hands of 6 billion victims. You will use up the oil and then convert back to slave labor, but still all the money will go to us and we will give some of it back to you, and you will be happy that you are not one of the slaves. You will prod the slaves with tasers as they build the dikes that protect your homes from encroaching waves, scan their barcodes as they plow over the wheat fields that no longer have fertilizer to make them viable, machine-gun their riots in the streets of whatever countries we can expand our dominion to, and tell yourself that they deserve it because they would all be dead without our munificence.
If you work hard and obey, your children may eat. If not, you still ended up living better than you would under SOCIALISM-ism-ism-ism..."
Okay, not total extinction, but what about the biggest mass extinction events of the past, which eliminated 90% of all species? What we know about them is that CO2 levels got so high that it must have gotten very hot and it had to be due to some greenhouse source not currently in play. We have large amounts of CO2 and methane locked in the permafrost in Siberia, which is melting. That gets us to a higher level. Then there's the methane clathrate deposits in the polar oceans, which if evaporated would give us all the explanation we need. If the Siberian thaw gets us up high enough to melt the methane, then it becomes much bigger than a human problem.
How do you know they have common ground?
Has any member of the Tea Party ever expressed anything but the most sickening nostalgia for the Good Old Days, when it just happens that America was fantastically unequal? In fact, doesn't every known faction of the Right Wing champion the most extreme reimposition of some aspect of the past?
Many of the right-wing activists who have resurfaced with this movement were spending the '90s talking about secession, nullification, and non-whites as "14th Amendment citizens", meaning not really citizens at all. We've heard all this before, except even the monsters who presided over Jim Crow lacked the balls to actually repeal the 14th Amendment, as is now being discussed.
As the following article explains, the Tea Party does not exist in isolation from the history of right-wing extremism:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/8/25/144229/855
It seems inevitable that the Army would draw the line somewhere. It still dominates the economy, and I can't imagine it willingly giving up its companies. If Egyptians keep poking into the details of how their economy got into its current state, the Army and its companies are bound to come out looking bad, and become the targets of populist redistribution. Something will be needed to put the brakes on.
It is the normal behavior of political parties in a functioning democracy to move to their center to grab as big a share of the vote as possible, just as economic theory predicts of competing companies. That is the difference between a party and a movement, whose impulse to every problem is always to move towards its extreme.
However, sometimes movements move towards their extreme and win anyway. And sometimes two movements polarize a country between them and cause a civil war. If any of these appear to be happening, you know you no longer have a functioning democracy. In the case of the United States, I would argue that we no longer have a functioning democracy because we no longer have a genuine public.
If Romney is only as bad as W, that would make him by far the least bad contender for the nomination. People keep saying there's no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, but the difference is that the Republicans have major factions who want to strip existing Hispanic citizens of their citizenship, repeal the 14th Amendment entirely, demand open favoritism towards Christians as an American birthright (see David Barton), eliminate the minimum wage, persecute witches and exorcise demons in every city in the land, prepare for all-out war with Russian and China, and inexorably expand the use of prison slave labor (which in the Jim Crow South always meant the framing of innocent blacks to provide the slaves).
If we are angry at Obama for striving to protect an intolerable status quo, we must not think that means that the Right is not planning something far worse than the status quo. Would any of us volunteer to go back to the 19th century?
The issue here is what competing right-wing Protestant factions have in common: an increasingly open belief that the adherents of the "wrong" religion will bring down a divine punishment on the entire country unless it appeases God via persecution, exclusion, and possibly elimination. This is, after all, exactly what the Old Testament advises, and these groups are defined by rabid competition to escalate their Biblical literalism.
You can accuse Democrats of many things, but you can't accuse them of imposing the Old Testament as the only source of law.
Hooray! One of the theocrats finally let his guard down and showed his true face!
Now will the media get around to exploring Perry's Catholic-hating allies in the New Apostolic Reformation, who regard the Virgin Mary as a demon called the Queen of Heaven? They were all up on the podium with him during his giant prayer rally.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/9/28/14855/2836/Front_Page/NAR_Apostle_Cindy_Jacobs_Leads_Hispanic_Groups_in_Anti_Catholic_Prayer_Initiative
Strange? Believing that Jesus sailed to America and evangelized the Indians.
Also, first century Christians were horribly divided. Some viewed themselves as a sort of Jew, others hated the Jews. Many in Alexandria believed in Gnosticism, which completely rejected Paul's pursuit of control and expansion, and even the reality of the human body. There were Christians who believed in female clergy, the right to be a homosexual, and suicide.
Why did the Catholics crush all the others? They attacked homosexuality, abortion and suicide - all of them things likely to reduce their group's rate of population growth. They won the battle of the wombs, and the lesson was not lost on later religious hustlers. Polygamy, of course, is a fantastic way to accelerate birth rates.
Yeah, because if we could have murdered all dissenters against the Vietnam War, we'd have won, right?
We don't have any leverage until we can make the rich expendable. They can threaten to leave America if we don't cave in to their destructive demands, but we can't do the same to them.
Solve this problem, and we can go from marching to building.
America was plenty Keynesian from 1933 to 1971; in '33 FDR outlawed private ownership of gold coins, which was a pretty damn extreme act to keep money circulating instead of sitting in vaults. Bretton Woods was not a contradiction of Keynesianism. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve was established 20 years before Keynesianism, because fly-by-night banks had been collapsing for decades and wiping out people's savings.
