I think what McPhee is saying is, you are being too trusting that these evil bills are even meant for the purposes claimed. I've followed these issues since the birth of DVD, and what is apparent is that the IP owners literally cannot accept that they don't own the images and memories in your head. Internet Neutrality and these two bills are the latest attempt to claim a guaranteed entitlement from society for their supposed irreplaceability, but also to drive ordinary private citizens out of the Internet as content producers. It has nothing to do with the artists and writers who continually get screwed by the IP conglomerates. Do you think the guys who drew "Steamboat Willie" benefit from the copyright period being extended by Disney lobbyists just in time to prevent Mickey Mouse from becoming public domain?
Remember, the definition of property is continually being manufactured and revised by the powerful. Before the Enclosure Acts in Britain, the idea that every square inch of land had to have an owner was alien. The new rich of the Industrial Revolution rammed that atrocity thru Parliament so they could turn their profits into real power, and then hailed economists who quickly convinced everyone that the new arrangment was "natural" and "eternal".
Perry is a weathervane and conduit for the crazies he courts. He has no convictions of his own; but a governor of Texas can pursue crazies that a governor of Massachusetts credibly cannot.
However, I would love it if a GOP president was so crazy that he would dismantle or leave NATO in outrage over our allies' socialized medicene, generous social benefits, gay rights, and secularism. Unfortunately, I would be enjoying this news from my cell in the concentration camp that such a president would have tossed me in.
The only thing that stops Perry from being a contender is not the madness of his statements, but the doubts of the redneck zombie army that he really means them. His political consultants probably have proof that many Republicans would indeed support armed bullying of Turkey and CIA support for the overthrow of its elected government.
I wonder what would happen if Obama simply admitted, with evidence, that Israel already has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and therefore has all the deterrence it needs against a paltry Iranian attack? Sort of cuts the balls off the Lobby. The Arabs and Iran all know the bombs are there, so you can't say the revelation would change anybody's behavior. Our missile shield is simply irrelevant.
Or even soft-power punishment by China, like a cutoff in purchases of US Treasuries, which would send the dollar off the cliff and raise the price of oil in US $ even if it remained steady in yuan.
One day, I think China will simply deal with these annoyances by sending a few million laborers, "advisors", and aid workers to every embattled ally to simply stand around and act as a tripwire. With a population of 1,300,000,000, it's not much of a sacrifice.
Give Israel's elites credit; they figured out the Achilles' Heel of American democracy. If you can obtain leverage in both parties at the same time, you are nearly unstoppable. It has long been the case that the big capitalist factions have always had a foot in both parties - one by membership, the other by rental. Israel almost fell into it by accident; Jews were a major faction in the faction-ridden Democratic Party, and then suddenly Christian Right freaks in the South transferred their allegiance to the GOP and to Israel. Since then Israel has moved far to the right, allowing Israeli-American dual citizens like the members of PNAC to serve simultaneously in the apparatus of the Likud and GOP, an extraordinary and unprecedented situation. Imagine if FDR's staffers had also been in Churchill's Political Action Committee during America's closest legal alliance.
What oil companies and foreign states can do, we ordinary Americans cannot. Only very big hypocrites can become driving forces in two competing political parties at the same time; it is a strategy to obfuscate, sabotage, and corrupt, not to unify citizens and act in their interest.
Compared to the Lavon affair? They tried to frame Egypt for bombings of US facilities, which would have led 1956 Americans to demand that Ike annihilate Egypt in a war, leaving him with a choice between causing the Iraq catastrophe 47 years early, or having a nuclear showdown with the Soviets over our right to do so. Even worse, the exposure of the plot triggered more pogroms of Jews from Arab countries, benefitting Israel, creating the constituency for the bloody Likud Party, and forming part of the Zionist smear campaign against the Arab world that has since poisoned the American mind.
I don't think this new crime is even as bad as shooting up the USS Liberty and trying to frame the Egyptians for that.
Ehud Barak is leader of the Labor Party and Defenese Minister. He has presided over all recent heinous actions of the IDF including the attack on the Gaza aid flotilla.
Now you can say that the Labor Party is no longer genuinely of the Left, which is why last year's street protestors against massive inequality don't hold any hope in elections. But by your standards, what % of Knesset members actually embrace a genuine peace process in accord with international law?
Uh, Bill, ordinary schmucks can mean workers. Workers don't create wealth? The people giving orders would have a hell of a time creating any wealth if they didn't have any workers.
Have the people of Pakistan ever put their bodies on the line to save democracy from the Army like the Egyptians have? Do they really regard themselves as a people such that they would bother?
That matters to me more than them kicking us out of Afghanistan. The Pakistani Army has been, with our past connivance, the greatest threat to peace and democracy in the region. It has always been responsible for Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan because it doesn't recognize Afghan sovereignity. If the citizenry would cut the balls off that army, most of our excuses for being in the region would be obsolete.
However, based on the things I heard about Zardari and his crew when he was installed, I'm not surprised he came to a bad end. I don't know anything about Imran Khan's positions, but I know Nawaz Sharif was supposed to be Saudi Arabia's man. Hard to imagine the Saudis would be happy with Pakistan's army accepting democracy.
Where is your evidence that the Arab Spring movement is any less socialistic than Occupy? Or that Occupy is a state socialist movement instead of an anarchist movement?
And if holding onto the past means that civil servants get the same standard of living that they did under, say, Eisenhower or Kennedy, what is your alternative? That they join the envious Tea Party mob that believes since its wages "must" be reduced to pre-WW2 levels to appease the great god Entrepreneurship, all other workers must suffer likewise? Under those idiotic conditions, there is no logical reason for the plutocrats to ever raise wages at all; like their bloody cousins in Latin America, the Philippines, etc, they've become better off making the country as poor and illiterate as possible since it gives them an overwhelming advantage in wage bargaining.
As for slavishly following America for developmental solutions, I have to recall my time in the Philippines, a country that hitched its star to America when it seemed all-powerful, while Thailand and other Asian countries copied the strategies of Japan. The Philippines had the 2nd highest per-capita income in East Asia in 1963. You know what happened after that. My own observation was that the overpopulation and resource constraints there made US models completely inapplicable, but because of their contact with the US, Filipinos viewed living Yankee-style as a reasonable aspiration. The other Asian states were lucky not to have these illusions, and generations of deferred consumption and industrial investment was their only hope.
I once had an anthropology professor who had worked in the Philippines, maybe went a little native there, but he insisted to his students that in the mid 1950s the big industrial and union interests in the US demanded that Washington stop promoting in the P.I. the kind of industrial development that made Japan into a threat to their dominance, and instead push the dogma of agricultural exports. I can't verify this, but it would explain an awful lot of the ugly results of US policy since then.
Because Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis wanted to replace that tyranny with Wall Street plutocracy, like all the neoliberals and neoconservatives do. Admitting anything when it would have helped those schmucks would just have made it easier for Bush & Cheney to justify the occupation of Iraq. Now Wall Street is being challenged by the Arab Street, and by Main Streets all over the world.
Joe, modern nuclear weapons are quite small. The trend towards bigger nukes reversed in the middle '60s when the Russians were believed to have 100-megaton h-bombs. The problem was, they worked too well as a deterrent; the military-industrial complexes of both superpowers - mainly us - became obsessed with "counterforce", which means destroying the other guy's missiles with small, super-accurate nukes. Which simply means Pearl Harbor the other guy and dictate terms. Which means the other guy must either develop an ABM system or build more warheads.
Which made the military-industrial complexes very happy.
So modern nukes are not very different in power than the Hiroshima weapon, and ironically by being designed to destroy enemy nukes has undermined the deterrent effect once provided by Mutually Assured Destruction. Thank God for Admiral Rickover and his untouchable submarines, the last clear deterrent.
And Bill, pride goeth before a fall. Get a copy of Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy", published in 2006, where he predicted most of the disasters that befell Bush's empire in 2008. Phillips was the Republican strategist behind the Southern Strategy, who came to regret his success because he saw it breeding arrogance and madness in his party. Every empire thinks it is unique and immortal at the very moment of its doom.
Lots of foreigners wanted to become a part of Rome too, Bill.
Question is, if we hadn't stolen all that Indian land, and used black slavery to keep the country solvent until stolen British technology triggered the Industrial Revolution in the US, how many foreigners would covet our goodies today?
You're no different than anyone else who hints that America is "special" and "unique" and "irreplaceable" as a smokescreen for justifying US control of global resources by infinite war spending. That's what JTMcPhee hates. Wasn't it projection when George W. Bush invaded Iraq promising freedom at the very time he was dismantling its legal basis at home?
The Roman Republic was a slave state. It was more honest than our republic in that it openly made the rich into first-class citizens, openly expected them to serve both as politicians and generals, and openly gloried in conquest for profit. It was more advanced than our republic in that it would grant citizenship to any conquered person who pledged to obey its laws and pay its taxes. But all of that continued under the Empire. The Republic was a plutocracy, as dominated by its big landowners as we are by Wall Street today.
And how can you forget that England banned slavery decades before the US, and so did Mexico? The sharecroppers of the Jim Crow south were debt serfs, just like peasants anywhere else in the world. Stop with this American exceptionalism and recognize that America was full of all kinds of oppression before WWII, things that made Europeans cringe.
The two greatest lies told by the libertarians are (1) that free enterprise ever actually existed anywhere in the past and (2) that America was a "free" society when it had weak federal government and the rich could get away with murder.
It is strange that no one points this out, but Americans, unlike Europeans, have forgotten how oppressive the institutions were that shared power before big government. Essentially power was shared between kings, landlords and churchmen, with plenty of overlap between their memberships, and each did horrible things. As recently as 90 years ago, large swathes of America were controlled by a white terrorist militia, blacks were falsely arrested and sold by local governments to well-connected businessmen to perform temporary slave labor, governors used the National Guard to murder strikers for the rich, whites and Asians could not marry in California, and local censorship boards dominated by local clergy cut up movies and banned books everywhere.
Free for what kind of American, Ron? This must be why he never talks about the past when he's trying to suck in the young.
They've been looking for another Reagan since the real one fled one step ahead of his Alzheimer's (and yes, Reagan was a better president after he started losing the ability to remember why he hated Commies so much). Remember when they were fluffing up Dan Quayle as the heir? Then they embraced Bush Jr. and paid the price. But each time a right-wing tyrant fails, he is instantly disavowed by the movement for the crime of not being extreme enough. So Bush is now officially no longer a conservative. Which clears the decks for even more extreme mutants and gimmicks; the female Reagan, the black Reagan, the Catholic Reagan, etc. etc.
Until you destroy the myth of Reagan's competence, the public will keep believing that they must keep following this course even when they feel uneasy about the policies.
There is a gap opening up between what ordinary people think is right and what they think is necessary for survival. They have been convinced, by massive propaganda efforts reaching into every area of their lives, that their compassion towards the poor, their tolerance for diversity, their yearning for peace, all the individual matters on which they express liberal preferences to pollsters, somehow is to blame for the country's weakness and their struggle to pay their bills.
I first noticed this in college when I had a class project to analyze data from a 1980 Texas voters' survey. It clearly showed that Texans, even Texas Republicans, had different policy positions than Reagan, the man they voted into power.
I think they wanted a President who would overrule them. They were being harangued into feeling guilty about the better angels of their nature, but they were being presented with a solution: give power to a leader who will restore order by wisely doing things you disagree with. Then you and your beliefs can exist in some quiet corner with no consequences whatsoever.
Of course, Reagan's puppetmasters had planned this for years, since the chaos of 1968. They knew the people disagreed with even their short-term agenda, but if the people would trust a good actor over their own consciences, the tax cuts and deregulation would get in place to create massive inequality to pay for more propaganda. Once people were convinced that Reagan saved America, their beliefs would begin to wither and sour into his very image. That accomplished, all that is needed to drive the public further right is the manufacturing of more budget crises - whereas in the past financial crises rightly drove voters to the left. If things are bad, we must kick more of the lazy and defective off the lifeboat - but we don't want to bloody our own hands with the task. Each GOP nominee in turn hints that he will do that dirty work, helped by the 20% of the population that relishes it, but we will surely not be among those sacrificed.
I hear it's Canada's turn for processing right now.
The real fear should not be what the MB does, but what the US and Israel do. They've spent years training their publics to hate and fear groups like Hamas, but all the Moslem Brotherhood needed to do to be hated was choose its name. Will the MB kill as many people as a "pre-emptive" attack by Israel will? Or US sanctions?
And now all of us who support the ongoing Arab revolution will get smeared and slandered by the vast zombie army of Islamophobic idiots found on the Internet, in the corporate media, in the pulpits, in every level of elected government, and in our own workplaces.
But that was inevitable. Egyptians were never gonna act white enough to make our lynch mob happy.
Destroying all American unions, child labor laws, minimum wage laws, pollution laws, and Federal legal authority (all announced goals of major GOP leaders) to return this country to the paradise of 1859 sounds hyperbolic, and yet that's what they've sworn to do. Did you know 1/5 of all state legislators, and many congressmen, are members of ALEC, a "pro-business" lobbying group that literally wrote both the Arizona 1070 legislation and legislation expanding the use of prison slave labor?
Create a workforce at Chinese wage levels, destroy all liberal institutions that could resist, then hire the gun nuts to be the enforcers. Squeeze the country dry of its last few drops of blood before departing for sunnier climes. Not hyperbolic, just utterly ruthless and soulless.
What does it tell us all that this neocon is bashing the one Moslem country that is really trying to prevent a regional war? You won't be happy, sir, until all Moslems live under safe military dictators whose armies are completely dependent on the Pentagon. I bet you never had a problem with the serial mass murderer Suharto, but a big problem with the alleged Communist Sukarno.
And the NY Times has spread plenty of lies about independent Moslem leaders over the decades. Could you guys wait till the blood from your Iraq crimes wears off before starting anew on Iran and Turkey?
I guess any discussion on what China's military spending or Iran's military spending really means degenerates into is: Intentions. Which is the same crap we wasted the Cold War on. We can slice the numbers six ways from Sunday, but we will always refuse to factor ourselves into their equation. No sane and moral people can see America as a threat. Anyone who refuses to accept American hegemony is the new Hitler. Blah blah blah.
What Iran probably does is transfer the technology to China in exchange for future results. Iran claims to build anti-ship weapons that sure look like something China would build and sell. Hey, no one complained when Israel and South Africa shared a-bomb technology!
Okay, I checked out globalsecurity.org. The problem with their numbers is that they're using purchasing parity to quadruple the official Chinese military budget. Thing is, if you buy such a ratio, then you are saying that everything in China is 4 times bigger than stated, including wages, which means that the value of China's GNP is actually twice that of the US!
You can't compare budgets when all military spending is corrupt. You have to count the toys.
I would have to see really detailed evidence to believe that China's military spending has increased 484% in 4 years to $400 billion. This sounds like the trumped-up figures the CIA used to put out for the USSR.
Firstly, the yuan has appreciated against the US $.
A lot of Chinese military units are fronts for arms businesses, and you can't rely on a Chinese general to not sell his troops' own guns to foreigners. How do you determine the budget when so much money is coming and going?
