In the '60s science fiction writers were already speculating about an automation crisis. They understood that replacing labor with automated capital meant that society had to make a decision about the distribution of the resulting profits. Why did the citizenry and their elected leaders not confront this with so much advance warning? We left the decision entirely in the hands of those who oppress us now.
And are the 130 countries in which the United States maintains military installations a "Greater America"?
A military base that implies the US will defend a government against its own people is one of the most serious forms of intervention; that's why there have never been foreign military bases on US soil.
It's alarming that the mechanisms that made Sarkozy pay for his sins don't seem to function in America. There are growing ties between the GOP and old white supremacists from the '90s via the Tea Party and Christian Dominionists, yet there are no consequences. Apolitical and even mildly liberal citizens see a flag-waving theocrat and perceive a better American than themselves, thus censor themselves and restrain sensible criticism. Witness monstrous liar David Barton's recent interview by Jon Stewart, who I hear refused to challenge Barton's bullshit that all the Founding Fathers mandated a right-wing Christian republic.
The one great favor Hitler did Europe is that he got all its flag-waving bigots to join his crusade, and dragged them all into dishonor and discredit with him. It hasn't happened in America yet.
I fear the key to everything is Germany. While its internal social and worker policies are far more progressive than America, Britain or the failed Bushite "New Europe", its success has allowed it to pursue a strong Euro which punishes less productive Euro economies that provide the same benefits. If the Euro were controlled by democracy rather than German bankers, it would be different. But once the German people bought into the idea that their greedy bankers were somehow "protecting" them from the lazy, swarthy Mediterranean types, they rallied to Merkel's agenda to starve and crush southern Europe the way America crushed Latin America (see Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine").
This is a tragic victory of narrow tribalism over class solidarity. Once our capitalists Shock-Doctrined Latin America and shipped our jobs over there, they started to do the same to us. Do German workers really think once Italians work for starvation wages, their own jobs are safe?
Pabelmont, you're right. The veto is now more important than the aid, because the Likud has worked for years to reduce US leverage on its actions. Back in the late '90s, the Likud commissioned a study by US Jewish neocons, meaning of course members of Cheney's Project For A New American Century, to plan out a new Israeli power structure. The paper was called "Clean Break". It proposed that Israel do three things:
1. destroy socialistic practices and create a Reaganite right-wing economy
2. turn the revenues from this into a bulwark against Washington using its aid money to blackmail Jerusalem.
3. thus freed from any external constraint, overthrow the governments of all the Moslem countries that it disliked
Of course, once those neocons took over Washington in '00, they tried to carry out #3 themselves and thus made #2 irrelevant. But it pays off now. #1 may in fact have also been imposed on America by these neocons. For all practical purposes, the Likud and the GOP share the same insane Politburo.
I think the Tunisian politicians going on hunger strikes is something that would really get attention. Arabs are used to their leaders being distant, indifferent, and hypocrites gorging on the public trust. For elected Arab leaders to do this together would damage the Israeli-American Catch-22 meme that Palestinians can always move to Arab countries to get their basic rights, but if the other Arabs are too selfish to treat them as equals, then it proves all Arabs are subhuman animals, thus it's okay for Israelis to persecute Arabs. Catch-22.
The rise of capitalism began with Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation. Haven't you heard of the "Protestant work ethic"? The merchant classes of Germany decided that Luther gave them a better God than the Pope and threw in with him. Thus, usury ceased to be a sin, landowning was no longer favored over finance, and that bastard Calvin could preach that getting rich was a sign of God's favor.
There was no egalitarian social dream until the poor saw the bourgeoise get away with this heresy. The first I've heard of were Thomas Munster's movement, which Protestant princes exterminated with Luther's thumbs-up, and the Diggers and Levellers who arose in the army that Cromwell created so his bourgeoise Puritans could overthrow the feudalist King. The first broad-based egalitarian movements to get anywhere came AFTER agnostic writers like Voltaire and Tom Paine stirred up revolution in their countries. It is ridiculous to blame anything on secularism before 1776.
The thing that increasingly bugs me about America as I've gotten older is the sense that American society, unlike the ones that came before it, waa a construct manufactured by the creators of the original colonies (joint-stock corporations, plantation owners). Other societies must have evolved norms of fairness and participation, which reassert themselves in revolutionary times and regenerate human feelings. But our society was engineered only to extract wealth from a continent of unclaimed resources in the quickest possible time.