WHY did Nixon terminate Bretton Woods? Because the dollar was overpriced due to Vietnam and the unwillingness of politicians to raise taxes to pay for it. But also, the US had been the world's largest oil exporter in the '60s, a situation which changed with breathtaking speed. By 1971, US oil production peaked at an amount similar to Saudi Arabia's current output, and has been falling ever since, while consumption was exploding, creating a huge trade deficit that logically would wreck the dollar's value. However, in that same year, OPEC voted to denominate all its members' oil sales in US dollars. This historic act meant that the dollar went from being tied to gold to being tied to oil. All over the world people now had to have dollars to buy oil. All OPEC member profits were in dollars, and where could they invest them? It is probably not a coincidence that after Kissinger threatened to invade Saudi Arabia in 1973, the petrodollars began to be invested right back in the USA.
The Fed is merely a cog in the machinations of the forces that have propped up the dollar and America artificially. The question is, what would have happened if the dollar had been allowed to fall all at once then instead of stretching it out over 40 years? Who would have benefitted or suffered?
Mike,
A Reagan cabinet official made the mistake of boasting in his biography that Reagan's crew intentionally built massive deficits into their budget so as to cause a budget crisis in the future that would be used to destroy social programs.
So stop acting like Wall Street is an innocent victim of liberal fiscal miscalculation. The elites came to the conclusion decades ago that it was worth it to reign in a broken, impoverished Hell rather than share the wealth in a functioning Heaven. More evidence as to the extent to which all of this was a long-planned crime:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm
But gee, Mike, the "basket of goods" in 1971 was a heckuva lot better than the basket of goods in 1931 because of technological improvements, yet the workers demanded and got massive wage increases on top of that in the interim and America prospered at all levels.
In other words, the workers refused to accept that they had to let capitalists rape, starve and shoot them in order to obtain technological improvements. One is not a tradeoff for the other; look at Northern Europe where there continues to be plenty of technological progress.
In fact, less and less of that technological progress is the product of Americans, whether entrepreneurs or engineers. So why should our bosses get all the added profits?
I guess the argument in America, then, is over what a visionary should be paid. The sociopathic Right sees Jobs as a flesh and blood John Galt, to whom all earnings must flow. But there have been many visionaries, in many economies, who did not need to become billionaires to do great work. There have also been visionaries under laissez-faire capitalism who were screwed out of everything by the corporations. I'm amazed at how many stories about the history of automobile companies and other Edwardian technology firms have a part where the firm's inventor-founder gets forced out by the financiers on his board of directors.
So we should be very careful in making assumptions about what Steve Jobs proves or disproves about how our economy works in general. Your country cannot become or stay great by cutting off the poor from education, dismantling basic health care, promoting ancient superstitions as a low-tax way to make the masses more moral, or terrorizing your workforce with the threat of starvation. There might be any number of potential Steve Jobs among our youth today, but how many will be lost as their communities and society are dismantled for short-term profit?
Robert Rubin and Larry Summers would have been Republicans if they'd been come along in the mid-20th century. The Democrats are conservatives now, the Republicans are outright reactionaries, and I shouldn't have to explain the difference.
But in fact Watt knew what to do with his steam engine because steam engines were already being built. These were condension-powered engines used to pump water out of mines. There's an impressive collection of some of these in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. Bigger than your living room, but only putting out a few horsepower. By switching to expansion, Watt improved performance so much that he got all the credit for a vast array of new applications that became known as the Steam Age. But he didn't really invent the steam engine.
Of course, there were many brilliant nerds working on personal computers before Mr. Jobs figured out how to utilize Mr. Wozniak's engineering genius.
You can't have too much electricity. In the future, global investors will look at the energy security of the factories they want to build in deciding where to locate them.
Maybe Iran just believes in supply-side economics?
It's not that the Chinese and Iranians are environmental saints.
It's that the world in general is passing America by, including its entire religion of faith-driven greed and cheap oil. We're as ridiculous today as Great Britain's tweedy self-aggrandizement and pathetic colonial maintenance wars were by the 1920s. Tourists must have been shocked to visit London back then, looking at undernourished people through a thick coal fog, and then thinking, "Wait, these guys rule the world?"
Meanwhile, we look back at the rest of the world through a fog of Yankee corporate censorship, so we can't understand how much progress is occurring. In fact, we can't even call it progress because it is so antithetical to our dogmas. Our rulers don't need Chinese-style Internet censorship, because our population censors itself from learning about the "outside".
Does it bother you that the black murderers are much more likely to get the death penalty than the white murderers? Or that Texas DAs will frame innocent men whom they think they can more easily execute and thus get re-elected (Errol Morris' famous documentary "The Thin Blue Line" exposed such a case)? Or that the Republican governor of Illinois was so offended by the obvious bias in handing out death penalties that he suspended executions until the problem was fixed? Or that Europe and East Asia are largely lacking in these monsters you speak of, based on their much lower murder and execution rates?
I think many of us Texans are willing to execute innocent black men because they see it as a form of collective punishment against the crime-ridden black race. If they execute enough blacks, it will terrify the survivors into submission. Juan has commented at this site enough times about the evils of collective punishment and the position of human rights law that I need say no more here.
Elected district attorneys are public murderers; they execute people to get bigots to vote for them. Make them appointees, firmly incentivized to obey civil rights law, and we will begin to look more like the civilized world.
There have always been antiwar activists who claim that Israelis are operating in US-occupied Kurdistan. Given the wide range of mercenary and death-merchant activities on which the new Israeli economy is dependent, there could be any number of reasons Israelis are there.
But the key is "US-occupied". Our remaining forces would become hostages if Israel tried to escalate the PKK war from its Iraqi strongholds. Turkish troops have crossed that border with impunity in recent years in unsuccessful searches for the PKK; the warlord pair that controls Iraqi Kurdistan probably is intimately tied to the PKK, and the Turks might go after the Kurdish government, which is hardly popular with either the Shias or Sunni Arabs. What will we do then?
Furthermore, the Iraqi state oil employees' union repeatedly threatened to wreck the entire production system, which they had kept running by heroic efforts during the sanctions, if any move were made to turn their facilities over to foreigners. No one ever moved against the union.