Mostly I don't believe it because I'm sure with their labor costs and our staggering MIC corruption that the Chinese would be able to buy as much from their $400 billion as we get with our $800 billion. They're not close. They're buying cheap anti-ship missiles instead of carrier groups. Their strategic nuclear arsenal is tiny. They don't bear the cost of foreign bases in 130 countries. They're not having to replace materiel losses from recent wars. I approve of all this, precisely because it should be vastly cheaper than $400 billion a year. They don't even have the air force and navy of France or Britain.
Where's the Ohio-class SSBMs? Where's the 9-digit-cost stealth bombers? Where's the crashing VTOLs?
If this is a new neo-con lie campaign, we ought to nip it in the bud with some logic.
There are a lot of people in this thread, and on the anti-Obama left generally, who seem to live in a fantasy world about what the American right-wing extremist movement is and always has been. For decades vile, murderous ideas from the Birchers and abortion clinic bombers have been mainstreamed by a corporate media conveyor belt, sanitized and euphemized until now a candidate from Lincoln's party can get away with saying Lincoln was the bad guy. The eliminationist language I used to see in small-time gun magazines in gas stations, or rags like "Confederate Veteran", are now the mantras of the Tea Party. This is not an accident, and it will not stop until they've found a way to exterminate everyone they don't like, which is nearly everyone plus you. Why do you persist in thinking that any of them want an America where they would share the tiniest bit of power with blacks, Latinos, gays, and Bernard Sanders?
Your hatred of the United States military has led you to seek brotherhood with people who will never be satisfied with anything less than a restored Confederacy. I'm not kidding. You hate guns and they worship guns. You help them abolish the government, and then who will protect you from them?
Those Paul newsletters are what the American worship of inequality is all about. As long as white people tend to have all the money, worshipping greed and worshipping whiteness - uh, excuse me, "superior American values" - are as identical as state's rights and Jim Crow. It's all about bringing back the 19th century, when the remedy for robber baron capitalism was for poor whites to head west and steal Indian land and thus be co-opted. Now how do you do that in the 21st century? More Ponzi schemes like privatized prisons and sweatshops full of minorities - libertarian approved!
I'm a half-white man convinced that world history shows some whites are unlikely to give up power peacefully. So I watch the end of white majority sweeping from state to state, and the neo-Jim Crow stratagems enacted solely to forestall this, with great interest.
Iowa is not as interesting, therefore, than states where non-white turnout must be suppressed, harassed, and degraded in order for one party to survive. Not long ago in this country, innocent black people could be seized off the streets of the South, convicted of vagrancy and literally leased to private businessmen to carry out slave labor. Now we have, especially in the Red States, a growing privatized prison industry supplanting free low-wage labor with convicts, a public that accepts that blacks just happen to be grossly overrepresented in our prisons, and pressure to permanently revoke the right of "felons" to vote. See how those three things come together to make an apartheid future for us all?
I think Israel's growing disenfranchisement of its Arab citizens is only the prototype for what Israel's fondest buddies in America intend to do.
In fact, a century ago European "ethnics" like Jews weren't considered white; they were considered the alien threat that Mexicans are today.
Yet this is fluid. The first big wave of Jewish immigration seems to have been of highly-Westernized German Jews in the mid 19th century, who encountered rapid success and assimilation. No one thought they weren't white. But when a bigger wave of Polish and Russian Jews came, everything reversed. Americans like Henry Ford became the leading lights of anti-Semitism.
"Acting" white, including matters of language, clothing, and entrepreneurship, practically adds up to being white after some period of time. I would consider that third factor to be the elephant in the room: we've practically comne to think that we're better than other countries because we treat "entrepreneurial" Jews well and "lazy" blacks badly, while the others persecute Jews. Master race and master salesman, how much of each makes up whiteness?
I'm very concerned how Americans will react the first time we lose a carrier. If we freak out and double down on the war and on carrier construction, we will find few friends in the world. If we give in and keep the carrier groups away from hot spots, their utility will collapse as their weakness is exploited by everyone all at once. We should have started preparing for this moment 20 years ago.
I think there are cycles of big wars and small wars. I might be prejudiced to that view because I was in Univ. of Michigan conflict studies where frequency and size of wars are quantitatively assessed. But I believe there's a narrative that explains this history. Sovereigns want wars to be private poker games between themselves, so we have periods dominated by proxy wars and limited border wars, professionals and mercenaries, little involvement by the citizenry, etc. But during such times politics becomes detached from the concerns of the masses, held back until they break like a dam into a flood of ideology: the 30 Years' War, the French Revolution, the World Wars. In each cataclysm, all the characteristics are reversed, populaces are decimated, empires overthrown. Afterwards, the surviving rulers get together at a resort and swear they'll never let that happen again, and impose new restrictions on what they can justly fight each other about.
I think the dam is about to break again. The technological side of that is covered by my reply to Paul below. The social side is seen in the mass demonstrations worldwide. I think we will look back fondly on the small wars of recent years, but they merely protected a dysfunctional status quo. If the forces of change are funneled by rising authoritarian powers, we might have the kind of wars you fear. If instead they herald an age of mass involvement and revolution, the nukes might not come out and we could have some very positive developments if we're willing to pay a substantial price.
Ron Paul is the ultimate priest of infinite, unregulated, unimpeachable greed as the solution to every human problem. He worships a 19th century in which the "state's-rights" National Guard was routinely ordered by governors owned & operated by robber barons to shoot down strikers in the streets. He denounced Lincoln for saving the Union. So even 1865 is too communistic for him.
Primus inter pares, meaning similar to Britain during the Great Power era. I think that's right, if we're talking about 1919-39 rather than the Pax Britannica. Our empire and economy are in a similar state of decline to the later era. Britain's own costly intervention in Iraq was 1919-1932. Ours actually has gone worse.
Firstly, the US dollar is grossly overvalued, which is actually hurting our economy just as the overvaluation of the British pound hurt the British empire after WW1. It creates an illusion of strength while perpetuating ruinous trade deficits.
Secondly, the size of our war spending may prove the evil of our intentions, but not the size of its effectiveness. I have been saying for 20 years that the US war machine is a vast waste of taxpayer dollars, a relic of the Cold War, ready to be ruined by newer ideas of combat. Iraq damn near ruined our army, despite being in ruins itself. Afghanistan is more of the same. Would-be opponents adapt to the high-profile successes of great powers. The Iraqis beat us while in an all-out war with each other. In fact after 2005 they appear to have already realized that we could not conquer them, and instead turned to internecine warfare, each faction taking US handouts when mutually convenient, to prepare for the great prize: a post-occupation regime that would reward one ethnic group with all the oil money. If they had shown any unity after the April 2004 uprisings, I think we would have been defeated on the ground by the next year.
That is a horrible statement on the utility of US military forces. Don't imagine that it has not been heard. The US war machine is built to destroy any normal government that defies it, but then what? Non-state actors can point to a string of successes from Mogadishu to 9/11 to the bankrupting of the USA in Iraq. Whenever we destroy a government, we find we cannot replace it and end the war, only the people can.
Meanwhile, many people have warned that the Persian Gulf is a trap for the US Navy due to cheap Chinese anti-ship weapons; as they grow in sophistication, more and more of the world's maritime chokepoints will be off-limits to us. Wars of a type which the US prefers to fight still prove to be difficult or impossible.
Our imperialists crowed of a revolution in military affairs. This is it. Americans are cowardly, spoiled, increasingly reliant on a redneck fanatic-Christian caste of hardened warriors to do our dirty work (if not foreign Hessians), and worst of all, we have completely outsourced civilian high-tech production to poor countries that increasingly defy our will. Don't you see, all our drones and killer robots and communications gear built in tiny lots at exorbitant profits by GOP-crony contractors in Red States will be copied by the Chinese for 1/5 the cost in ten times the quantity, if they ever prove themselves worthy? We called ourselves the Arsenal of Democracy when we took middling-advanced weapons technology and mass-prodcued it on an unprecedented scale in an America full of factories. China is the only country on Earth that could do that now, if it chose. But if they're really smart, and as mean as I am, the Chinese should be figuring out how to improve the pathetic weapons that our opponents are already beating us with. Imagine a $10,000 cruise missile that can deploy from a van on a highway, or a robot torpedo that knows the sound of every ship in the sea and lurks in the Gulf of Sidra, biding its time, or a guided mortar shell that can destroy helicopters (yes, that one exists). What if every Chinese sweatshop that makes RC-trucks and planes for your kids were to just add explosives and sell them to the kids of the next country we invade?
That is the nightmare of future war, waged by the infinite armies of poor children - in ghettoes and in factories - in a failed global economy against the murderous bigoted warriors of Tennessee and Alabama. It doesn't matter how much money we spend. We will lose everything, and then the war will come home.
Historians may one day point to our quagmire in Iraq as the event that liberated South America from Wall Street hegemony. And while Bush lost South America and Central Asia with his ignorance, now the Middle East is being peeled off. We've lost three major world regions, if not to democracy, at least to sovereignity.
Unfortunately, Mexico is still too far from God and too close to the USA and its relentless drug consumption. Cheer for the Mexican people's movement to end the drug war.
I think, Juan, that you're right if the world economy is growing, but The Raven is right if ecological degradation reverses food production and oil has peaked. In such a calamity, hegemons simply take and redistribute the resources of others to maintain their survival (and thus civilization), but in a multipolar world, it could go Mad Max in a hurry.
Unfortunately, if we choose to be foolish we can finance Israel for a long time at the cost of everything else. It's not the US government aid anymore, it's the earnings from foreign sales by the entire Israeli military-security-industrial complex, driven by the belief that the War on Terror continues. Consider this article from Max Blumenthal:
For a completely different angle, how many decades did the ridiculously backward economies of feudal Europe manage to maintain Crusader castles in a Palestine surrounded by a superior civilization? If your people are savage enough and crazy enough, it can be done. But that was in a world with no international law, no concept of human rights, no global media... It's up to the rest of the world to stand up to America, and make it hurt.
Stop to think what would happen to America if China, without firing a shot, simply started dumping all its US $ denominated holdings. The current Chinese model of propping up the $ to hold down the yuan imposes a high cost on Chinese consumers for imports, but the leadership hasn't yet felt it was worth the risk of jumping to a strong yuan model. Congressmen should stop whining for a strong yuan, unless they're already salivating for the bribes that will come with the Chinese who will buy up everything remaining of value in our country.
Precisely because this is soft power, we don't know where China will choose to risk using it.
On your last paragraph, read Andrew Bacevich's "The New American Militarism" for a chronicle of how ridiculously easy it was for corrupt pressure groups to train Americans to forget the "lessons of Vietnam." Young adults today know nothing, zero, nada, about our excuses and crimes in Vietnam. Mission Accomplished. We're already feeding Iraq to the memory hole this New Year's Eve.
Joel, we never supported democratic change in the region, we supported our whores in the region, like Mubarak. You've forgotten that the Occupation in Iraq intended to install appointed puppet Iraqi prime ministers indefinitely until Sistani and the Shia uprising forced us to schedule elections. You've forgotten our war against the elected Hamas government. We proved our whores could overthrow other whores. If the good people of the Arab world saw that meant whores could be overthrown, you can hardly claim that the result was America's aim. We are at war with the Arab people for their refusal to accept the elimination of the Palestinians. Anything that increases their ability to refuse is an American defeat, until we admit we were wrong in the first place.
Shield them all you can, but the alliance of religious and economic conservatives, here and in Israel, should produce certain similarities over time. The religious extremists want government to stop feeding the poor and thus competing with their own charity-cum-bribery. They also want it to get out of all other activities that distract it from enforcing religion-based morality. The economic conservatives want government drowned in the bathtub so they can get themselves another filthy tax cut. Enforcing religious fantasies is cheaper than enforcing environmental laws. And the cheapest form of enforcement of all is a caste system, where the factory owner or settler becomes a law unto his own, eager to crush dissenters with his own hands or private henchmen, and every boss and every father is a tyrant on his own private freehold, and women's wombs and sweatshop floors are capital goods producing an army of broken, pliable voter-peasants.
So convergence is inevitable. Secular society makes real-world demands for equality and justice which can only be delivered by tax-financed government - so would-be aristocrats can't get what they want unless it is all wiped out and seized by the holy, in Rand Paul's Kentucky as in Evigdor Lieberman's Israel. That is why now the most extreme brands of religion are growing fastest, and the rich keep getting richer.
Yes, but throw in the massive polarization of wealth that always happens under unregulated capitalism - always - and it really starts to hurt and kill the workers. Thus, the revolutions. Our turn next?
Ask the people of a dozen countries in Latin America whether pandering to US neoliberal doctrines got them a better standard of living before they threw our stooges out. The purpose of cozying up to the US is so that your rule will be backed by US Marines, not to raise the wages of workers. Where would capitalism be worldwide if the US didn't happen to have forces in 130 countries?
And our relations with Mubarak had been excellent.
I think that there is a definite religion called Americanism, and that it induces heresy in all sects that are imported to these shores over a period of several generations. For instance, I've read that belief in an afterlife among US Catholics and Jews is much greater now than in surveys taken a century ago. I did not know of any modern Catholic and Jewish creationists, until veteran right-wing greedist Ben Stein put out the so-called documentary "Intelligence Not Required". What Stein really believes in, just like Buchanan, is the power and votes of Southern Christians to realize their personal extremist agendas. But then, the Protestantization of Catholics and Jews was really the same thing, wasn't it, the result of assimilation into capitalist, imperialist America?
What are the tenets of Protestant Americanism that assimilate others? In Houston I saw a bumper sticker, "Guns, Guts, and God". Much of the answer can be derived from that, if you add one more G-word: Greed. I would like to get into how this translates into political doctrine but it takes too long and I'd need the ability to create a graph to show how key terms have been redefined since the beginning of American slavery to keep filling the slots in the resulting caste system. In its ugliest sense, it co-opts working-class whites by enlisting them as foot soldiers or henchmen in the sacred conquest and looting of the Earth, just as my redneck forebears in TN were glad to be exploited and poor as long as they were the ones who got to hold the whip. That literally was and is a belief worth killing for, and the religion is the necessary complement to the alienating processes of American capitalism, the secret ingredient that allowed our elites to defeat social democracy.
As a Protestant who has seen the extremist rhetoric used only among fellow evangelicals, I can't understand why American Catholics don't get loudly upset when evangelicals send missionaries (like Tim Tebow's hardline dad) a-poaching in the Catholic Philippines. These exact same evangelicals go courting the vote of homophobic, racist and Islamophobic Catholics every 2 years. Newt Gingrich has become such a nasty gumbo of neoconservative imperialism, neo-Confederate bigotry, Protestant-capitalist greedism and opportunistic Catholicism that he ought to have done with it and start his own religion.
Having (long ago) been a born-again, I think I can explain why American "concerns" for Arab Christians are so hypocritical.
Because in fact, unless you are exactly the same kind of Christian they are, extremist theocrats don't give a damn about you. They believe God made them to use everyone else as tools. You only matter to them if you can (a) be converted by them, and only them, or (b) you can be tricked into voting for one of their stealth candidates, or (c) you can be bullied into the astroturf political mob hysterias they create. If you're a European or Asian or Arab Christian, you're a problem because it's harder for them to justify the cost of missionaries to convert you into the RIGHT KIND of Christian. But if you're an African, whoa Nelly, they've got an open hunting license on you because they think you're ready to sign up for cargo-cult Pentecostalism, the Gospel of Prosperity magic that'll get you Yankee goodies. And yes, it's happening.