Thus the America definition of freedom seems to have hidden codicils, that restrict it to the pursuit of material wealth and power over others; the haves are granted the power to dictate to all which behaviors are liberties, and which are license, and any who feel oppressed under that setup are persecuted.
Until now we've never foreseen the end of this pursuit, and it seems we're so addicted to it as a substitute for true social relations that we will run the country off a cliff before we evolve.
But Mr. Morrone, those examples imply that free speech isn't the only weapon or a particular end in itself; it's a means of aggregating like-minded people to take disruptive action against their oppressors. Talking without planning how to win a revolution gets you slaughtered like in Indonesia in '66. We need free speech to spread the evidence that already exists on the Internet that the right-wing, as an organized movement, has been planned and led by people who do not believe in multiparty elections or the Bill of Rights or freedom of religion or, especially, the equality of humanity. Liberals are afraid to talk about this evidence because they are bullied by extremists who threaten (in their media circles) to use violence against "Un-Americans". Either we tell the bullies that we will shut down the whole economy even if they slaughter us, or we tell them that we will fight them.
Andrew Bacevich's book "The New American Militarism" attempted an explanation of why Republicans with no military service can call Democrats who are veterans (like John Kerry) traitors and peaceniks. He pointed to a 1980 Reagan campaign speech where the bastard semantically shifted the burden of patriotism from "serving the country" to "supporting the troops". Because Reagan had done nothing in his Army service but make propaganda movies, he magically tied himself to the new generation of draft-free Americans who wanted someone else to do the dirty work of war, while the rest of us "supported" them by blindly cheering for warmongerers who get them killed. Thus it becomes impossible to criticize the war as useless and wasteful without being accused of calling the troops those things.
I think something like this also applies to Stephen Kriz' comment above about Romney's silver spoon. Free enterprise is no longer about the genuine ability of men to rise via small business, government service, academia, etc. It is a ritual of blind support for the tiny corporate nobility that we expect to keep us in goodies even as our social mobility increasingly disappears. Producing actual goods, or inventing actually useful machines (as Carter helped do), or especially rising by any means except by serving the corporate idols, is now a subversion of a tribal hierarchy that says the only useful humans are billion-buck salesmen of financial scams, because all the lower-level white petty bourgeoise owe their own positions to the favorable judgment of those princelings. If a Bush or Romney is proven a fool, the little Bushes and Romneys who run our lives know we might start recognizing them as useless parasites.
If you can't criticize the barons, and you can't criticize the knights, you are a dumb powerless serf.
I think that progressive ire towards Carter has to do with his lack of enthusiasm for traditional Democratic programs. In '80 this led to Ted Kennedy's serious run against Carter, knowingly risking his own party's hold on the White House, on the grounds that Carter had betrayed the soul of the party as defined by FDR. People now think that Kennedy's run was very damaging for both Carter and the party.
However, Kennedy was right in the long run. Centrist Southern Dems have failed to educate the citizenry on WHY the Depression and New Deal happened and why we couldn't go back to '20s laissez faire - instead Clinton embraced it.
Now the actual reason progressives should be pissed at Carter is because his national security adviser boasted, years later, that he and Carter made the decision to intervene in Afghanistan BEFORE the Soviets even invaded; that in fact he warned Carter that the CIA aiding the Islamists might provoke that very invasion, but that he secretly hoped Carter would do it because he wanted the Soviets to get slaughtered and ruined in Afghanistan. That is a very serious black mark on both men. Millions have died in Afghanistan because of that, our subsequent escalation of aid in conjunction with Saudi fanatics and Pakistani tyrants is one of the prime causes of the current wars on Islam (we created the very enemy we now butcher), and millions of Russians died of hunger and deprivation after the collapse of the USSR ("shortened life expectancies" is the euphemism used to report this).
On the other hand, if I'd been President I would probably have okayed the aid AFTER the invasion, and all of these terrible things would have happened anyway. I don't think Carter did it out of bloody vindictiveness, but he created the worst of both worlds: dragging America to an imperial role in the Middle East, yet still cleverly damned by Reaganite propaganda for being too wimpy and pacifistic, thus meaning Reagan got a free pass to double down on the madness.
The point of stories like the Pat Tillman coverup is that the government has a pro-war bias, isn't it? If that's the bias, then why should I believe that a government that has been exaggerating threats and committing crimes would be looking for an excuse to do nothing at all about actual terrorists targeting the US?