We can expect that problem to be a hundred times worse with Saudi Arabia. They've not only observed what happened in Iraq, but they've had 40 years since Kissinger blackmailed them with an invasion threat to prepare a response. Many beleive that the Saudi fields are booby-trapped as a deterrent to invaders.
Part of that response was that the US has become dependent on the very thing that we probably extorted out of the Arabs after '73; that petrodollars be recycled as US investments. Without Saudi billions propping up our currency and real estate markets, what is America really worth?
I saw a study some years ago that analyzed the cause-and-effect relationship with political candidates who get big campaign money from the fatcats. It showed not that politicians usually changed their views after they got big money, but that candidates who had the "right" views were chosen to get the big money.
So all we have to do is learn how to detect those views and do everything we can to destroy those candidates. However, once they've been rewarded for their views with tons of TV money and favorable media platforms, they can hide those real positions with fluff and hot-button bigotry. It's too late, since the public always relies on those outlets to develop their image of what the candidate really stands for.
This is why our progressive forefathers relied on unions, ethnic activists and political machines as their own filter to weed out Wall Street henchmen.
Why speak to the hirelings when you know where the masters are?
There is another disturbing trend that helped put the US into a situation where it cannot capture people for trial or kill them in a gunfight. Namely, America doesn't win wars anymore.
I mean, the Lord Haw-Haw example depended on Germany actually losing the war and having to be exposed to a thorough Allied occupation. Any comparisons to the American Civil War are affected by the fact that the US was able to eliminate the organization that was making all the trouble that justified the use of lethal force, thus rendering its partisans ordinary criminals on US soil who could reasonably be captured. US wars ended in only a few years with its troops in control of the enemy's capital and the ability to sort out the status and threat levels of those still at large.
But now we're stuck in a world where people fight against the US, but live in a country that is not at war with the US but not about to be its toady. There will never again be a time when we can "win" any war in the traditional sense. So the war lasts until we hunt down every last partisan, but we can't shoot him unless he's shooting at us, and we can't capture him because we're illegally in a sovereign country and it's not worth the lives of dozens of our men to take him back alive. When in the past have we had to wage war this way?
America, by the way, has carried out large assassination programs before. There was Operation Phoenix, which had legal cover in the form of the fake government of South Vietnam, on whose fake soil the targets were living. Nowadays we can't even obtain that level of cover.
20 years ago my great fear was that the tradition of working-class activism would be broken, that the movement that rose from neglected mines and factories and despised immigrants after the Civil War until it made possible the New Deal would no longer be handed down from parent to child. For once it was lost and forgotten, we would have to start all over from scratch, and the first time it required a lot of bloodshed. The National Guard was called out an average of twice a year between the Civil War and WW2 to crush labor protests.
Well, it happened. We lost everything. Without a workers' movement to define social and economic justice, it's not enough for people to get angry and take to the streets. They haven't formed a consensus as to what America's future should be like. Just like the angry protestors of the 1870s, we are having to define the enemy and its nature, and then define the weapons we will build to defeat it. This will take years, too long for America to be saved as we know it. The capitalists of the Gilded Age were making more money in America than they could elsewhere, so when they eventually wrecked the country they had to negotiate with the workers to rebuild it. Now the capitalists are making the last big killings on their way out the door to new host bodies overseas. They won't negotiate; they will kill and tyrannize us until they're ready to pull the plug on America.
Yet we will still need the movement, and we will still need to rebuild a society as ruined as Mubarak's Egypt.
The workers are what made it possible for FDR to be a progressive; their network of unions, radical parties, and leftist media played the bad cop, he played the good cop who told his rich pals that he couldn't hold those crazy proles back if he didn't get some cooperation. Obama doesn't have that, and neither has any Democratic president since LBJ. It was never about the opinion of the people, it was about the leverage of those people who were willing to go beyond their personal vote to disrupt the usurpations of their enemies and force negotiations. Once liberals thought voting was enough, they were doomed.
I think the way it works is that as an empire grows more beleagured, its loyalists become ever more willing to hold onto what preserves their way of life for a shorter future time frame, and think less and less about the subsequent consequences.
The ultimate example would be, say, Berlin or Tokyo in 1945. In the world view of the people in those cities, there was no 1946 to imagine.
Thus, in my childhood Americans used to speculate all the time about life in the year 2000, or 2020, or whatever, usually in a positive light. Not just technological improvements, but a better life for the ordinary and the poor. Now, huge numbers of Americans are expecting God to terminate the world any day now because they can't lord over it anymore. Shame, just when they finally got the giant flat-panel TVs on our walls after all these years.
I think this psychological reaction is an example of Alvin Toffler's "future shock". People become more and more dependent on technology, but have less and less understanding of it. In this case, we seize on threats that our primitive brains can visualize (rock on head bad) regardless of the odds, and transfer to it our fears about technological problems we really don't understand or are too spoiled to make sacrifices to reverse. It's also been shown that fear has little to do with statistical probability; we fear the big boom more than the silent poison.
The mob reaction to suicide is probably more of a rural versus urban thing. In rural societies, someone attempting suicide probably has relatives that you know. In cities, everyone's a stranger. The cliche of New Yorkers encouraging people to jump off of ledges goes back a long way.
On the other hand, I don't expect that a crowd in the city of Tunis would actively be cheering on someone to jump. There are issues of alienation and projected hostility to consider in America's case.
When Mr. Evans uses the word "oppose", he means with economic sanctions, bombs, invasions, stuff the West can do to Egypt but not vice versa. So if it ceases to be democratic when one country has the power to violently coerce the other, we're the ones who are undemocratic based on actual history. And you know we have always had double standards in what we choose to coercively oppose around the world, based on alliances, race, and economic power.