In their eyes, if you have your own tradition of Christianity and refuse to convert to their hybrid greed-guns-Americanism heresy, you are a threat to their claim to represent all Christians. When they're making up lies about the war on Christmas, Catholics are suddenly useful to them, but their internet forums fill up with talk about the Inquisition not being the fault of real Christians, and when the Pope speaks against our wars or the molestation scandal presents a chance to increase their market share, they're merciless. They are just as hateful to Mormons, Unitarians, and yes, Jews who don't share their imperialist agenda.
The New Apostolic Reformation of Sarah Palin, also sponsor of Rick Perry's stadium rally, takes this to its logical conclusion in its media-ignored doctrines, which imply that everyone, all Christians, all Protestants, all evangelicals and all Pentecostals who refuse to join it are under demonic influence and thus have no rights that must be respected. It's even okay to secretly infiltrate enemy churches (called "steeplejacking"). It is, I think, the ultimate statement of American religion.
Point is, Ike, America allied with Saddam AFTER 1979. 60 Minutes presented evidence that the US Navy coordinated Iraqi attacks on Iranian oil platforms in the Gulf. You've seen the pictures of Bush-1 era Rumsfeld with Saddam, haven't you? How many of the industrial contracts he thus signed with American firms enabled his attacks on the Kurds?
Most of all, don't you recall Saddam trying to get Ambassador Glaspey to give a US stamp of approval on his invasion of Kuwait?
There are allegations that the CIA was involved in the Baath coup against the previous Marxist government, during which time Saddam tortured the defeated leftists for his superiors. My God, half the things the bastard has done in his career seemed to be with US approval and support, as long as he killed the Marxists and Shiites we wanted killed. So he followed orders, ended up bankrupt fighting our mutual enemy, and then expected a ridiculous quid pro quo in Kuwait, so we've been destroying his country ever since. When does our foreign policy get held responsible for all our Saddams the world over?
Actually this has been a norm for long periods of our history. In effect the southern US and even parts of the Midwest were ruled by an armed terrorist militia, the Ku Klux Klan, for up to 90 years. The fact that we still rarely call the KKK an armed terrorist militia tells you that some powerful forces are trying to keep that route open, and "American", for the future.
Note that Home Depot apparently declined to sponsor this show from the very start, and is not getting any of the flak. We can't know if Home Depot acted out of fear or bigotry, whereas Lowe's retracting its ads after being intimidated and "informed" by hate groups tells us that it is afraid, and it tells stupid people that there must be something to the "Moslem threat" after all. So as usual in our system, the more hardcore and consistent right-winger gets a pass, and the waffling liberal gets creamed.
What should alarm us is the possibility that Lowe's flip-flopped for no other reason than the risk that its refusal would have led the FFA and its infinitude of allies could whip up a smear campaign against Lowe's about things completely unrelated to the show, just to make an example of it. Just like a protection racket that blows up your car to remind you of whom you really need protection from.
If we have reached the point where right-wing extremists can ruin anyone who disobey their commands about anything, what does it matter what the truth is or what ordinary Americans believe? We will all say what we have to say in order to hold onto our jobs.
They justified the McCarthy witchhunt on the grounds that "liberal" State Dept analysts failed to stop Mao from winning China because they were really Communist agents. They can manufacture excuses at will to justify the hatreds that already fester in our hearts.
My guess is that religious fanatics just have higher voter turnout - in Egypt, and in the United States of America.
Shame on you, JT, I'm talking about people all over the world who face starvation if they can't get fish. What does it say that you think everyone who eats fish is a wealthy sushi-sucking yuppie? Did you think I was only thinking about my own dinner plans? I'm also saying that it will be an indication of far greater problems; if it's harder for us to catch fish, it's also harder for many other creatures that live in the sea. You're so self-righteous that you can't even communicate with anyone on your own side anymore.
In both cases, the effects of Prof. Cole's enemies being seen as "right" are barbaric and catastrophic. Where's the accountability for what happens if the oil companies really are killing the planet, or if the neocons use Egyptian election results to convince Americans that Arab democracy is the new Nazism? About the same place as the accountability for Wall Street wrecking the world economy.
Don't forget the mysterious effects of increased ocean acidity, which is the price we pay for the ocean doing such a good job of absorbing CO2 so far. When will it hit fishing yields?
And neither is the MEK, the way Prof. Cole describes it. Yet our media can describe anyone as anything that the military-industrial complex needs them to be described. In the '60s, we were all assured via many media, down to bad spy movies and "Iron Man" comics, that the Russians weren't so bad but the Chinese were ultra-crazy sneaky yellow bastards ready to start WWIII as soon as they got the secret formula.
You could make the argument that the US is also state-capitalist or corporatist, and the Right more so than the Left, yet the Right is more willing to call Obama a Communist than it is the People's Republic, does so daily and gets away with it. How do we trust any of our information about the outside world when our sources so obviously have an agenda to back the agenda of big business?
You mean, like the Marxist country our corporations have exploited to replace millions of American manufacturing jobs, thus delivering vast dividends to the 1%, and then relied on to purchase hundreds of billions in US Treasury bonds to prop up our dollar and prevent our collapse?
Our news organs will not admit that Communist China is the only thing keeping America, and its corrupt polarization of wealth, viable, but they sure as hell won't criticize it any harder than necessary to keep up our normal level of bigotry against Asian success and to blind us to the treason of our own owners. The MEK is very small fry compared to that.
Actually, Newt and Bolton might really be stupid enough to start a war with China... I better start stockpiling canned food.
Yes, and the giant TV in the cafeteria at Exxon here is usually tuned to Fox News. Big shock - the ownership class owns the buildings and controls the TV. Fox is the organ of the business class. Its lies please our owners, so they keep the TVs blaring the lies. Yet another way that inequality of wealth leads to increasing inequality of power.
The big problem is that Fox as a fundamental strategy blurs the distinction between its news shows and opinion shows. We have always had the option in America of believing the editorials and disregarding the front page, but our reluctance to do so shows that we had some inkling that wishful thinking can't overcome reality. 19th Century papers were blatantly partisan party organs (survivors still have "Democrat" and "Republican" in their names), yet in the 20th Century this faded - though the new "objective" journalism came with plenty of traps of its own, the mere fact that our grandfathers turned away from party organs shows that they sensed they needed to hear some unpleasant truths to survive.
And the Pakistani Army has never accepted the independence of Afghanistan. They think they must have a monopoly on selecting its government. Now if that was the attitude of the civilian Pakistani government then we could deal with this diplomatically, but having an out-of-control Army that occasionally decapitates a civilian head of government but hides behind its coattails is not honest or honorable.
Do the nukes make Pakistan a sovereign state, or a sovereign army holding a state hostage?
You claim Turkey had a relatively free media, but if you had the "wrong" ideas the judges (backed by the Army) would ban you from running for office. Is that a free country to you? Generally, the most effective oppressive organization in non-Communist societies is the Army. You imply that Erdogan is a fascist; that's a serious charge when we consider that Berluscogni actually had monopoly control of the private and public media and had fascist allies, yet he still had to give up power due to his massive corruption, unpopularity and failure. You and the Western corporate media seem to spend a hundred times more effort damning any Moslem who won't be our Uncle Tom than you do a real criminal in the heart of Europe who helped create an economic catastrophe.
Firstly, he showed that if a black man doubles down on the bigotry that conservatives have for anyone besides blacks, he can actually get them to pretend to a public opinion pollster that they would ever pull the lever for a black man.
Secondly, he advanced the rebranding of America's caste system from one that abhors black people, who just HAPPEN to be disproportionately poor, to one that abhors poor people, who just HAPPEN to be disproportionately black.
Which does not change a God damn thing in reality.
Thirdly, he got the usual GOP suspects to spend extra money attacking him.
I think we should take up a collection to encourage Cain to stay in the race. We are learning a lot about the spread of abysmal ignorance. Southern African Americans are learning a lot about how monstrous the values of one of their own can become when he gets a zillion bucks. If he can keep going long enough, eventually each of his opponents will blow it and say something racial. His vanity and paranoia will convince him that all the objective attacks on him are racially motivated, and like fellow rich black conservative Charles Barkley he will start accusing everyone of being racist. That leads to him spending money and bleeding the GOP all the way to the convention, where he will find what Ron Paul found in '08, that for all their talk few reactionaries will in fact pull the lever for someone who varies from Reagan in either his skin tone or his belief in American empire.
Then he will claim the primaries were rigged and run as an independent.
The rude, racist religious extremists will all move back to Brooklyn where they came from. The US alone will have a Lobby demanding that we take in an unlimited # of refugees and instantly give them citizenship and subsidies, so we will get stuck with everyone that no one else wants. Lieberman's Russians will reunite with their cousins who have emigrated straight to Little Odessa. Better to have them all in Brooklyn, though, than on the front lines of a nuclear race war.
For one faction of the Right it's simply a matter of math; 2/3 to 3/4 of Latinos are historically likely to vote Democratic. For another faction it's the closely related sin of "not acting white enough"; they believe that inferior poor people inexorably use their votes to destroy the proper oligarchy of the Founding Fathers, so they just don't want any impoverished minority to vote.
50% of this year's kindergarteners are non-white, so things will come to a head in America long before a 3 degree Celsius increase in temperature.
But AA, the US does have something like what you described.
"The daily advertising fare in this country is so over-the-top, in-your-face, over done, and other ways exaggerated to the extreme, that it long ago lost touch with reality. The ads are crude, grotesque caricatures."
These are about extremist evangelical Christian attempts to get legally recognized as part of the "Nation of Israel", aided by the Likud. They're already putting up facilities in the illegal settlements, and promising "military training". Since the Army-settler coalition has tyrannical power over Israeli law, a million Christian settlers willing to live in the settlements and join the Army would quickly supplant actual Jews as the power within Zionism.
And why shouldn't the Likud replace Jews with murderous Red-State gun nuts? Just like in America, it's about who will best serve the political-economic elite.
Nothing but a sea of Catch-22s for the government, is there? If they get into a shooting war, they can use that to forbid Israeli Jews from leaving the country, but that means no one in his right mind would emigrate there, so one is stuck with the losing hand of modern white birth rates. Also, the trapping of the population is right out of the USSR, and once begun it can never end.
The easiest solution would be to admit they have long had a genuine nuclear deterrent. We didn't all move out of the USA the moment the Soviets got the Bomb. However, you could say that's because there would have been no place to run from a US-USSR nuclear war. But the real problem is, Israel always justifies land-grabbing on the grounds of creating a buffer zone (what an archaic concept) against the Arab armies. Admitting you have 200 nukes makes the buffer zone pointless. Real estate has become a cornerstone of the Israeli economy, just like in other aging right-wing capitalist states, so the grabbing must continue regardless.
Well, the FBI has already targeted animal rights activists as a special threat, and I have trouble believing they'd be so high up the enemies list if they hadn't angered any number of corporations that do bad things to animals in the normal course of their businesses. So torturing animal rights activists will be a reward for some of the lobbyists out there. Logically climate activists face the same danger as a threat to the oil & coal industry. Which should one day prove, too late, that it's a myth that global-warming deniers are the persecuted truth-tellers while the global-warming alarmists are liars bankrolled by a wealthy conspiracy. You know which group will get tortured by authorities first, if ever.
Well, how many free societies were there in Europe before World War I by these standards? Britain had just overridden the House of Lords' veto power and women were still fighting for the vote, Germany's constitutional monarchy looked good on paper but was fatally flawed by the power of its military, France had too many elections for its own good while the bureaucrats remained in place and ruled. Yet it was better than things had been a few generations earlier.
Unless one finds it unacceptable that Arab democracy should progress at a similar crawl, the question is whether the powerful forces that put more and more power into the hands of elected parliaments in an industrializing Europe is what we find at work in the Arab world today.
I don't think, Prof. Cole, that it is right to issue a blanket condemnation of nationalism because of the wars it has caused. The fact is, before we had nationalism, we had feudalism. Nationalism was an absolutely necessary step in moving forward from a world in which legal equality simply didn't exist at all in any political community to one where it was conferred locally by ethnicity, a substantial improvement over the injustices of nobility and caste. Joan of Arc, for instance, was a warrior who hated war, who fought because she saw the cause of suffering for the French people was the way that they were passed back and forth between sovereigns like cattle at an auction. By demanding that her sovereign fight for his subjects rather than treat them as property, she was laying the basis for the idea of a public interest, without which we could hardly have progressed to parliamentary democracy.
So we have gone from fighting wars for feudal portfolio-building to wars of faith to wars of mass ideology, and now we do have big problems because the nationalities that had the money and soldiers to gain sovereign rights have done so and evolved into weak, selfish bourgeoise market-states, while the weaker nationalities left behind to fight over the scraps are fighting ever more viciously using purchased weaponry. We are bumping up against the limits of the big-heartedness of human nature, the willingness to share our welfare with ever-wider defintions of fellow humanity, and we face the danger of splintering back into narrow tribalism. See, for instance, how socialist programs which once exploited our pride in nationalism (even LBJ's "Great Society") to obtain benefits for the poor are now being reversed because too many of the poor are immigrants.
However, until we possess the means of engendering that loyalty to universal humanity in the hearts of all people, the nation-state is the best tool we've got to maintain the very rudimentary concepts of international law and equality of citizenship that we've managed so far. It could all be lost in a heartbeat.
Soooo... when will Jews understand that Moslems are stuck with the belief that Moslems everywhere are supposed to go to the aid of Moslems who are driven out of their homes? I mean, that belief is no more medieval than Jewish beliefs in their entitlement, which is ultimately what both sides are using to demand that the other side retreat. We Christians are stuck with some crazy beliefs too, which if acted upon would endanger the world's survival. It would be nice to just be able to revise your religion when it is in conflict with higher concepts of human rights, rather than cynically turning your inalienable beliefs into bargaining chips.
Joe, we could have saved a lot more money than that by just saying one thing:
"Europe, you're on your own."
I'm fine with that because I trust EU foreign policy more than US foreign policy. Their very lack of unity is a deterrent to imperialism, but the fact that the EU - except for its ties to Washington via NATO - is about a million miles to the left of the US means they can counter us if our crazies get in the White House and try to start a war with our boogeyman-du-jour.
Now that doesn't mean I disagree with the Kosovo intervention, but if we had dismantled NATO when its reason for being had ceased to exist, the EU would have had to come up with a replacement, a unified, democratic nuclear superpower with its own sphere of influence, which would have included Kosovo. We admitted back then that Rwanda was outside of our zone of interests, and it's a tragedy what happened there, but at some point we have to draw an overt line around our interests and say, "We will not go into that area by ourselves." Kosovo should have been the EU's responsibility but we seem to not want it capable of acting independently of us.
Same for Japan. The dirty secret of Asia is that Asians still fear the Japanese, but we can't coddle these countries forever by pretending to be Japan's ally when in reality we're its jailer. One of these centuries, we're going to have to trust that once Japanese voters have their fate in their own hands, they won't immediately invade Manchuria.
I think that's a 50% cut right there. And all those years Bush was wasting our money on Iraq, Latin America began wrestling itself free of US hegemony, and it's working for those countries both economically and militarily (as in, we built up those militaries into a threat to wage war on their own citizens).