Wow, that sinister Erdogan undermined your Islam-bashing narrative by making those remarks, so you now have to accuse him of being a double-talking tyrant who steals aid from the West to act as its henchman against Iran.
There just isn't anything a Moslem can do to make you happy, is there? There will never be an end to the hoops you will erect, the insinuations you will make, the convoluted conspiracy theories you will sincerely profess. No, only a US-investing monarch or US-trained praetorian regime ashamed to not be white Christians can earn your trust.
And you probably represent the upper 1% of American intellectual capacity. Thank Allah that the US is passing from the scene, along with the archaic prejudices it preserved in its splendid imperial isolation from reality, which the Tea Party and right-wing radio demagogues have amplified from the whispers of executive suites and churchgoers. I just had to argue with an old Tea Partier at Exxon who believes that all Moslems are out to convert us and enslave the world. He really believes that they all think like al Qaeda. Thanks, Mr. Miller, for your little contribution in making that kind of thinking the New Normal.
When Israel was at those 1967 borders, it didn't have over 200 nuclear bombs. You know, the ones it refuses to admit it has so that it can claim that its existence is threatened, which then allows it to steal more Palestinian land.
Carter outed the Israeli nukes recently. So why are they not part of the conversation as to Israel's true level of security?
Hey, it took a lot of your tax dollars to bribe, corrupt, and overthrow Arab governments to get them to ignore their citizens' sentiments on the Palestinian issue. Show some appreciation for 32 years of hard work!
I would not discount the size of future Turkish trade with Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization states as well. Interestingly, I heard a report before 9/11 that the Israelis were looking to start buying oil from Russia, for the obvious reason that no one else was going to sell it to them. After 9/11, I heard nothing about this, even as oil supplies tightened. The neocon chains binding Washington and Jerusalem might have been the cause; Cheney's PNAC clearly defined oil states acting independently of Washington as a threat, but his bullying drove Russia into greater hostility and an interest in getting its naval base in Syria back. Israel could hardly buy Russian oil and betray the neocon agenda.
Presumably the alternative Israel was waiting for was oil sent thru the Neocon Express pipeline from Central Asia to Israel-friendly Turkey. Well, that Turkey doesn't exist anymore. Not that Turkey won't sell Israel oil, but Israel would then face the danger of a sudden Turkish embargo the next time it does something spectacularly offensive. Which could be any day now.
An additional point about how 9/11 weakened America: economic policy. In 2001, the US was dealing with the burst of the tech bubble, and was flirting with recession. The attacks were used as an excuse to artificially resuscitate the bubble. Greenspan cut interest rates and used his great influence over the next several years to encourage the worst banking practices. This in turn created trillions of dollars in private credit. We keep forgetting the 2008 crash was a collapse of PRIVATE credit and asset prices that had been overvalued since 9/11. Greenspan and Bush simply held off that crash for seven years. I would argue that their excuse was that they could not let al Qaeda claim that it had caused a recession in '01. But stringing things out for 7 years made it far worse, with a derivatives market tangled beyond comprehension, and China moving in as the world's great saver while American savings vanished.
If we'd created a war economy like we did in 1942, then at least much of the debt would have been used to create factories that could be converted back to peaceful uses, and infrastructure would have been improved and people would have gotten real jobs. That's not how modern military spending works, though. It is meant to produce as few jobs as politics can bear, and create overspecialized gear to fight imaginary threats. The profits go straight to that real estate and stock bubble. (Much as they did in the UK and Israel, such that we could call it Neocon-nomics.)
So the worst damage was not the actual size of the military spending, but the size of the fake civilian boom that had to be created to make the wars politically palatable. Whether al Qaeda planned it or not, we chose a very self-destructive economics for this conflict.
Prof. Cole,
I think you are mostly right about this, but I would disagree that al Qaeda failed to weaken the American empire or drive it out of the Moslem world. Recall that in the '90s US fatcats were sneaking all over Central Asia looking to turn it into more banana republics for Exxon. When the US used 9/11 as an excuse to bully Russia with NATO expansion instead of using it as an excuse to aid Russia with its Chechen quagmire (culminating in Cheney's famous dissing of Putin at the ceremony for the 60th anniversary of V-E Day), Russia moved harshly to reassert itself in Central Asia. We've really been powerless to stop it, and risk Russia moving actively to further burden us in Afghanistan as it easily could.
Furthermore, with our military engaged far away in our revenge wars, Latin America erupted in radical populism, costing us almost all of our long-established, neoliberal-whipped banana republics. I can't believe that we would have refrained from CIA operations, vicious sanctions and other forms of interference against the new egalitarianism of Latin America.
Finally, I think the militants would make a strong argument that the wars also helped bring down Mubarak. Our actions in Iraq were terribly humiliating to Arabs even if they disagreed with al Qaeda, and the helplessness of their pro-Western autocrats to do anything to stand up to America certainly was added to their helplessness against Israel. A guerrilla would say that his job is to expose the true agenda of a government by putting it under pressure, and then trust the people to judge correctly.
It happens that most of what al Qaeda wanted the people to choose, they rejected in favor of other choices not originally imagined. That's how it is with revolutionary activity, though. A lot of countries have been destabilized by one type of radical, only to fall into the hands of another type of radical. Russia was terrorized by anarchists, including Lenin's executed brother. Lenin was no anarchist, but he exploited the end of a long process that they began. The Communists tried very hard to take over the Weimar Republic, but the backlash against them put in place the parts that led to Nazism.
My favorite example is that of the Japanese fascists, put in power by young officers whose families often had been ruined by the trade war that the US began with the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. Those officers really did blame white capitalists for everything and thought Japanese rule would somehow be better for Asia. While the Japanese army behaved very differently in Burma and Indonesia, where it was hailed as a liberator, than in the Philippines, where it was extremely cruel, it did accomplish one great thing. It destroyed the cult of white supremacy, the memory of tiny handfuls of white soldiers and technology massacreing vast native armies. Once Asians saw other Asians give Westerners the fight of their lives, the genie could not be put back in the bottle. Yet the de-colonized Asia that resulted was hardly what the Japanese fascists imagined.