I am not a pacifist. I think the model for our military policy should be that formerly held by Britain; that in the absence of a genuine superpower threat, we simply keep our Navy strong enough to defeat any likely combination on the high seas (two carrier groups could do that if we'd stop poking around the Persian Gulf), and rely on the Marines for short incursions without the means to carry our a full occupation. The Strategic Air Command and most of the Regular Army perform no function but to tempt our leaders into foreign adventures. Really the only part of our Air Force that justifies its monstrous price tag is the part that protects ground forces, meaning the A-10, the slow plane the USAF didn't want. Our air wars have not broken any nation to our will.
Another thing; if the Democratic Party stood for anything other than special interests, it would have spent every day the last 10 years jumping up and down pointing at the economic boom that followed that small cut in military spending by Clinton. I don't think it's as simple as that; there was a lot of personal borrowing and Ponzi schemes going on in the '90s; but why can't we even discuss the evidence that military spending is the productive equivalent of setting fire to a giant pile of dough? Have we a primitive superstition that the right-wing factions that get most of the money from the war machine are God's favorites (Halliburton pigs, Lyndie England torture-necks, Christian crazies turned soldiers) and He will punish us for not terrorizing the world for Him?
What JTMcphee should have pointed out is that the defense budget should have been cut a hell of a lot more than 20% after the USSR was gone. We should have had a real public debate on exactly what our agenda was overseas. Are we in the business of pointing a carrier group at every 3rd world country that doesn't kiss our asses? Are we claiming that any event, anywhere in the world, that could cause a Wall Street crash (because we let it become so crash-prone) is therefore a "vital national interest"? Why do we have military installations in 130 countries?
We should be frankly terrified that the public was conned into believing some guys in caves in Afghanistan represented the same degree of threat as the USSR. Clearly it has nothing to do with real capabilities, since Russia still has a lot of nukes and no one cares anymore. It's about ideology, the mere idea that there are folks out there who are opposed to our global hegemony. But that doesn't explain our willingness to bankrupt ourselves to stifle everyone abroad who takes up arms against our agents. We must also fear, in some dark corner of our souls, that one day the world will recognize that we really are the undeserving imperial pigs that bin Laden said we were, that the incredible economic injustice in our world will one day be avenged by an infinite army of starving dark-skinned kids, who will pour across our borders like army ants.
So now what will replace al-Qaeda as our next budget-justifying bogeyman, animal rights activists? Occupy Wall Street?
Obama simply threatened to cut off the money. It was worth it to the military to ditch Mubarak to keep the money. But now you're talking about the military giving up its control of large swathes of the Egyptian economy. If that's bigger than the US aid, they'll say screw America, and then what?
It would be different if Egypt were one of the countries where US troops actually are present to back up the government against its own people, but we only do that where there's not a lot of people. We allied with Egypt because we assumed its military, like Pakistan's, would keep things quiet in a corner of the world for us. Hasn't quite worked out like we expected, but that's subcontractors for you...
Research Google on a Likud-commissioned political plan called "A Clean Break", written in the 1990s by signatories to Dick Cheney's PNAC who later worked for the Bush regime. It calls for the destruction of the Israeli welfare state, the elimination of any US leverage on Israeli actions, and the removal of Arab governments that would not cooperate. You have very accurately discerned what the plan was.
Tito, our country is already dying with oil at current prices. It's been dying since 1973, which just happens to be when US production peaked and we lost our position as the world's dominant producer. We literally needed to dominate world oil production to the extent that Saudi Arabia dominates it today just to keep our way of life from bankrupting us. Are you seriously claiming the US could increase production from under 5 million bbls a day all the way back to its original peak of 10 million, which would now be only a small part of current consumption and still wouldn't cause prices to go down? If anything, we should consider reducing production before we suffer another BP catastrophe, but you clearly have already written off the Gulf as a necessary sacrifice to feed the beast.
Worse, you're offering this in defense of a madman's scheme to destroy the Middle East. Do you not see that oil itself is the toy of tyrants and warmongerers because it concentrates power into too few hands, and thus inexorably corrupts them? Our invasion of Iraq took America to levels of evil on the international stage where it had never gone before, and it was because of our paranoia to defend what the war criminal Cheney called our non-negotiable way of life.
By the way, Gingrich just denounced child labor laws as the greatest source of economic inequality in America. Because things were so much more equal when small children were dying in sweatshop fires and mine cave-ins. So I guess when he claims the effects on us of his war on Iran would be negligble, we have to consider that he believes going back to the 19th century would also do negligble harm.
Gingrich is so stupid that he doesn't know Europe also buys oil and gas from Russia? Cut off Iran, and Putin can afford to start building aircraft carriers again. Oh wait, a renewed Russian superpower is just what the GOP wants, isn't it?
Also, Iran is trying to convert its cars to natural gas, which it already has more than it knows what to do with, and doesn't require refineries. I'm sure China would be willing to supply the cars in exchange for some more of that gas, since it's the only short-term replacement for China's disastrous coal economy.
It's a staggering compendium of ignorance. A massive all-sources energy program is meaningless because capitalist dogma requires it to all be run by the private sector. So no sources will be invested in unless they're already proven to be profitable, or are fantasies promoted by the existing energy oligarchs like shale "oil". The oil companies, honest to God, have been trying to make shale profitable for a whole century.
Then the competing oligarchs will fight each other over which of these sources should get government handouts, and they will fight in the arena that they have purchased, our Congress. So nothing will even be started for years.
Now, Canada could ramp up tar sands production with disastrous effects, but Gingrich is not running for prime minister of Canada, so how can he guarantee that the US will have any ability to make Canada speed up when it's so profitable for it to just sit back and let prices rise? Will we invade Alberta?
Also, Americans are completely confused about the difference between liquid fuels that could run our cars, and energy sources that produce electricity, like nuclear and coal. There's a lot less we can do about liquid sources in any reasonable time frame unless, like Iran, we were willing to mandate that cars run on natural gas. Unlikely from the GOP.
So Newt can start a war in January 2013, but he won't have a god-damned barrel of oil to offer to Europe before he's up for re-election in 2016. The America that could invent an atomic bomb in 3 years? It doesn't exist anymore, and it's largely capitalist actions that dismantled it.
The problem is not getting the military back in its barracks, the problem is getting it out of the many factories it owns. That's what it's fighting to hold onto, which requires a captive government. Egyptians may still have too much patriotism to accuse the officer corps of lusting after those profits just as much as its former commander did. But what other wealth is there to be had in Egypt?
Leopards change their spots all the time in politics. You must believe that, since you think NATO is a villain now, yet it is the alliance that defeated the Soviet bloc and the direct descendant of the alliance that defeated Adolf Hitler. Or do you think that Hitler, Stalin and Gadafi were all good guys, and America was always the bad guy?
How do we square Eisenhower forcing the UK and France to withdraw from Suez with our subsequent behavior? Or Truman ordering the Dutch out of Indonesia while he backed the French in Vietnam? To the people who wield power, these aren't simple decisions to put on a superhero suit or a supervillain suit and spend the rest of their lives in it.
The corruption of power grows everywhere on all sides, but it is not a consistent thing.
You didn't have a revolution, you had the commander of a military dictatorship removed by his military because his unpopularity became a threat to their financial machine. It was done to prevent a real revolution, while preserving the essential injustice of the system. Now the ball is back in the people's court, and they are pushing for further concessions, for which they are willing to pay by risking their lives some more.
Look at the history of the French and Russian revolutions if you want to see how complicated these games can get before there are thousands being killed in the streets.
I'm half-Okinawan. Two of my mother's oldest sisters died in the Battle of Okinawa. It probably happened because US Marines used flamethrowers to clear out caves in which thousands of Japanese soldiers and conscripted nurses were hiding. The Japanese told the nurses that all American GIs were rapists. So when the Marines ordered those in the caves to surrender, the nurses kept quiet, and all were killed. This happened many, many times.
Now do I hold this against the Marines? Hell no. Those same Japanese soldiers tried to seize my mom's teenaged brother for conscription. They also indoctrinated Okinawans into committing suicide, and some of the conscripts, now elderly men, are still speaking out that they were ordered to shoot civilians who would not commit suicide.
More importantly, I know what the Japanese did to ordinary Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipinos, and their particularly small-minded cruelty. And I can well believe that what the US was planning to do to Japan barring use of the a-bomb would therefore have resulted in millions of deaths.
This is so richly appropriate to bring up in the context of US economic sanctions over the invasion of Indochina actually provoking the bulletheads in Tokyo to okay the attack on Pearl Harbor. We don't have very good tools to punish foreign governments for their actions. They are terribly messy and mostly ineffective and often backfire. We must educate our children, as part of their responsibility as voters, in the effects of those tools on innocent civilians.
But I will go to my grave certain that the people of Asia are better off today than they would have been if the Japanese Army had conquered Asia. And the reason those old Okinawans are speaking out on what they were ordered to do is that Japanese Education Ministry fascists are still writing lies in their school textbooks about the war. 60 years of the no-war constitution have not stamped out this evil.
By the way, John Adams claimed that American opinion at the start of the Revolutionary War was split 1/3 for independence, 1/3 for British rule, and 1/3 for empire. We really, really needed French help. So does this mean that our independence is illegitimate? Or more disturbingly, does it mean that humans use force on each other all the time and then try to make the best they can of the results? There is blood on the hands of the Founding Fathers; so does that mean we should shut the whole thing down and swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, or does it mean that we have as much right to violence as that minority faction did to remake the Republic to meet our needs, instead of treating the Founders as sinless deities and their doctrines as infallible?
As I pointed out before, no one expresses any problems with how the mob dealt with Benito Mussolini or Ceaucescu. One was a fascist, and the other was a Communist who was an embarassment to the left, so it is politically correct to look the other way, isn't it?
And I personally would love it if Jefferson Davis had been torn limb from limb by a mob of liberated slaves, or Hitler chopped to pieces by concentration camp inmates. I can't believe that there's anyone who disagrees with me about this. Would Adil really, really have a problem with a pro-American dictator being butchered by a pissed-off mob? No wonder the western Left is viewed as pathetic.
I think to be fair you have to start the clock on Indonesia and Turkey in the same manner. The military actually took power in Indonesia in 1966, so it had a run about as long as most of the other dictatorships that have been falling more recently. We also don't know whether the Indonesian people are really on top of the Army, just as we didn't know in South Korea until after a few real elections.
But the big issue with Indonesia's army is that it committed three genocides and that had nothing to do with its eventual downfall. That is a disgusting comment on human nature. As long as the victims were the wrong ethnicity, the vast majority of Indonesians didn't give a damn; it was another matter once the dictator was stealing their tax dollars.
The funny thing is, supposedly a recent survey showed that 2/3rds of those in the "1 percent" also agree that growing inequality is a serious problem for our society. Yet we can see that every wing of modern conservatism, the imperialists, the theocrats, the neo-Confederates, the corporate whores and the libertarians, is spouting about an ideal past, ideal because inequality favors "our kind". And tens of millions love this crap.
So what is the nature of the relationship between the power elite and the extremists? Possibilities:
1. the rich mostly don't understand how their investments multiply; they just pay off a network of banksters, lobbyists and propagandists to make their chosen stocks grow as quickly as possible. Problem is, these henchmen know the way to do that is destroy pollution, financial and labor regulations, ship jobs to the foreign sweatshop du jour, and crank out the CO2. The rich, and the computers that actually run their mutual funds, blindly follow the hottest gainers to our mutual doom.
2. The extremists need the rich because they need the corporate and military hegemony of America to do many dirty things; they then skim off the rewards to the owners. Dick Cheney may be exhibit 1; he was small fry by the standards of the plutocracy, but as part of the war machine he exploited their fears of the confusing, complicated outside world and waved the flag in their faces. They never bothered to read the insane papers his PNAC was writing, they just wanted to know that their investments would be "protected". He used his DefSec resume to get the Halliburton gig, then militarized it so it would be the only company that could carry out privatized military services as he had proposed in the '90s, then got back in the White House in '00 and carried out that proposal to the benefit of Halliburton shareholders by starting a war. Did any of them read past the dividend report?
3. Corporations and private companies are not exactly in accordance. The corp execs view themselves as managers of both their firms and America itself; their holdings are so global, their exposure so public, that they want to avoid the really kooky far-right stuff and attendant bad PR. But the multi-generational private owners, while not owning the biggest US firms, have total control over them and don't give a damn about PR or foreign repercussions; compare Henry Ford's open Naziism vs. GM's sneaky deals with the 3rd Reich, or the viciousness of the family-owned "Little Steel" companies in butchering strikers in the late '30s after corporate Big Steel had already begun to talk, and now the Koch brothers, whose coal-centric energy operations are tiny compared to the oil giants but are willing to pour vast sums into subverting and fanaticizing American democracy just to keep the smokestacks belching.
Somehow, we of the 99% are going to have to educate ourselves about how to exploit these possible divisions among our owners as a force multiplier in our struggle for economic leverage.
The government is just bought property, sir. The beneficiaries are not passive or innocent, they've been plotting this for decades, lying to get their policies enacted, then raking in the rewards, then plowing them back into their favored candidates for more rewards. Harper's editor Lewis Lapham witnessed the process:
This is what happens to democracy when the rich are so incredibly rich that they can buy both political parties, the Pentagon, the mass media and the churches. Obviously you want to pretend that if we destroy the government the rich will not step into the power vacuum to conspire against and oppress us. I think that has been the end game all along and the new extremist policies of the 2010 election winners are the start of the final phase.
Cointelpro, Bill. The FBI historically put infiltrators into both left wing and right wing groups who then tried to steer them towards violence, which obviously is good for the infiltrator's career and the Bureau's budget. This method was used to carry out the extermination of the Black Panthers.
Well, once we've started a regional conflagration and turned the whole world against us, it will be relatively easy for the new President to declare a state of emergency and rewrite the Constitution, financial system and budget to advance his personal agenda. That's far more important than actually paying for the war.
And once he's crushed all domestic resistance, there is always the option of using our nuclear arsenal to literally blackmail the world to cancel our debts and supply us with cheap oil. I mean, we rational people consider that unthinkable, but there seem to be millions of Americans who would gamble on that in a last-ditch attempt to preserve the comforts and privileges that make their lives worth living. Let's goad Herman Cain into running it up the flagpole, and then with great fear, let's count how many salute.
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I think what McPhee is saying is, you are being too trusting that these evil bills are even meant for the purposes claimed. I've followed these issues since the birth of DVD, and what is apparent is that the IP owners literally cannot accept that they don't own the images and memories in your head. Internet Neutrality and these two bills are the latest attempt to claim a guaranteed entitlement from society for their supposed irreplaceability, but also to drive ordinary private citizens out of the Internet as content producers. It has nothing to do with the artists and writers who continually get screwed by the IP conglomerates. Do you think the guys who drew "Steamboat Willie" benefit from the copyright period being extended by Disney lobbyists just in time to prevent Mickey Mouse from becoming public domain?
Remember, the definition of property is continually being manufactured and revised by the powerful. Before the Enclosure Acts in Britain, the idea that every square inch of land had to have an owner was alien. The new rich of the Industrial Revolution rammed that atrocity thru Parliament so they could turn their profits into real power, and then hailed economists who quickly convinced everyone that the new arrangment was "natural" and "eternal".
It also happens in Latin America, and did under many US-installed dictatorships in the past.
And Saudi Arabia, Rick? Huh? Surely you don't defend Wahhabism, Rick?
Perry is a weathervane and conduit for the crazies he courts. He has no convictions of his own; but a governor of Texas can pursue crazies that a governor of Massachusetts credibly cannot.
However, I would love it if a GOP president was so crazy that he would dismantle or leave NATO in outrage over our allies' socialized medicene, generous social benefits, gay rights, and secularism. Unfortunately, I would be enjoying this news from my cell in the concentration camp that such a president would have tossed me in.
The only thing that stops Perry from being a contender is not the madness of his statements, but the doubts of the redneck zombie army that he really means them. His political consultants probably have proof that many Republicans would indeed support armed bullying of Turkey and CIA support for the overthrow of its elected government.
I wonder what would happen if Obama simply admitted, with evidence, that Israel already has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and therefore has all the deterrence it needs against a paltry Iranian attack? Sort of cuts the balls off the Lobby. The Arabs and Iran all know the bombs are there, so you can't say the revelation would change anybody's behavior. Our missile shield is simply irrelevant.
Or even soft-power punishment by China, like a cutoff in purchases of US Treasuries, which would send the dollar off the cliff and raise the price of oil in US $ even if it remained steady in yuan.
One day, I think China will simply deal with these annoyances by sending a few million laborers, "advisors", and aid workers to every embattled ally to simply stand around and act as a tripwire. With a population of 1,300,000,000, it's not much of a sacrifice.
Give Israel's elites credit; they figured out the Achilles' Heel of American democracy. If you can obtain leverage in both parties at the same time, you are nearly unstoppable. It has long been the case that the big capitalist factions have always had a foot in both parties - one by membership, the other by rental. Israel almost fell into it by accident; Jews were a major faction in the faction-ridden Democratic Party, and then suddenly Christian Right freaks in the South transferred their allegiance to the GOP and to Israel. Since then Israel has moved far to the right, allowing Israeli-American dual citizens like the members of PNAC to serve simultaneously in the apparatus of the Likud and GOP, an extraordinary and unprecedented situation. Imagine if FDR's staffers had also been in Churchill's Political Action Committee during America's closest legal alliance.
What oil companies and foreign states can do, we ordinary Americans cannot. Only very big hypocrites can become driving forces in two competing political parties at the same time; it is a strategy to obfuscate, sabotage, and corrupt, not to unify citizens and act in their interest.
Compared to the Lavon affair? They tried to frame Egypt for bombings of US facilities, which would have led 1956 Americans to demand that Ike annihilate Egypt in a war, leaving him with a choice between causing the Iraq catastrophe 47 years early, or having a nuclear showdown with the Soviets over our right to do so. Even worse, the exposure of the plot triggered more pogroms of Jews from Arab countries, benefitting Israel, creating the constituency for the bloody Likud Party, and forming part of the Zionist smear campaign against the Arab world that has since poisoned the American mind.
I don't think this new crime is even as bad as shooting up the USS Liberty and trying to frame the Egyptians for that.
Ehud Barak is leader of the Labor Party and Defenese Minister. He has presided over all recent heinous actions of the IDF including the attack on the Gaza aid flotilla.
Now you can say that the Labor Party is no longer genuinely of the Left, which is why last year's street protestors against massive inequality don't hold any hope in elections. But by your standards, what % of Knesset members actually embrace a genuine peace process in accord with international law?
Uh, Bill, ordinary schmucks can mean workers. Workers don't create wealth? The people giving orders would have a hell of a time creating any wealth if they didn't have any workers.
Have the people of Pakistan ever put their bodies on the line to save democracy from the Army like the Egyptians have? Do they really regard themselves as a people such that they would bother?
That matters to me more than them kicking us out of Afghanistan. The Pakistani Army has been, with our past connivance, the greatest threat to peace and democracy in the region. It has always been responsible for Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan because it doesn't recognize Afghan sovereignity. If the citizenry would cut the balls off that army, most of our excuses for being in the region would be obsolete.
However, based on the things I heard about Zardari and his crew when he was installed, I'm not surprised he came to a bad end. I don't know anything about Imran Khan's positions, but I know Nawaz Sharif was supposed to be Saudi Arabia's man. Hard to imagine the Saudis would be happy with Pakistan's army accepting democracy.
Where is your evidence that the Arab Spring movement is any less socialistic than Occupy? Or that Occupy is a state socialist movement instead of an anarchist movement?
And if holding onto the past means that civil servants get the same standard of living that they did under, say, Eisenhower or Kennedy, what is your alternative? That they join the envious Tea Party mob that believes since its wages "must" be reduced to pre-WW2 levels to appease the great god Entrepreneurship, all other workers must suffer likewise? Under those idiotic conditions, there is no logical reason for the plutocrats to ever raise wages at all; like their bloody cousins in Latin America, the Philippines, etc, they've become better off making the country as poor and illiterate as possible since it gives them an overwhelming advantage in wage bargaining.
As for slavishly following America for developmental solutions, I have to recall my time in the Philippines, a country that hitched its star to America when it seemed all-powerful, while Thailand and other Asian countries copied the strategies of Japan. The Philippines had the 2nd highest per-capita income in East Asia in 1963. You know what happened after that. My own observation was that the overpopulation and resource constraints there made US models completely inapplicable, but because of their contact with the US, Filipinos viewed living Yankee-style as a reasonable aspiration. The other Asian states were lucky not to have these illusions, and generations of deferred consumption and industrial investment was their only hope.
I once had an anthropology professor who had worked in the Philippines, maybe went a little native there, but he insisted to his students that in the mid 1950s the big industrial and union interests in the US demanded that Washington stop promoting in the P.I. the kind of industrial development that made Japan into a threat to their dominance, and instead push the dogma of agricultural exports. I can't verify this, but it would explain an awful lot of the ugly results of US policy since then.
Because Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis wanted to replace that tyranny with Wall Street plutocracy, like all the neoliberals and neoconservatives do. Admitting anything when it would have helped those schmucks would just have made it easier for Bush & Cheney to justify the occupation of Iraq. Now Wall Street is being challenged by the Arab Street, and by Main Streets all over the world.
Joe, modern nuclear weapons are quite small. The trend towards bigger nukes reversed in the middle '60s when the Russians were believed to have 100-megaton h-bombs. The problem was, they worked too well as a deterrent; the military-industrial complexes of both superpowers - mainly us - became obsessed with "counterforce", which means destroying the other guy's missiles with small, super-accurate nukes. Which simply means Pearl Harbor the other guy and dictate terms. Which means the other guy must either develop an ABM system or build more warheads.
Which made the military-industrial complexes very happy.
So modern nukes are not very different in power than the Hiroshima weapon, and ironically by being designed to destroy enemy nukes has undermined the deterrent effect once provided by Mutually Assured Destruction. Thank God for Admiral Rickover and his untouchable submarines, the last clear deterrent.
And Bill, pride goeth before a fall. Get a copy of Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy", published in 2006, where he predicted most of the disasters that befell Bush's empire in 2008. Phillips was the Republican strategist behind the Southern Strategy, who came to regret his success because he saw it breeding arrogance and madness in his party. Every empire thinks it is unique and immortal at the very moment of its doom.
Lots of foreigners wanted to become a part of Rome too, Bill.
Question is, if we hadn't stolen all that Indian land, and used black slavery to keep the country solvent until stolen British technology triggered the Industrial Revolution in the US, how many foreigners would covet our goodies today?
You're no different than anyone else who hints that America is "special" and "unique" and "irreplaceable" as a smokescreen for justifying US control of global resources by infinite war spending. That's what JTMcPhee hates. Wasn't it projection when George W. Bush invaded Iraq promising freedom at the very time he was dismantling its legal basis at home?
The Roman Republic was a slave state. It was more honest than our republic in that it openly made the rich into first-class citizens, openly expected them to serve both as politicians and generals, and openly gloried in conquest for profit. It was more advanced than our republic in that it would grant citizenship to any conquered person who pledged to obey its laws and pay its taxes. But all of that continued under the Empire. The Republic was a plutocracy, as dominated by its big landowners as we are by Wall Street today.
And how can you forget that England banned slavery decades before the US, and so did Mexico? The sharecroppers of the Jim Crow south were debt serfs, just like peasants anywhere else in the world. Stop with this American exceptionalism and recognize that America was full of all kinds of oppression before WWII, things that made Europeans cringe.
The two greatest lies told by the libertarians are (1) that free enterprise ever actually existed anywhere in the past and (2) that America was a "free" society when it had weak federal government and the rich could get away with murder.
It is strange that no one points this out, but Americans, unlike Europeans, have forgotten how oppressive the institutions were that shared power before big government. Essentially power was shared between kings, landlords and churchmen, with plenty of overlap between their memberships, and each did horrible things. As recently as 90 years ago, large swathes of America were controlled by a white terrorist militia, blacks were falsely arrested and sold by local governments to well-connected businessmen to perform temporary slave labor, governors used the National Guard to murder strikers for the rich, whites and Asians could not marry in California, and local censorship boards dominated by local clergy cut up movies and banned books everywhere.
Free for what kind of American, Ron? This must be why he never talks about the past when he's trying to suck in the young.
Prof. Cole lacks the technology to send letters back to the 19th Century.
They've been looking for another Reagan since the real one fled one step ahead of his Alzheimer's (and yes, Reagan was a better president after he started losing the ability to remember why he hated Commies so much). Remember when they were fluffing up Dan Quayle as the heir? Then they embraced Bush Jr. and paid the price. But each time a right-wing tyrant fails, he is instantly disavowed by the movement for the crime of not being extreme enough. So Bush is now officially no longer a conservative. Which clears the decks for even more extreme mutants and gimmicks; the female Reagan, the black Reagan, the Catholic Reagan, etc. etc.
Until you destroy the myth of Reagan's competence, the public will keep believing that they must keep following this course even when they feel uneasy about the policies.
There is a gap opening up between what ordinary people think is right and what they think is necessary for survival. They have been convinced, by massive propaganda efforts reaching into every area of their lives, that their compassion towards the poor, their tolerance for diversity, their yearning for peace, all the individual matters on which they express liberal preferences to pollsters, somehow is to blame for the country's weakness and their struggle to pay their bills.
I first noticed this in college when I had a class project to analyze data from a 1980 Texas voters' survey. It clearly showed that Texans, even Texas Republicans, had different policy positions than Reagan, the man they voted into power.
I think they wanted a President who would overrule them. They were being harangued into feeling guilty about the better angels of their nature, but they were being presented with a solution: give power to a leader who will restore order by wisely doing things you disagree with. Then you and your beliefs can exist in some quiet corner with no consequences whatsoever.
Of course, Reagan's puppetmasters had planned this for years, since the chaos of 1968. They knew the people disagreed with even their short-term agenda, but if the people would trust a good actor over their own consciences, the tax cuts and deregulation would get in place to create massive inequality to pay for more propaganda. Once people were convinced that Reagan saved America, their beliefs would begin to wither and sour into his very image. That accomplished, all that is needed to drive the public further right is the manufacturing of more budget crises - whereas in the past financial crises rightly drove voters to the left. If things are bad, we must kick more of the lazy and defective off the lifeboat - but we don't want to bloody our own hands with the task. Each GOP nominee in turn hints that he will do that dirty work, helped by the 20% of the population that relishes it, but we will surely not be among those sacrificed.
I hear it's Canada's turn for processing right now.
The real fear should not be what the MB does, but what the US and Israel do. They've spent years training their publics to hate and fear groups like Hamas, but all the Moslem Brotherhood needed to do to be hated was choose its name. Will the MB kill as many people as a "pre-emptive" attack by Israel will? Or US sanctions?
And now all of us who support the ongoing Arab revolution will get smeared and slandered by the vast zombie army of Islamophobic idiots found on the Internet, in the corporate media, in the pulpits, in every level of elected government, and in our own workplaces.
But that was inevitable. Egyptians were never gonna act white enough to make our lynch mob happy.
Destroying all American unions, child labor laws, minimum wage laws, pollution laws, and Federal legal authority (all announced goals of major GOP leaders) to return this country to the paradise of 1859 sounds hyperbolic, and yet that's what they've sworn to do. Did you know 1/5 of all state legislators, and many congressmen, are members of ALEC, a "pro-business" lobbying group that literally wrote both the Arizona 1070 legislation and legislation expanding the use of prison slave labor?
Create a workforce at Chinese wage levels, destroy all liberal institutions that could resist, then hire the gun nuts to be the enforcers. Squeeze the country dry of its last few drops of blood before departing for sunnier climes. Not hyperbolic, just utterly ruthless and soulless.
What does it tell us all that this neocon is bashing the one Moslem country that is really trying to prevent a regional war? You won't be happy, sir, until all Moslems live under safe military dictators whose armies are completely dependent on the Pentagon. I bet you never had a problem with the serial mass murderer Suharto, but a big problem with the alleged Communist Sukarno.
And the NY Times has spread plenty of lies about independent Moslem leaders over the decades. Could you guys wait till the blood from your Iraq crimes wears off before starting anew on Iran and Turkey?
I guess any discussion on what China's military spending or Iran's military spending really means degenerates into is: Intentions. Which is the same crap we wasted the Cold War on. We can slice the numbers six ways from Sunday, but we will always refuse to factor ourselves into their equation. No sane and moral people can see America as a threat. Anyone who refuses to accept American hegemony is the new Hitler. Blah blah blah.
What Iran probably does is transfer the technology to China in exchange for future results. Iran claims to build anti-ship weapons that sure look like something China would build and sell. Hey, no one complained when Israel and South Africa shared a-bomb technology!
Okay, I checked out globalsecurity.org. The problem with their numbers is that they're using purchasing parity to quadruple the official Chinese military budget. Thing is, if you buy such a ratio, then you are saying that everything in China is 4 times bigger than stated, including wages, which means that the value of China's GNP is actually twice that of the US!
You can't compare budgets when all military spending is corrupt. You have to count the toys.
I would have to see really detailed evidence to believe that China's military spending has increased 484% in 4 years to $400 billion. This sounds like the trumped-up figures the CIA used to put out for the USSR.
Firstly, the yuan has appreciated against the US $.
A lot of Chinese military units are fronts for arms businesses, and you can't rely on a Chinese general to not sell his troops' own guns to foreigners. How do you determine the budget when so much money is coming and going?
Mostly I don't believe it because I'm sure with their labor costs and our staggering MIC corruption that the Chinese would be able to buy as much from their $400 billion as we get with our $800 billion. They're not close. They're buying cheap anti-ship missiles instead of carrier groups. Their strategic nuclear arsenal is tiny. They don't bear the cost of foreign bases in 130 countries. They're not having to replace materiel losses from recent wars. I approve of all this, precisely because it should be vastly cheaper than $400 billion a year. They don't even have the air force and navy of France or Britain.
Where's the Ohio-class SSBMs? Where's the 9-digit-cost stealth bombers? Where's the crashing VTOLs?
If this is a new neo-con lie campaign, we ought to nip it in the bud with some logic.