I think that is the role that bin Laden played, and it shouldn't be minimized just to make mainstream America feel good about outlasting him. We've lost control of vast areas of the world since 9/11, and we are still in complete denial that our owners counted on the exploitation of those regions, and others we will soon lose, to keep our economy working without many people making actual goods, or possessing any skills besides marketing and fearmongering.
The good news is, mostly the Left is winning in these places. The bad news is, America has long been pre-programmed to view the Left as an existential threat, and we will simply change fairy tales from the Moslem Peril one back to the Red Menace one, only now we are much more stupid, afraid of our own minorities' numbers, and apocalyptically religious. We've still got thousands of nukes, and we haven't learned a damn thing.
IDF officers siding with Turkey over Israel? All I can imagine is that those officers' involvement with Turkey included weapons sales, which in turn would lead to lucrative post-military careers with the Israeli arms industry. No Turkey means canceled contracts.
I can't imagine that those officers are actually capable of overcoming Israel's increasing tunnel vision and recognizing the danger that Turkey could turn its strategic position into real leverage in realigning the Mediterranean and possibility popping the cork and letting in the Russian Navy. Remember the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, aka The Neocon Express? Ceyhan is in Turkey. The grand US strategy was going to send a flood of Central Asian oil to Turkey, so a friendly Turkey meant oil to Israel forever. Now all these plans are going awry.
Actually, a lot of Kurds voted for the AK Party. Either it was just that much better than the old nationalist-at-bayonet-point parties, or they thought that re-emphasizing Islam over Turkish ethnicism would be a net gain. Or it's just that a rising tide lifts all boats, as we used to say in America when we actually still had a rising tide.
No, but there are a lot of white Americans who would vote for a President who could find a way to do such a thing without them having to face any consequences.
Phoenix Woman, your link led to a site with an even better story involving falling solar power prices in Italy - because electricity is quite expensive there now, rooftop and big ground solar installations will reach price parity in about 3 years - without feed-in tariffs.
http://www.rechargenews.com/energy/solar/article276475.ece
This is really quite startling. The current wholesale price noted for Italy is 10.7 cents per kwh; I'm paying that much retail in Texas, but it wasn't long ago that I was paying substantially more.
They might not have to build solar arrays across North Africa and send the electricity across the Mediterranean as I'd hoped. Or they could go ahead and do it anyway and create electricity so dirt cheap that it would constitute a significant advantage for manufacturers who use a lot of power.
"things that are not real and are not going to happen."
You mean like all that fracking gas and coal bed gas and shale oil that we're continually told by the business media will save America & free enterprise? Or those offshore oil deposits located nearer to the center of the Earth than to Brazil? Or all that dirty sand in Venezuela that OPEC just reclassified as "oil"?
It's all longshot territory now, yet the capital goes to support what looks most like the status quo.
Yeah, yeah, and 90 years ago Douhet told all the flyboys that if they dropped enough bombs on civilian cities, armies would no longer be needed to fight wars. How has that worked out?
The drones are sloppy, weak, and blind in the deeper sense that you can never fight without knowing something about the society you are fighting. We got that first quick victory in Afghanistan in 2002 because Special Forces guys with laser target designators were welcomed by the Northern Alliance, who were a genuine coalition of anti-Pashtun rebels, and that meant they had an understanding of what they were calling airstrikes against. We don't have that in Pakistan, which is by the way a nuclear power and doesn't just let these drone strikes happen helplessly, no matter how it postures in its own media.
Drones are entirely the response of a weak, cowardly democracy to a public that has deliberately kept so ignorant of foreign affairs that it is reluctant to sacrifice anything for any reason. They won't be worth a damn in a Great Power war, just like all the other weapons we've developed since Vietnam started. They look equally useless in a battle against a mass revolution based on modern communications and decentralization.
Unless, of course, you have cheap enough high-tech labor and big enough factories to build (and operate) them by the millions. There's nothing America can make 1000 of that China can't eventually copy 1,000,000 of. Yet again, America has created its own worst enemy.
The Brazilians aren't afraid of NATO, but of the CIA, which helped install military dictatorships all over South America back before 1975. Consider this their idea of payback.
However, you must understand that consent of the governed is always relative. To say that Putin has no consent is to whitewash the monstrous economic crimes carried out by the pro-US Yeltsin regime, which the public definitely did not consent to. Yet dazzled by Yeltsin's American corporate brainwashing... uh, campaign team, they voted for him, and boy do they regret it. Similarly, the Chinese government maintains breakneck economic growth, I've heard, because its own economists believe mass rebellion will occur if growth falls below 7% per year. Yet I think China's regime is in a stronger position that it believes, because of the rising nationalism of the Chinese and their pride in their accomplishments under one-party rule. They like being strong.
Meanwhile, note the mass demonstrations roiling Indian cities in recent weeks over an elderly activist's hunger strike against corruption and his arrest by a centrist government. Consent is a tricky matter in hard times, and right now no government across the political spectrum, or even capitalism itself, is perfectly safe.
As mentioned in my links above, the polarization of Israeli wealth is a recent phenomenon, apparently tied to an economic crisis in the early 1980s and a great increase in the cost of maintaining the Occupation. Of course, this ties everything directly to the Likud. The problem is that once the Likud got away with using wars to privatize public goods and market the Israeli military-industrial complex, all the parties on the Left began giving in to it, for the obvious reason of not wanting to be accused of treason. Since Kadima was formed largely by Likud people who felt it had gone too far, it only represents an earlier version of Likud capitalist extremism.