There are a lot of people in this thread, and on the anti-Obama left generally, who seem to live in a fantasy world about what the American right-wing extremist movement is and always has been. For decades vile, murderous ideas from the Birchers and abortion clinic bombers have been mainstreamed by a corporate media conveyor belt, sanitized and euphemized until now a candidate from Lincoln's party can get away with saying Lincoln was the bad guy. The eliminationist language I used to see in small-time gun magazines in gas stations, or rags like "Confederate Veteran", are now the mantras of the Tea Party. This is not an accident, and it will not stop until they've found a way to exterminate everyone they don't like, which is nearly everyone plus you. Why do you persist in thinking that any of them want an America where they would share the tiniest bit of power with blacks, Latinos, gays, and Bernard Sanders?
Your hatred of the United States military has led you to seek brotherhood with people who will never be satisfied with anything less than a restored Confederacy. I'm not kidding. You hate guns and they worship guns. You help them abolish the government, and then who will protect you from them?
Those Paul newsletters are what the American worship of inequality is all about. As long as white people tend to have all the money, worshipping greed and worshipping whiteness - uh, excuse me, "superior American values" - are as identical as state's rights and Jim Crow. It's all about bringing back the 19th century, when the remedy for robber baron capitalism was for poor whites to head west and steal Indian land and thus be co-opted. Now how do you do that in the 21st century? More Ponzi schemes like privatized prisons and sweatshops full of minorities - libertarian approved!
I'm a half-white man convinced that world history shows some whites are unlikely to give up power peacefully. So I watch the end of white majority sweeping from state to state, and the neo-Jim Crow stratagems enacted solely to forestall this, with great interest.
Iowa is not as interesting, therefore, than states where non-white turnout must be suppressed, harassed, and degraded in order for one party to survive. Not long ago in this country, innocent black people could be seized off the streets of the South, convicted of vagrancy and literally leased to private businessmen to carry out slave labor. Now we have, especially in the Red States, a growing privatized prison industry supplanting free low-wage labor with convicts, a public that accepts that blacks just happen to be grossly overrepresented in our prisons, and pressure to permanently revoke the right of "felons" to vote. See how those three things come together to make an apartheid future for us all?
I think Israel's growing disenfranchisement of its Arab citizens is only the prototype for what Israel's fondest buddies in America intend to do.
In fact, a century ago European "ethnics" like Jews weren't considered white; they were considered the alien threat that Mexicans are today.
Yet this is fluid. The first big wave of Jewish immigration seems to have been of highly-Westernized German Jews in the mid 19th century, who encountered rapid success and assimilation. No one thought they weren't white. But when a bigger wave of Polish and Russian Jews came, everything reversed. Americans like Henry Ford became the leading lights of anti-Semitism.
"Acting" white, including matters of language, clothing, and entrepreneurship, practically adds up to being white after some period of time. I would consider that third factor to be the elephant in the room: we've practically comne to think that we're better than other countries because we treat "entrepreneurial" Jews well and "lazy" blacks badly, while the others persecute Jews. Master race and master salesman, how much of each makes up whiteness?
I'm very concerned how Americans will react the first time we lose a carrier. If we freak out and double down on the war and on carrier construction, we will find few friends in the world. If we give in and keep the carrier groups away from hot spots, their utility will collapse as their weakness is exploited by everyone all at once. We should have started preparing for this moment 20 years ago.
I think there are cycles of big wars and small wars. I might be prejudiced to that view because I was in Univ. of Michigan conflict studies where frequency and size of wars are quantitatively assessed. But I believe there's a narrative that explains this history. Sovereigns want wars to be private poker games between themselves, so we have periods dominated by proxy wars and limited border wars, professionals and mercenaries, little involvement by the citizenry, etc. But during such times politics becomes detached from the concerns of the masses, held back until they break like a dam into a flood of ideology: the 30 Years' War, the French Revolution, the World Wars. In each cataclysm, all the characteristics are reversed, populaces are decimated, empires overthrown. Afterwards, the surviving rulers get together at a resort and swear they'll never let that happen again, and impose new restrictions on what they can justly fight each other about.
I think the dam is about to break again. The technological side of that is covered by my reply to Paul below. The social side is seen in the mass demonstrations worldwide. I think we will look back fondly on the small wars of recent years, but they merely protected a dysfunctional status quo. If the forces of change are funneled by rising authoritarian powers, we might have the kind of wars you fear. If instead they herald an age of mass involvement and revolution, the nukes might not come out and we could have some very positive developments if we're willing to pay a substantial price.
Ron Paul is the ultimate priest of infinite, unregulated, unimpeachable greed as the solution to every human problem. He worships a 19th century in which the "state's-rights" National Guard was routinely ordered by governors owned & operated by robber barons to shoot down strikers in the streets. He denounced Lincoln for saving the Union. So even 1865 is too communistic for him.
Primus inter pares, meaning similar to Britain during the Great Power era. I think that's right, if we're talking about 1919-39 rather than the Pax Britannica. Our empire and economy are in a similar state of decline to the later era. Britain's own costly intervention in Iraq was 1919-1932. Ours actually has gone worse.
Firstly, the US dollar is grossly overvalued, which is actually hurting our economy just as the overvaluation of the British pound hurt the British empire after WW1. It creates an illusion of strength while perpetuating ruinous trade deficits.
Secondly, the size of our war spending may prove the evil of our intentions, but not the size of its effectiveness. I have been saying for 20 years that the US war machine is a vast waste of taxpayer dollars, a relic of the Cold War, ready to be ruined by newer ideas of combat. Iraq damn near ruined our army, despite being in ruins itself. Afghanistan is more of the same. Would-be opponents adapt to the high-profile successes of great powers. The Iraqis beat us while in an all-out war with each other. In fact after 2005 they appear to have already realized that we could not conquer them, and instead turned to internecine warfare, each faction taking US handouts when mutually convenient, to prepare for the great prize: a post-occupation regime that would reward one ethnic group with all the oil money. If they had shown any unity after the April 2004 uprisings, I think we would have been defeated on the ground by the next year.
That is a horrible statement on the utility of US military forces. Don't imagine that it has not been heard. The US war machine is built to destroy any normal government that defies it, but then what? Non-state actors can point to a string of successes from Mogadishu to 9/11 to the bankrupting of the USA in Iraq. Whenever we destroy a government, we find we cannot replace it and end the war, only the people can.
Meanwhile, many people have warned that the Persian Gulf is a trap for the US Navy due to cheap Chinese anti-ship weapons; as they grow in sophistication, more and more of the world's maritime chokepoints will be off-limits to us. Wars of a type which the US prefers to fight still prove to be difficult or impossible.
Our imperialists crowed of a revolution in military affairs. This is it. Americans are cowardly, spoiled, increasingly reliant on a redneck fanatic-Christian caste of hardened warriors to do our dirty work (if not foreign Hessians), and worst of all, we have completely outsourced civilian high-tech production to poor countries that increasingly defy our will. Don't you see, all our drones and killer robots and communications gear built in tiny lots at exorbitant profits by GOP-crony contractors in Red States will be copied by the Chinese for 1/5 the cost in ten times the quantity, if they ever prove themselves worthy? We called ourselves the Arsenal of Democracy when we took middling-advanced weapons technology and mass-prodcued it on an unprecedented scale in an America full of factories. China is the only country on Earth that could do that now, if it chose. But if they're really smart, and as mean as I am, the Chinese should be figuring out how to improve the pathetic weapons that our opponents are already beating us with. Imagine a $10,000 cruise missile that can deploy from a van on a highway, or a robot torpedo that knows the sound of every ship in the sea and lurks in the Gulf of Sidra, biding its time, or a guided mortar shell that can destroy helicopters (yes, that one exists). What if every Chinese sweatshop that makes RC-trucks and planes for your kids were to just add explosives and sell them to the kids of the next country we invade?
That is the nightmare of future war, waged by the infinite armies of poor children - in ghettoes and in factories - in a failed global economy against the murderous bigoted warriors of Tennessee and Alabama. It doesn't matter how much money we spend. We will lose everything, and then the war will come home.
Historians may one day point to our quagmire in Iraq as the event that liberated South America from Wall Street hegemony. And while Bush lost South America and Central Asia with his ignorance, now the Middle East is being peeled off. We've lost three major world regions, if not to democracy, at least to sovereignity.
Unfortunately, Mexico is still too far from God and too close to the USA and its relentless drug consumption. Cheer for the Mexican people's movement to end the drug war.
I think, Juan, that you're right if the world economy is growing, but The Raven is right if ecological degradation reverses food production and oil has peaked. In such a calamity, hegemons simply take and redistribute the resources of others to maintain their survival (and thus civilization), but in a multipolar world, it could go Mad Max in a hurry.
Unfortunately, if we choose to be foolish we can finance Israel for a long time at the cost of everything else. It's not the US government aid anymore, it's the earnings from foreign sales by the entire Israeli military-security-industrial complex, driven by the belief that the War on Terror continues. Consider this article from Max Blumenthal:
http://exiledonline.com/max-blumenthal-how-israeli-occupation-forces-bahraini-monarchy-guards-trained-u-s-police-for-coordinated-crackdown-on-occupy-protests/
For a completely different angle, how many decades did the ridiculously backward economies of feudal Europe manage to maintain Crusader castles in a Palestine surrounded by a superior civilization? If your people are savage enough and crazy enough, it can be done. But that was in a world with no international law, no concept of human rights, no global media... It's up to the rest of the world to stand up to America, and make it hurt.
China = veto.
Stop to think what would happen to America if China, without firing a shot, simply started dumping all its US $ denominated holdings. The current Chinese model of propping up the $ to hold down the yuan imposes a high cost on Chinese consumers for imports, but the leadership hasn't yet felt it was worth the risk of jumping to a strong yuan model. Congressmen should stop whining for a strong yuan, unless they're already salivating for the bribes that will come with the Chinese who will buy up everything remaining of value in our country.
Precisely because this is soft power, we don't know where China will choose to risk using it.
To the neocon, war is literally the solution to every problem.
On your last paragraph, read Andrew Bacevich's "The New American Militarism" for a chronicle of how ridiculously easy it was for corrupt pressure groups to train Americans to forget the "lessons of Vietnam." Young adults today know nothing, zero, nada, about our excuses and crimes in Vietnam. Mission Accomplished. We're already feeding Iraq to the memory hole this New Year's Eve.
Joel, we never supported democratic change in the region, we supported our whores in the region, like Mubarak. You've forgotten that the Occupation in Iraq intended to install appointed puppet Iraqi prime ministers indefinitely until Sistani and the Shia uprising forced us to schedule elections. You've forgotten our war against the elected Hamas government. We proved our whores could overthrow other whores. If the good people of the Arab world saw that meant whores could be overthrown, you can hardly claim that the result was America's aim. We are at war with the Arab people for their refusal to accept the elimination of the Palestinians. Anything that increases their ability to refuse is an American defeat, until we admit we were wrong in the first place.
To IlikeIke and Steve,
Shield them all you can, but the alliance of religious and economic conservatives, here and in Israel, should produce certain similarities over time. The religious extremists want government to stop feeding the poor and thus competing with their own charity-cum-bribery. They also want it to get out of all other activities that distract it from enforcing religion-based morality. The economic conservatives want government drowned in the bathtub so they can get themselves another filthy tax cut. Enforcing religious fantasies is cheaper than enforcing environmental laws. And the cheapest form of enforcement of all is a caste system, where the factory owner or settler becomes a law unto his own, eager to crush dissenters with his own hands or private henchmen, and every boss and every father is a tyrant on his own private freehold, and women's wombs and sweatshop floors are capital goods producing an army of broken, pliable voter-peasants.
So convergence is inevitable. Secular society makes real-world demands for equality and justice which can only be delivered by tax-financed government - so would-be aristocrats can't get what they want unless it is all wiped out and seized by the holy, in Rand Paul's Kentucky as in Evigdor Lieberman's Israel. That is why now the most extreme brands of religion are growing fastest, and the rich keep getting richer.
Yes, but throw in the massive polarization of wealth that always happens under unregulated capitalism - always - and it really starts to hurt and kill the workers. Thus, the revolutions. Our turn next?
Ask the people of a dozen countries in Latin America whether pandering to US neoliberal doctrines got them a better standard of living before they threw our stooges out. The purpose of cozying up to the US is so that your rule will be backed by US Marines, not to raise the wages of workers. Where would capitalism be worldwide if the US didn't happen to have forces in 130 countries?
And our relations with Mubarak had been excellent.
I think that there is a definite religion called Americanism, and that it induces heresy in all sects that are imported to these shores over a period of several generations. For instance, I've read that belief in an afterlife among US Catholics and Jews is much greater now than in surveys taken a century ago. I did not know of any modern Catholic and Jewish creationists, until veteran right-wing greedist Ben Stein put out the so-called documentary "Intelligence Not Required". What Stein really believes in, just like Buchanan, is the power and votes of Southern Christians to realize their personal extremist agendas. But then, the Protestantization of Catholics and Jews was really the same thing, wasn't it, the result of assimilation into capitalist, imperialist America?
What are the tenets of Protestant Americanism that assimilate others? In Houston I saw a bumper sticker, "Guns, Guts, and God". Much of the answer can be derived from that, if you add one more G-word: Greed. I would like to get into how this translates into political doctrine but it takes too long and I'd need the ability to create a graph to show how key terms have been redefined since the beginning of American slavery to keep filling the slots in the resulting caste system. In its ugliest sense, it co-opts working-class whites by enlisting them as foot soldiers or henchmen in the sacred conquest and looting of the Earth, just as my redneck forebears in TN were glad to be exploited and poor as long as they were the ones who got to hold the whip. That literally was and is a belief worth killing for, and the religion is the necessary complement to the alienating processes of American capitalism, the secret ingredient that allowed our elites to defeat social democracy.
As a Protestant who has seen the extremist rhetoric used only among fellow evangelicals, I can't understand why American Catholics don't get loudly upset when evangelicals send missionaries (like Tim Tebow's hardline dad) a-poaching in the Catholic Philippines. These exact same evangelicals go courting the vote of homophobic, racist and Islamophobic Catholics every 2 years. Newt Gingrich has become such a nasty gumbo of neoconservative imperialism, neo-Confederate bigotry, Protestant-capitalist greedism and opportunistic Catholicism that he ought to have done with it and start his own religion.
Having (long ago) been a born-again, I think I can explain why American "concerns" for Arab Christians are so hypocritical.
Because in fact, unless you are exactly the same kind of Christian they are, extremist theocrats don't give a damn about you. They believe God made them to use everyone else as tools. You only matter to them if you can (a) be converted by them, and only them, or (b) you can be tricked into voting for one of their stealth candidates, or (c) you can be bullied into the astroturf political mob hysterias they create. If you're a European or Asian or Arab Christian, you're a problem because it's harder for them to justify the cost of missionaries to convert you into the RIGHT KIND of Christian. But if you're an African, whoa Nelly, they've got an open hunting license on you because they think you're ready to sign up for cargo-cult Pentecostalism, the Gospel of Prosperity magic that'll get you Yankee goodies. And yes, it's happening.