But it was definitely the Likud's intent to do this. Google the "Clean Break" paper, in which Dick Cheney's own neocon lieutenants outlined to the Likud how to do what the GOP later did to the US.
18 families control 60% of the Israeli economy. To a Republican, that looks like Mission Accomplished!
Once wealth is that concentrated, those other blemishes you mention can easily be corrected by yet another pro-privatization brainwashing campaign.
To keep your post on-topic, compare the American events you describe to this 7-part interview with a radical Israeli economist about the rise of the rich there and their use of the Occupation to distract the public from the ills of privatization and wealth polarization.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=74&jumival=595
The similarities between Israel and the US are so great as to be sickening. It's as if Israel was taken over by a bunch of sleazy hustlers to use as a testbed for a much bigger target: the USA. He even parallels your point about sneaking in oligarchy from the bottom; that Israel created plausible deniability for its growing tyranny, apartheid and race-based lawlessness by letting soldiers and settlers in the OT come up with all the violations of international law right on the spot, and then have its courts refuse to punish them. The argument that our boys on the battlefield have impunity from international law is the doppelganger to the ancient US worship of the idea that local government, cops, property owners, and churches can lynch, enslave, pollute and discriminate free from centralized tyranny.
The revolution against the rich has begun everywhere but in North America.
There are a few places where the Right rules because the Left is hopelessly split between several parties run by prima-donnas, like France and Britain, but the real people are in the streets there too.
We should have seen it coming. It all began in Latin America and its rebellion against the Washington Consensus, beginning 10 years ago. Our media found a flawed villain in Hugo Chavez to blame, thus making all the ordinary activists into "outside agitators". The truth was far more remarkable. When the Bolivian native peoples literally chased their neoliberal government from city to city - on foot - I began to see I was way behind on the most important political development of our time (not 9/11). Our media portrays Evo Morales as an unrepresentative radical who hijacked Bolivia for his master Chavez. The Bolivian poor view him as some sort of useless mainstream sellout, because they've moved past Marxism all the way to anarchism. Real anarchism, grassroots and faceless, the kind that we've all been taught can't exist because all Socialism is really a plot by longhaired elitists.
That's the story that ties everything together from South America to Greece to Egypt. Of course disgust with the American empire has led normal, mostly capitalist states like Russia, China, Brazil and South Africa to turn against us as well, even though their socialist credentials are damn thin. It's allowed their leaders to stay ahead of the marchers, who are on a hair trigger against privatization and government layoffs. It's allowed them to rebel against America's new monopoly center, Microsoft, by propagating Linux as an alternative system to avoid paying licensing fees to the little crook with the eyeglasses whom our antitrust regulators refuse to punish.
However, too many people on the Left, and even isolationist Right, are obsessed with man-love for anti-American strongmen like Putin who put nationalism over Wall Street. There are more genuine revolutions, playing out over a longer time scale than the career of a single autocrat. In the streets of Mexico's cities, Javier Sicilia is gathering a broad coalition outside the entire party system to march and march until the use of the army against drug gangs is halted. That is a vote against America's hypocrisy in buying the drugs, selling the guns to both sides, and demanding that Mexicans must stop it all on their end. The Zapatistas, anarchists who did not go away when our media stopped covering them, are now in alliance with Sicilia. Imagine the Fox/GOP/mainstream Democrat/NYT outrage explosion once we suddenly discover that most Mexicans are sick of being ordered around by us. We'll have to prove they've been infiltrated by al-Qaeda.
That's the looming tragedy; a panic when Americans all at once realize the world has turned against them, and the rush to scapegoat and crush all Democrats and progressives for having let things get this way - not for the claimed reason that it's actually their fault; we know in our hearts that we're greedy, violent bastards and that one day we won't get away with it. The real reason will be our certainty that once we crush all internal dissent, all stand in perfect subservience to our corporate masters, and they are rewarded with enough tax cuts from sacrificed public services, the capitalist system will automagically make America so strong and pure that all in the world will fall to their knees in awe and worship us again.
Once THAT fails, nothing for it but to build a giant wall around the country, cut all the Internet connections at the borders, put our fingers in our ears and sing loud hymns as we slowly crumble to a neo-Confederate economy and the rest of the world goes on thankfully without us.
Wake me up when the poor are marching in our streets with red banners again.
I wasn't very enthusiastic about the Libyan revolution when it started. It was mostly because Meteor Blades at Daily Kos kept posting diaries about an in-law who was Libyan and involved in the revolution that I started to worry about the consequences of Gadafy successfully rolling over Benghazi and ending the entire tide of Arab Spring.
But after I supported the NATO bailout, which is what it was, a stupid, clumsy, poorly planned bailout, not an invasion, I was aghast at all the people coming out of the woodwork cheering for Gadafy. (I spell his name that way because it's the fewest letters.) I'm still not sure what the Hell that's about. Some only talked in very vague ways about his Socialist credentials. None of them actually seemed to remember the '70s and '80s when Gadafy was (a) really involved in financing armed movements and (b) really on the US hit list. So what was this all about?
But then my real horror began when the supposedly anti-war voices began to ape the Fox News/ Ziocon dogma that any Arab who would stand up against his government must be an al-Qaeda monster, that Arabs are such haters that even one Islamist in their midst would turn them into a zombie mob, that NATO was really behind a bin Laden takeover of Libya as though it were still Afghanistan in 1981 and nothing had changed since.
If there was one thing that the peace movement was to be proud of was that it stood up to the hateful anti-Arab, anti-Islam bigotry streaming from most American institutions across 3/4 of the political spectrum after 2001.
Yet after NATO bombed Libya, I read plenty of hatred for the actual rebels of Libya, and nothing but praise for the mythical horde of rank & file Gadafy supporters. Does this mean that an Arab only has human dignity as a registered member of the "anti-imperialist" brigade, with all credentials cleared by Alexander Cockburn to assure that no single action said Arab will ever take will ever benefit a single Westerner or (gasp!) Jew? It seems little different than the Bushites heaping praises on their Iraqi pets or whatever Palestinian faction Israel tells us is less bad this week while most actual Iraqis and Palestinians suffered under their rulers. A right-winger thinks an Arab only has the right to exist to provide us oil; a left-winger, I guess, only thinks an Arab has a right to exist to give oil money to terrorists fighting capitalism and Zionism.
That can't be the peace movement, can it? Surely the microphone has simply been grabbed by the Alex Jones/Ron Paul gang, or any of the millions of Bush dead-enders who wanted this war to be Obama's Iraq out of pure spite, like the pure spite that put Bush in the White House in the first place in revenge for 1992. No one in the peace movement really believes that the only way to keep the evil Arabs from their dark Islamist instincts is for left-wing tyrants to point bayonets at them.
And yet, now that I think back, where was most of the peace movement on Egypt and Tunisia? They just seemed to be confused like the rest of us. The handful who really embraced popular organization for non-violent change in Cairo just went nuts when their Libyan counterparts dared to shoot back. I guess they will never forgive that apostasy. These were the ones who kept talking about the rebels having to be hung out to dry until they negotiated with the man who was ranting on TV that they were all al-Qaeda and must be exterminated.
And that's where the vultures flew in, with a far nastier message unopposed by those we expect to oppose such racism. Do we always depend on the former group to vet the "anti-war" position so we don't get fooled by Astroturfers? No wonder the supporters of peace come off as so pathetic to everyone else.
I would have said last year that Mubarak was more competent than Gadafi, given that Egypt has little oil and many mouths to feed. Mubarak had to squeeze his billions out of Washington at the price of his people's contempt.
The thing is, an oil dictator can afford to sacrifice his population, because the oil under their feet is more valuable than their own ability to pay taxes. Assad has to actually have people working in order to keep his soldiers paid, and probably so do the governments of Algeria and Morocco. Obviously the reactionary oil monarchies have a huge advantage in staying in power.
But we're seeing people's uprisings everywhere now - in Chile, in Greece, in London, in India, the poor are getting sick of, essentially, the neo-Victorian era inaugurated by Reagan and Thatcher 30 years ago. Instead of microanalyzing the supposed conspiracies behind the peoples' uprisings that we don't think are "left-wing" enough, and saying that whomever the US or NATO supports is irredeemably evil, we need to look at the macro picture of how quickly the forces of capitalism, corporatism, or all the 3rd world tyrants across the political spectrum who all cut their own deals with the corporations, are being overwhelmed by popular anger. We don't see it because we're stuck here in the States, where all populist anger is diverted to the Right by generations of ideological conditioning and censorship. America is being left alone on a right-wing island while the rest of the world is recapitulating the history of workers' movements in the late 19th and early 20th century. Screw Fukuyama, history is starting again.
There is no point in slandering the Libyan people for being ungrateful for the things Muammar Gadafy did long ago. They had to live with the things he was doing today, and for the last decade, and they chose to risk their lives to put an end to that.
So those who would eulogize Gadafy, use Robert Penn Warren's words, and remember his warning:
"I have to believe he was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together so that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that."
Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" frames the intentional sabotage of Iraq's remaining economy by the Bush carpetbaggers as the ultimate example of neoliberal destruction of mixed economies. She writes about how Iraqis were practically forbidden to get any industries on line to make goods to repair anything, because contractors friendly to the Bush Administration had already been given royal charters to rule those industries.
But the point is that Chalabi did not ultimately prove loyal to the US Occupation. He seems to have deeper loyalties to Iran, but who can say for sure? He's still in politics, now hostile to the US.
And that was the best we could do with 150,000 troops on the ground and an unlimited war budget, following a decade of massive fabrication of an Iraqi capitalist exile movement by Dick Cheney with the resources of the American Enterprise Institute and Halliburton and the Project for a New American Century - done openly and clearly their top priority, complete with countless Congressional hearings to regurgitate fake evidence.
It was hard to get good help in 2003; it's impossible now.
Why didn't the Arab Spring happen in 2004 then? Why didn't Bush put sanctions on Mubarak instead of continuing to deliver his billion per year in aid? We did nothing to contribute to the Arab Spring except prop up hated dictators beyond the people's ability to bear, and turn Iraq into a hellhole, and snuggle up ever closer to Israel - which you might notice now has a street uprising going on against Netanyahu, whose party practically cohabits Washington D.C. How can you not notice that most of the uprisings have been against US allies?
So having been shut out of Libya, the Chinese will dig a little more deeply into the THREE TRILLION DOLLARS of foreign currency they're sitting on to bid up the price of oil on the open market, and we will all have to pay it.
See how markets work?
And if we conspire against China too much, China finally stops propping up the dollar at the detriment of the yuan, letting the latter appreciate and thus buy more oil while impoverished Americans can no longer afford the Chinese crap they buy to make ends meet.
China already owns our asses, don't you get it? They've already won, in human terms. Their big enemy is the strain they had to place on the planet in order to rapidly overcome American domination.
This is in reply to Mr. Horvath.
You couldn't even be bothered to do the research to discover North Vietnam's population during the war was only 17 million?! Or that Gadafy had 40 years of oil sales with which to build up his defenses, especially after 1986? He could have bought half the Soviet Army after 1990. Or that America had up to 500,000 troops in South Vietnam at one time, and was nowhere near being able to march to Hanoi, much less enter it on Toyota pickup trucks?
You're a fool if you claim Gadafy's legitimacy among his people was even a tiny fraction that of the regime of Ho Chi Minh among the Vietnamese, though even he was a tyrant. Conventional bombing, in fact, is a proven failure in changing the political allegiance of citizens. The bombing did not break the will of the Libyan people to resist the rebels; there was no will to begin with.