In their eyes, if you have your own tradition of Christianity and refuse to convert to their hybrid greed-guns-Americanism heresy, you are a threat to their claim to represent all Christians. When they're making up lies about the war on Christmas, Catholics are suddenly useful to them, but their internet forums fill up with talk about the Inquisition not being the fault of real Christians, and when the Pope speaks against our wars or the molestation scandal presents a chance to increase their market share, they're merciless. They are just as hateful to Mormons, Unitarians, and yes, Jews who don't share their imperialist agenda.
The New Apostolic Reformation of Sarah Palin, also sponsor of Rick Perry's stadium rally, takes this to its logical conclusion in its media-ignored doctrines, which imply that everyone, all Christians, all Protestants, all evangelicals and all Pentecostals who refuse to join it are under demonic influence and thus have no rights that must be respected. It's even okay to secretly infiltrate enemy churches (called "steeplejacking"). It is, I think, the ultimate statement of American religion.
Point is, Ike, America allied with Saddam AFTER 1979. 60 Minutes presented evidence that the US Navy coordinated Iraqi attacks on Iranian oil platforms in the Gulf. You've seen the pictures of Bush-1 era Rumsfeld with Saddam, haven't you? How many of the industrial contracts he thus signed with American firms enabled his attacks on the Kurds?
Most of all, don't you recall Saddam trying to get Ambassador Glaspey to give a US stamp of approval on his invasion of Kuwait?
There are allegations that the CIA was involved in the Baath coup against the previous Marxist government, during which time Saddam tortured the defeated leftists for his superiors. My God, half the things the bastard has done in his career seemed to be with US approval and support, as long as he killed the Marxists and Shiites we wanted killed. So he followed orders, ended up bankrupt fighting our mutual enemy, and then expected a ridiculous quid pro quo in Kuwait, so we've been destroying his country ever since. When does our foreign policy get held responsible for all our Saddams the world over?
Actually this has been a norm for long periods of our history. In effect the southern US and even parts of the Midwest were ruled by an armed terrorist militia, the Ku Klux Klan, for up to 90 years. The fact that we still rarely call the KKK an armed terrorist militia tells you that some powerful forces are trying to keep that route open, and "American", for the future.
Note that Home Depot apparently declined to sponsor this show from the very start, and is not getting any of the flak. We can't know if Home Depot acted out of fear or bigotry, whereas Lowe's retracting its ads after being intimidated and "informed" by hate groups tells us that it is afraid, and it tells stupid people that there must be something to the "Moslem threat" after all. So as usual in our system, the more hardcore and consistent right-winger gets a pass, and the waffling liberal gets creamed.
What should alarm us is the possibility that Lowe's flip-flopped for no other reason than the risk that its refusal would have led the FFA and its infinitude of allies could whip up a smear campaign against Lowe's about things completely unrelated to the show, just to make an example of it. Just like a protection racket that blows up your car to remind you of whom you really need protection from.
If we have reached the point where right-wing extremists can ruin anyone who disobey their commands about anything, what does it matter what the truth is or what ordinary Americans believe? We will all say what we have to say in order to hold onto our jobs.
They justified the McCarthy witchhunt on the grounds that "liberal" State Dept analysts failed to stop Mao from winning China because they were really Communist agents. They can manufacture excuses at will to justify the hatreds that already fester in our hearts.
My guess is that religious fanatics just have higher voter turnout - in Egypt, and in the United States of America.
Shame on you, JT, I'm talking about people all over the world who face starvation if they can't get fish. What does it say that you think everyone who eats fish is a wealthy sushi-sucking yuppie? Did you think I was only thinking about my own dinner plans? I'm also saying that it will be an indication of far greater problems; if it's harder for us to catch fish, it's also harder for many other creatures that live in the sea. You're so self-righteous that you can't even communicate with anyone on your own side anymore.
There was never any plan, except for us to start pushing each other out of the lifeboat.
In both cases, the effects of Prof. Cole's enemies being seen as "right" are barbaric and catastrophic. Where's the accountability for what happens if the oil companies really are killing the planet, or if the neocons use Egyptian election results to convince Americans that Arab democracy is the new Nazism? About the same place as the accountability for Wall Street wrecking the world economy.
Don't forget the mysterious effects of increased ocean acidity, which is the price we pay for the ocean doing such a good job of absorbing CO2 so far. When will it hit fishing yields?
Bashar al-Assad = Michael Corleone.
But in Arab countries, Sonny usually gets the throne.
And neither is the MEK, the way Prof. Cole describes it. Yet our media can describe anyone as anything that the military-industrial complex needs them to be described. In the '60s, we were all assured via many media, down to bad spy movies and "Iron Man" comics, that the Russians weren't so bad but the Chinese were ultra-crazy sneaky yellow bastards ready to start WWIII as soon as they got the secret formula.
You could make the argument that the US is also state-capitalist or corporatist, and the Right more so than the Left, yet the Right is more willing to call Obama a Communist than it is the People's Republic, does so daily and gets away with it. How do we trust any of our information about the outside world when our sources so obviously have an agenda to back the agenda of big business?
You mean, like the Marxist country our corporations have exploited to replace millions of American manufacturing jobs, thus delivering vast dividends to the 1%, and then relied on to purchase hundreds of billions in US Treasury bonds to prop up our dollar and prevent our collapse?
Our news organs will not admit that Communist China is the only thing keeping America, and its corrupt polarization of wealth, viable, but they sure as hell won't criticize it any harder than necessary to keep up our normal level of bigotry against Asian success and to blind us to the treason of our own owners. The MEK is very small fry compared to that.
Actually, Newt and Bolton might really be stupid enough to start a war with China... I better start stockpiling canned food.
As the bumper stickers said in Louisiana supporting Democrat Edwin Edwards over KKK leader David Duke, "Better the crook than the Nazi."
That's just Bolton's insane Armageddon project for Monday. Wait 'til you see the ones he has lined up the rest of the week.
Yes, and the giant TV in the cafeteria at Exxon here is usually tuned to Fox News. Big shock - the ownership class owns the buildings and controls the TV. Fox is the organ of the business class. Its lies please our owners, so they keep the TVs blaring the lies. Yet another way that inequality of wealth leads to increasing inequality of power.
The big problem is that Fox as a fundamental strategy blurs the distinction between its news shows and opinion shows. We have always had the option in America of believing the editorials and disregarding the front page, but our reluctance to do so shows that we had some inkling that wishful thinking can't overcome reality. 19th Century papers were blatantly partisan party organs (survivors still have "Democrat" and "Republican" in their names), yet in the 20th Century this faded - though the new "objective" journalism came with plenty of traps of its own, the mere fact that our grandfathers turned away from party organs shows that they sensed they needed to hear some unpleasant truths to survive.
Now, not at all.
And the Pakistani Army has never accepted the independence of Afghanistan. They think they must have a monopoly on selecting its government. Now if that was the attitude of the civilian Pakistani government then we could deal with this diplomatically, but having an out-of-control Army that occasionally decapitates a civilian head of government but hides behind its coattails is not honest or honorable.
Do the nukes make Pakistan a sovereign state, or a sovereign army holding a state hostage?
You claim Turkey had a relatively free media, but if you had the "wrong" ideas the judges (backed by the Army) would ban you from running for office. Is that a free country to you? Generally, the most effective oppressive organization in non-Communist societies is the Army. You imply that Erdogan is a fascist; that's a serious charge when we consider that Berluscogni actually had monopoly control of the private and public media and had fascist allies, yet he still had to give up power due to his massive corruption, unpopularity and failure. You and the Western corporate media seem to spend a hundred times more effort damning any Moslem who won't be our Uncle Tom than you do a real criminal in the heart of Europe who helped create an economic catastrophe.
Herman Cain accomplished several things.
Firstly, he showed that if a black man doubles down on the bigotry that conservatives have for anyone besides blacks, he can actually get them to pretend to a public opinion pollster that they would ever pull the lever for a black man.
Secondly, he advanced the rebranding of America's caste system from one that abhors black people, who just HAPPEN to be disproportionately poor, to one that abhors poor people, who just HAPPEN to be disproportionately black.
Which does not change a God damn thing in reality.
Thirdly, he got the usual GOP suspects to spend extra money attacking him.
I think we should take up a collection to encourage Cain to stay in the race. We are learning a lot about the spread of abysmal ignorance. Southern African Americans are learning a lot about how monstrous the values of one of their own can become when he gets a zillion bucks. If he can keep going long enough, eventually each of his opponents will blow it and say something racial. His vanity and paranoia will convince him that all the objective attacks on him are racially motivated, and like fellow rich black conservative Charles Barkley he will start accusing everyone of being racist. That leads to him spending money and bleeding the GOP all the way to the convention, where he will find what Ron Paul found in '08, that for all their talk few reactionaries will in fact pull the lever for someone who varies from Reagan in either his skin tone or his belief in American empire.
Then he will claim the primaries were rigged and run as an independent.
I would pay to see that.
The rude, racist religious extremists will all move back to Brooklyn where they came from. The US alone will have a Lobby demanding that we take in an unlimited # of refugees and instantly give them citizenship and subsidies, so we will get stuck with everyone that no one else wants. Lieberman's Russians will reunite with their cousins who have emigrated straight to Little Odessa. Better to have them all in Brooklyn, though, than on the front lines of a nuclear race war.
For one faction of the Right it's simply a matter of math; 2/3 to 3/4 of Latinos are historically likely to vote Democratic. For another faction it's the closely related sin of "not acting white enough"; they believe that inferior poor people inexorably use their votes to destroy the proper oligarchy of the Founding Fathers, so they just don't want any impoverished minority to vote.
50% of this year's kindergarteners are non-white, so things will come to a head in America long before a 3 degree Celsius increase in temperature.
But AA, the US does have something like what you described.
"The daily advertising fare in this country is so over-the-top, in-your-face, over done, and other ways exaggerated to the extreme, that it long ago lost touch with reality. The ads are crude, grotesque caricatures."
Fox News!
Don't worry, Israel, redneck reinforcements are on the way:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/10/16/152246/04
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/10/19/175932/60
These are about extremist evangelical Christian attempts to get legally recognized as part of the "Nation of Israel", aided by the Likud. They're already putting up facilities in the illegal settlements, and promising "military training". Since the Army-settler coalition has tyrannical power over Israeli law, a million Christian settlers willing to live in the settlements and join the Army would quickly supplant actual Jews as the power within Zionism.
And why shouldn't the Likud replace Jews with murderous Red-State gun nuts? Just like in America, it's about who will best serve the political-economic elite.
Nothing but a sea of Catch-22s for the government, is there? If they get into a shooting war, they can use that to forbid Israeli Jews from leaving the country, but that means no one in his right mind would emigrate there, so one is stuck with the losing hand of modern white birth rates. Also, the trapping of the population is right out of the USSR, and once begun it can never end.
The easiest solution would be to admit they have long had a genuine nuclear deterrent. We didn't all move out of the USA the moment the Soviets got the Bomb. However, you could say that's because there would have been no place to run from a US-USSR nuclear war. But the real problem is, Israel always justifies land-grabbing on the grounds of creating a buffer zone (what an archaic concept) against the Arab armies. Admitting you have 200 nukes makes the buffer zone pointless. Real estate has become a cornerstone of the Israeli economy, just like in other aging right-wing capitalist states, so the grabbing must continue regardless.
Well, the FBI has already targeted animal rights activists as a special threat, and I have trouble believing they'd be so high up the enemies list if they hadn't angered any number of corporations that do bad things to animals in the normal course of their businesses. So torturing animal rights activists will be a reward for some of the lobbyists out there. Logically climate activists face the same danger as a threat to the oil & coal industry. Which should one day prove, too late, that it's a myth that global-warming deniers are the persecuted truth-tellers while the global-warming alarmists are liars bankrolled by a wealthy conspiracy. You know which group will get tortured by authorities first, if ever.
Good point, but most Americans can't tell the difference between "tactical" and "strategic". "Pyrrhic" is really beyond them.
Well, how many free societies were there in Europe before World War I by these standards? Britain had just overridden the House of Lords' veto power and women were still fighting for the vote, Germany's constitutional monarchy looked good on paper but was fatally flawed by the power of its military, France had too many elections for its own good while the bureaucrats remained in place and ruled. Yet it was better than things had been a few generations earlier.
Unless one finds it unacceptable that Arab democracy should progress at a similar crawl, the question is whether the powerful forces that put more and more power into the hands of elected parliaments in an industrializing Europe is what we find at work in the Arab world today.
I don't think, Prof. Cole, that it is right to issue a blanket condemnation of nationalism because of the wars it has caused. The fact is, before we had nationalism, we had feudalism. Nationalism was an absolutely necessary step in moving forward from a world in which legal equality simply didn't exist at all in any political community to one where it was conferred locally by ethnicity, a substantial improvement over the injustices of nobility and caste. Joan of Arc, for instance, was a warrior who hated war, who fought because she saw the cause of suffering for the French people was the way that they were passed back and forth between sovereigns like cattle at an auction. By demanding that her sovereign fight for his subjects rather than treat them as property, she was laying the basis for the idea of a public interest, without which we could hardly have progressed to parliamentary democracy.
So we have gone from fighting wars for feudal portfolio-building to wars of faith to wars of mass ideology, and now we do have big problems because the nationalities that had the money and soldiers to gain sovereign rights have done so and evolved into weak, selfish bourgeoise market-states, while the weaker nationalities left behind to fight over the scraps are fighting ever more viciously using purchased weaponry. We are bumping up against the limits of the big-heartedness of human nature, the willingness to share our welfare with ever-wider defintions of fellow humanity, and we face the danger of splintering back into narrow tribalism. See, for instance, how socialist programs which once exploited our pride in nationalism (even LBJ's "Great Society") to obtain benefits for the poor are now being reversed because too many of the poor are immigrants.
However, until we possess the means of engendering that loyalty to universal humanity in the hearts of all people, the nation-state is the best tool we've got to maintain the very rudimentary concepts of international law and equality of citizenship that we've managed so far. It could all be lost in a heartbeat.
Soooo... when will Jews understand that Moslems are stuck with the belief that Moslems everywhere are supposed to go to the aid of Moslems who are driven out of their homes? I mean, that belief is no more medieval than Jewish beliefs in their entitlement, which is ultimately what both sides are using to demand that the other side retreat. We Christians are stuck with some crazy beliefs too, which if acted upon would endanger the world's survival. It would be nice to just be able to revise your religion when it is in conflict with higher concepts of human rights, rather than cynically turning your inalienable beliefs into bargaining chips.
Joe, we could have saved a lot more money than that by just saying one thing:
"Europe, you're on your own."
I'm fine with that because I trust EU foreign policy more than US foreign policy. Their very lack of unity is a deterrent to imperialism, but the fact that the EU - except for its ties to Washington via NATO - is about a million miles to the left of the US means they can counter us if our crazies get in the White House and try to start a war with our boogeyman-du-jour.
Now that doesn't mean I disagree with the Kosovo intervention, but if we had dismantled NATO when its reason for being had ceased to exist, the EU would have had to come up with a replacement, a unified, democratic nuclear superpower with its own sphere of influence, which would have included Kosovo. We admitted back then that Rwanda was outside of our zone of interests, and it's a tragedy what happened there, but at some point we have to draw an overt line around our interests and say, "We will not go into that area by ourselves." Kosovo should have been the EU's responsibility but we seem to not want it capable of acting independently of us.
Same for Japan. The dirty secret of Asia is that Asians still fear the Japanese, but we can't coddle these countries forever by pretending to be Japan's ally when in reality we're its jailer. One of these centuries, we're going to have to trust that once Japanese voters have their fate in their own hands, they won't immediately invade Manchuria.
I think that's a 50% cut right there. And all those years Bush was wasting our money on Iraq, Latin America began wrestling itself free of US hegemony, and it's working for those countries both economically and militarily (as in, we built up those militaries into a threat to wage war on their own citizens).
I am not a pacifist. I think the model for our military policy should be that formerly held by Britain; that in the absence of a genuine superpower threat, we simply keep our Navy strong enough to defeat any likely combination on the high seas (two carrier groups could do that if we'd stop poking around the Persian Gulf), and rely on the Marines for short incursions without the means to carry our a full occupation. The Strategic Air Command and most of the Regular Army perform no function but to tempt our leaders into foreign adventures. Really the only part of our Air Force that justifies its monstrous price tag is the part that protects ground forces, meaning the A-10, the slow plane the USAF didn't want. Our air wars have not broken any nation to our will.
Another thing; if the Democratic Party stood for anything other than special interests, it would have spent every day the last 10 years jumping up and down pointing at the economic boom that followed that small cut in military spending by Clinton. I don't think it's as simple as that; there was a lot of personal borrowing and Ponzi schemes going on in the '90s; but why can't we even discuss the evidence that military spending is the productive equivalent of setting fire to a giant pile of dough? Have we a primitive superstition that the right-wing factions that get most of the money from the war machine are God's favorites (Halliburton pigs, Lyndie England torture-necks, Christian crazies turned soldiers) and He will punish us for not terrorizing the world for Him?
What JTMcphee should have pointed out is that the defense budget should have been cut a hell of a lot more than 20% after the USSR was gone. We should have had a real public debate on exactly what our agenda was overseas. Are we in the business of pointing a carrier group at every 3rd world country that doesn't kiss our asses? Are we claiming that any event, anywhere in the world, that could cause a Wall Street crash (because we let it become so crash-prone) is therefore a "vital national interest"? Why do we have military installations in 130 countries?
We should be frankly terrified that the public was conned into believing some guys in caves in Afghanistan represented the same degree of threat as the USSR. Clearly it has nothing to do with real capabilities, since Russia still has a lot of nukes and no one cares anymore. It's about ideology, the mere idea that there are folks out there who are opposed to our global hegemony. But that doesn't explain our willingness to bankrupt ourselves to stifle everyone abroad who takes up arms against our agents. We must also fear, in some dark corner of our souls, that one day the world will recognize that we really are the undeserving imperial pigs that bin Laden said we were, that the incredible economic injustice in our world will one day be avenged by an infinite army of starving dark-skinned kids, who will pour across our borders like army ants.
So now what will replace al-Qaeda as our next budget-justifying bogeyman, animal rights activists? Occupy Wall Street?
Obama simply threatened to cut off the money. It was worth it to the military to ditch Mubarak to keep the money. But now you're talking about the military giving up its control of large swathes of the Egyptian economy. If that's bigger than the US aid, they'll say screw America, and then what?
It would be different if Egypt were one of the countries where US troops actually are present to back up the government against its own people, but we only do that where there's not a lot of people. We allied with Egypt because we assumed its military, like Pakistan's, would keep things quiet in a corner of the world for us. Hasn't quite worked out like we expected, but that's subcontractors for you...
Research Google on a Likud-commissioned political plan called "A Clean Break", written in the 1990s by signatories to Dick Cheney's PNAC who later worked for the Bush regime. It calls for the destruction of the Israeli welfare state, the elimination of any US leverage on Israeli actions, and the removal of Arab governments that would not cooperate. You have very accurately discerned what the plan was.
Tito, our country is already dying with oil at current prices. It's been dying since 1973, which just happens to be when US production peaked and we lost our position as the world's dominant producer. We literally needed to dominate world oil production to the extent that Saudi Arabia dominates it today just to keep our way of life from bankrupting us. Are you seriously claiming the US could increase production from under 5 million bbls a day all the way back to its original peak of 10 million, which would now be only a small part of current consumption and still wouldn't cause prices to go down? If anything, we should consider reducing production before we suffer another BP catastrophe, but you clearly have already written off the Gulf as a necessary sacrifice to feed the beast.
Worse, you're offering this in defense of a madman's scheme to destroy the Middle East. Do you not see that oil itself is the toy of tyrants and warmongerers because it concentrates power into too few hands, and thus inexorably corrupts them? Our invasion of Iraq took America to levels of evil on the international stage where it had never gone before, and it was because of our paranoia to defend what the war criminal Cheney called our non-negotiable way of life.
Wow, Robert, that's WONDERFUL!
We have lots of oil, so it's okay for us to exterminate the people of Iran! I knew you oil guys had only the best intentions for the world!
By the way, Gingrich just denounced child labor laws as the greatest source of economic inequality in America. Because things were so much more equal when small children were dying in sweatshop fires and mine cave-ins. So I guess when he claims the effects on us of his war on Iran would be negligble, we have to consider that he believes going back to the 19th century would also do negligble harm.
Gingrich is so stupid that he doesn't know Europe also buys oil and gas from Russia? Cut off Iran, and Putin can afford to start building aircraft carriers again. Oh wait, a renewed Russian superpower is just what the GOP wants, isn't it?
Also, Iran is trying to convert its cars to natural gas, which it already has more than it knows what to do with, and doesn't require refineries. I'm sure China would be willing to supply the cars in exchange for some more of that gas, since it's the only short-term replacement for China's disastrous coal economy.
It's a staggering compendium of ignorance. A massive all-sources energy program is meaningless because capitalist dogma requires it to all be run by the private sector. So no sources will be invested in unless they're already proven to be profitable, or are fantasies promoted by the existing energy oligarchs like shale "oil". The oil companies, honest to God, have been trying to make shale profitable for a whole century.
Then the competing oligarchs will fight each other over which of these sources should get government handouts, and they will fight in the arena that they have purchased, our Congress. So nothing will even be started for years.
Now, Canada could ramp up tar sands production with disastrous effects, but Gingrich is not running for prime minister of Canada, so how can he guarantee that the US will have any ability to make Canada speed up when it's so profitable for it to just sit back and let prices rise? Will we invade Alberta?
Also, Americans are completely confused about the difference between liquid fuels that could run our cars, and energy sources that produce electricity, like nuclear and coal. There's a lot less we can do about liquid sources in any reasonable time frame unless, like Iran, we were willing to mandate that cars run on natural gas. Unlikely from the GOP.
So Newt can start a war in January 2013, but he won't have a god-damned barrel of oil to offer to Europe before he's up for re-election in 2016. The America that could invent an atomic bomb in 3 years? It doesn't exist anymore, and it's largely capitalist actions that dismantled it.
The problem is not getting the military back in its barracks, the problem is getting it out of the many factories it owns. That's what it's fighting to hold onto, which requires a captive government. Egyptians may still have too much patriotism to accuse the officer corps of lusting after those profits just as much as its former commander did. But what other wealth is there to be had in Egypt?
I think you have to read the story of the Delian League in Thucydides' "The Pelopponesian War", and weep at the slowness of human evolution.
Leopards change their spots all the time in politics. You must believe that, since you think NATO is a villain now, yet it is the alliance that defeated the Soviet bloc and the direct descendant of the alliance that defeated Adolf Hitler. Or do you think that Hitler, Stalin and Gadafi were all good guys, and America was always the bad guy?
How do we square Eisenhower forcing the UK and France to withdraw from Suez with our subsequent behavior? Or Truman ordering the Dutch out of Indonesia while he backed the French in Vietnam? To the people who wield power, these aren't simple decisions to put on a superhero suit or a supervillain suit and spend the rest of their lives in it.
The corruption of power grows everywhere on all sides, but it is not a consistent thing.
You didn't have a revolution, you had the commander of a military dictatorship removed by his military because his unpopularity became a threat to their financial machine. It was done to prevent a real revolution, while preserving the essential injustice of the system. Now the ball is back in the people's court, and they are pushing for further concessions, for which they are willing to pay by risking their lives some more.
Look at the history of the French and Russian revolutions if you want to see how complicated these games can get before there are thousands being killed in the streets.
I'm tired of this peacenik crap.
I'm half-Okinawan. Two of my mother's oldest sisters died in the Battle of Okinawa. It probably happened because US Marines used flamethrowers to clear out caves in which thousands of Japanese soldiers and conscripted nurses were hiding. The Japanese told the nurses that all American GIs were rapists. So when the Marines ordered those in the caves to surrender, the nurses kept quiet, and all were killed. This happened many, many times.
Now do I hold this against the Marines? Hell no. Those same Japanese soldiers tried to seize my mom's teenaged brother for conscription. They also indoctrinated Okinawans into committing suicide, and some of the conscripts, now elderly men, are still speaking out that they were ordered to shoot civilians who would not commit suicide.
More importantly, I know what the Japanese did to ordinary Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipinos, and their particularly small-minded cruelty. And I can well believe that what the US was planning to do to Japan barring use of the a-bomb would therefore have resulted in millions of deaths.
This is so richly appropriate to bring up in the context of US economic sanctions over the invasion of Indochina actually provoking the bulletheads in Tokyo to okay the attack on Pearl Harbor. We don't have very good tools to punish foreign governments for their actions. They are terribly messy and mostly ineffective and often backfire. We must educate our children, as part of their responsibility as voters, in the effects of those tools on innocent civilians.
But I will go to my grave certain that the people of Asia are better off today than they would have been if the Japanese Army had conquered Asia. And the reason those old Okinawans are speaking out on what they were ordered to do is that Japanese Education Ministry fascists are still writing lies in their school textbooks about the war. 60 years of the no-war constitution have not stamped out this evil.
By the way, John Adams claimed that American opinion at the start of the Revolutionary War was split 1/3 for independence, 1/3 for British rule, and 1/3 for empire. We really, really needed French help. So does this mean that our independence is illegitimate? Or more disturbingly, does it mean that humans use force on each other all the time and then try to make the best they can of the results? There is blood on the hands of the Founding Fathers; so does that mean we should shut the whole thing down and swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, or does it mean that we have as much right to violence as that minority faction did to remake the Republic to meet our needs, instead of treating the Founders as sinless deities and their doctrines as infallible?
As I pointed out before, no one expresses any problems with how the mob dealt with Benito Mussolini or Ceaucescu. One was a fascist, and the other was a Communist who was an embarassment to the left, so it is politically correct to look the other way, isn't it?
And I personally would love it if Jefferson Davis had been torn limb from limb by a mob of liberated slaves, or Hitler chopped to pieces by concentration camp inmates. I can't believe that there's anyone who disagrees with me about this. Would Adil really, really have a problem with a pro-American dictator being butchered by a pissed-off mob? No wonder the western Left is viewed as pathetic.
I think to be fair you have to start the clock on Indonesia and Turkey in the same manner. The military actually took power in Indonesia in 1966, so it had a run about as long as most of the other dictatorships that have been falling more recently. We also don't know whether the Indonesian people are really on top of the Army, just as we didn't know in South Korea until after a few real elections.
But the big issue with Indonesia's army is that it committed three genocides and that had nothing to do with its eventual downfall. That is a disgusting comment on human nature. As long as the victims were the wrong ethnicity, the vast majority of Indonesians didn't give a damn; it was another matter once the dictator was stealing their tax dollars.
The funny thing is, supposedly a recent survey showed that 2/3rds of those in the "1 percent" also agree that growing inequality is a serious problem for our society. Yet we can see that every wing of modern conservatism, the imperialists, the theocrats, the neo-Confederates, the corporate whores and the libertarians, is spouting about an ideal past, ideal because inequality favors "our kind". And tens of millions love this crap.
So what is the nature of the relationship between the power elite and the extremists? Possibilities:
1. the rich mostly don't understand how their investments multiply; they just pay off a network of banksters, lobbyists and propagandists to make their chosen stocks grow as quickly as possible. Problem is, these henchmen know the way to do that is destroy pollution, financial and labor regulations, ship jobs to the foreign sweatshop du jour, and crank out the CO2. The rich, and the computers that actually run their mutual funds, blindly follow the hottest gainers to our mutual doom.
2. The extremists need the rich because they need the corporate and military hegemony of America to do many dirty things; they then skim off the rewards to the owners. Dick Cheney may be exhibit 1; he was small fry by the standards of the plutocracy, but as part of the war machine he exploited their fears of the confusing, complicated outside world and waved the flag in their faces. They never bothered to read the insane papers his PNAC was writing, they just wanted to know that their investments would be "protected". He used his DefSec resume to get the Halliburton gig, then militarized it so it would be the only company that could carry out privatized military services as he had proposed in the '90s, then got back in the White House in '00 and carried out that proposal to the benefit of Halliburton shareholders by starting a war. Did any of them read past the dividend report?
3. Corporations and private companies are not exactly in accordance. The corp execs view themselves as managers of both their firms and America itself; their holdings are so global, their exposure so public, that they want to avoid the really kooky far-right stuff and attendant bad PR. But the multi-generational private owners, while not owning the biggest US firms, have total control over them and don't give a damn about PR or foreign repercussions; compare Henry Ford's open Naziism vs. GM's sneaky deals with the 3rd Reich, or the viciousness of the family-owned "Little Steel" companies in butchering strikers in the late '30s after corporate Big Steel had already begun to talk, and now the Koch brothers, whose coal-centric energy operations are tiny compared to the oil giants but are willing to pour vast sums into subverting and fanaticizing American democracy just to keep the smokestacks belching.
Somehow, we of the 99% are going to have to educate ourselves about how to exploit these possible divisions among our owners as a force multiplier in our struggle for economic leverage.
The government is just bought property, sir. The beneficiaries are not passive or innocent, they've been plotting this for decades, lying to get their policies enacted, then raking in the rewards, then plowing them back into their favored candidates for more rewards. Harper's editor Lewis Lapham witnessed the process:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm
This is what happens to democracy when the rich are so incredibly rich that they can buy both political parties, the Pentagon, the mass media and the churches. Obviously you want to pretend that if we destroy the government the rich will not step into the power vacuum to conspire against and oppress us. I think that has been the end game all along and the new extremist policies of the 2010 election winners are the start of the final phase.
Meanwhile, we objectively get weaker and weaker, and the rich get stronger and stronger. Which side are you on, Bill?
Cointelpro, Bill. The FBI historically put infiltrators into both left wing and right wing groups who then tried to steer them towards violence, which obviously is good for the infiltrator's career and the Bureau's budget. This method was used to carry out the extermination of the Black Panthers.
Well, once we've started a regional conflagration and turned the whole world against us, it will be relatively easy for the new President to declare a state of emergency and rewrite the Constitution, financial system and budget to advance his personal agenda. That's far more important than actually paying for the war.
And once he's crushed all domestic resistance, there is always the option of using our nuclear arsenal to literally blackmail the world to cancel our debts and supply us with cheap oil. I mean, we rational people consider that unthinkable, but there seem to be millions of Americans who would gamble on that in a last-ditch attempt to preserve the comforts and privileges that make their lives worth living. Let's goad Herman Cain into running it up the flagpole, and then with great fear, let's count how many salute.