We bombed North Vietnamese cities relentlessly for years. And the fall of Iraq's government was just the beginning of the war. What Cole's critics are saying is that there ARE NO REBELS, just foreign mercenaries and CIA stooges (and even al-Qaeda), and that resistance collapsed because NATO bombing has completely destroyed the will of a population that still loves Muamar Gadafy.
I am struck by one commonality in all the threads attacking the intervention:
Their utter, absolute contempt for the rebels. They are continually characterized as Western henchmen, rats who scurried into power on the backs of bombing, traitors who will sell all their oil, scheming tribesmen who will betray other factions, and murderous marauders. One even implied that Libya would be better off if they had been killed off in the first weeks to prevent (all!) of the subsequent suffering.
But mostly, they are portrayed as not having mattered in any way at all.
I would have more respect for the hardline anti-war position if it had a single representative who would even admit that the rebels started this, and they finished it, at extreme danger to themselves and a sacrifice in comfort and well-being utterly unimaginable by modern Americans, despite thousands of them having come from ordinary jobs and backgrounds that we should be able to relate to as human beings.
In other words, not that different than many of the people who rose against us in Iraq.
But you folks must deprive them of any identity so as to give US bombing awesome, Godlike powers to break peoples' real allegiances - which Iraq and Vietnam long ago disproved. Whatever the sins and conspiracies of their leaders, the rebels really were willing to die for a gamble at replacing their government with something they considered ordinary and reasonable. They didn't all sign the Project for A New American Century manifesto, or buy oil stocks on Wall Street. They, not NATO mercenaries or US killer robots, got into those Toyotas on Friday morning bound and determined to end this war in a weekend before conditions got much worse, with no idea what bizarre defenses and traps might await them.
Yeah, we Americans are hypocrites. But not all our allies are as low and cynical as we've become.
"If anything good and lasting comes of this, it will be a first."
Wow, where were you on V-E Day?
You nailed it. Thank you.
America is an empire with interests. As empires go, we are far from the worst. You should go over to War Nerd's stuff at exiledonline.com and see him rake Britain over the coals for massive war crimes as recently as the 1950s - they didn't really get much nicer as they declined, and I guess we won't either.
What makes us monstrous is that we won't admit that we're an empire. That's a decision that all of us participate in, and thus removes all moral restraint - as long as the public thinks it's getting what it secretly wants - and also makes it impossible to have useful conversations about policy, because we're all speaking in code words. The most important policy of all is, who is the primary beneficiary of the empire? The public does not want to know what a poor return it gets for its tax dollars in exchange for a taste of conqueror's pride.
But if I'd been raised as a citizen of an honest empire, I'd probably approve of some pretty horrific acts to perpetuate it. Now all that's left is to decide which of the two fates of declining empires the United States will suffer - Sweden, or Spain?
But the Right in America has been extremely successful with ideological blinkers, angry sneering, loud yelling, snark and unclear thinking. Why shouldn't we have some of those guys working on our side for a change?
And if the democratic elements spent 20 years overthrowing Gaddafi, besides the massive effects on infrastructure and the creation of a generation of refugee camp survivors (which has deformed Afghanistan and other societies), how much would those democratic elements have been mutated by their long struggle? It was the problem of Ho Chi Minh and his successors that the longer they fought, the more doctrinaire and authoritarian they got - when he first declared independence in 1945, he simply translated the US Declaration of Independence and read it from a balcony.
But the problem is not NATO, it is the United States. NATO did not create Karzai's regime; that was entirely our doing. The problem is getting NATO away from the corrupting influence of a desperate, declining empire, and Obama's lack of enthusiasm for this operation provides an opening, which the troubles in Afghanistan could open into a chasm. Essentially, Europe should be a federal republic with a real national economic policy (instead of the chaos that the southern tier visited upon the Euro) and a real military, a democratic superpower with a sphere of influence in the Mediterranean. NATO was the logical precursor to that, but the Bush administration perverted it into an organization that has very little to do with European interests. It's time for Europeans to stop abdicating their sovereign responsibilities and stand up to us before our right-wing whackos get back in the White House and realize that our remaining nuclear arsenal is the only thing left that America can use to extort a living from the world.
The capitalist West is now in such a deep economic crisis that it's fighting to keep afloat on a week by week basis. Long-term means November 2012. That's it.
That definitely was a surprise. If Tripoli has the kind of sprawl that lets mountain tribesmen drive their tacticals in from the desert and link up unchallenged, then Gadafi did a lot less to prepare than I expected. How many African laborers does it take to build a stupid trench line?
Problem is, NATO's slowness and clumsiness will prevent it from quickly establishing airdrops and even boat landings to get in supplies to the uprising. Once you're the neighborhood that has all the food and gasoline, you become very popular. It would be a tragedy to miss this opportunity to avoid a prolonged seige, like the day in 1864 when Union forces dithered outside Petersburg, Virginia because the generals didn't trust the black troops they had available, and when white reinforcements arrived it was already getting dark. That cost America another 9 months of war.
Great, the only movement to ever fight effectively for the poor Shia of Lebanon will be gone and the Shia will return to the bottom caste under a Hariri family owned by Saudi Arabia. Yeah, you just advocated putting what is soon to be Lebanon's majority to the fate of the people of Bahrain - except that being neoliberals, the Hariris will keep the Shia much poorer.
Norman -
Perry was a Democrat until he had to switch sides to hold onto his government job. He then became Bush's shadow, but easily avoided the Bush collapse in '08 by joining those who said Bush wasn't extreme enough. He's not crazy, he's a barometer of the craziness of voters.
So the next time he calls FDR or Al Gore a Socialist, someone needs to ask him why he spent so many years in their party.