The awful question that we should be asking is, how many of our fellow citizens are willing to deny global warming just because they think the sacrifices they'd be forced to make to counter it outweigh making as much money as they can by raping as much of the Earth as possible and riding out the effects?
There's a problem with Americans and their shallow customs of "niceness" hiding monstrous agendas. We act as if racism is merely a misunderstanding, not a way to get what practitioners view as tangible benefits, benefits worth dying and killing for. We act as if imperialism is a sincere effort to improve the lives of non-Americans, not a way to make blood money ripping off both our taxpayers and the conquered. You don't dare hypothesize that our leaders and owners might help terrorists carry out an attack to create a pretext for war, or intentionally create a bubble economy knowing they will have the power to blackmail the state for a bailout.
In other words, you can no longer use the word evil to describe any other American unless he is "un-American".
Greed and inequality, alas, are still regarded as sacred American values.
Actually, a democracy can be an empire. Besides the now-forgotten Athenian example, there were the French 3rd and 4th Republics, which may make an interesting comparison with what Engelhardt is talking about: paralyzed at home, with no way for leaders to distinguish themselves except by staking far too much on wars of colonial maintenance. Recall what happened when DeGaulle tried to pull the plug on Algeria; the colonists and military attempted a coup.
With the help of racism, a democracy might be the most dangerous, irresponsible empire of all. We should know better than this by now.
There was some discussion in non-mainstream media like The Asia Times a few years ago about Saudi Arabia's support of Islamist democratic parties like the AKP in Turkey and PML-N in Pakistan. The implication was that Saudi was quietly reducing its dependence on Washington by creating a sphere of influence of elected governments more palatable to the world than its own tyranny.
If so, then neither that nor the attempt to extend the model to the Arab Spring parties is going quite the way the monarchy wants. No two conservative Islamist parties are the same, but none of them obeys a foreign king in quite the servile manner that the Sauds have grown accustomed to from their guest workers. Conservative Egyptians and Pakistanis and Tunisians do not seem to give a damn about the purported Shiite threat. They may not be willing to sell the Palestinians down the river to keep the US and Israel happy either.
But if the Sauds want to keep pouring money into undermining the US-backed model of secular generalissimos, I'm all for it.
This is the consequence of the government trying to pack the settlements with the only available immigrants, Russians who don't give a damn about Judaism but do want wealth and power. This is Evigdor Lieberman's gang, so I wouldn't expect that he will define "compensation" in any reasonable fashion.
The Democrats were in it simply (and stupidly) to hold on to the Jewish vote. They didn't gain anything useful ideologically from Israeli extremism the way the Reaganites, neocons, and Christian nuts have. In fact, giving in to Israel has put the Dems in an impossible situation, since Israel is run by part of a global (but US-headquartered) right-wing movement that works to crush progressives in all countries. No matter how much any leader of the Left gives Israel, he gets screwed in return, and the bullies laugh and agree that they don't have to bargain fairly with liberal softies. That is the utility of Israel's warrior cult for the Right. Thus the intransigence of the Likud led to the intransigence of the Tea Party; they've proven the Right can take what it wishes over and over while the rest of us try to be "reasonable".
You already know the answer to your question. This has never been about what is good for "Israel". Israel's leadership, over generations of success, have turned their country into a kind of clearing house for dangerous right-wing ideas for the purpose of selling the legitimacy of those ideas to powerful allies in the West. In effect, they and the US neocons have put the "Holocaust Victim - Above All Criticism" brand on:
militarism / expansionism at the expense of non-whites
Friedmanite hypercapitalism
military-industrial complex domination of policy-making
the War on Terrorism as basis for government
Orwellian surveillance
torture
nuclear proliferation
Moslems as a unique evil who must be permanently defeated
Then they've sold these now-protected doctrines back to right-wing bastards in the US, UK and Europe, so that the buyers can call any critics on the Left "anti-semitic" (ironically many of the critics are Jewish). They can also claim that these aggressive doctrines win wars, please Jehovah, and cure the common cold.
The buyers: the GOP, the Christian Right, Tony Blair, all austerity pimps in Europe, and of course the war machine. When you see those charts showing the vast increase in inequality in the US over the last 30 years, a part of that wedge came from the use of Israeli legitimization of right-wing policies. Maybe not the biggest part, but then we're talking about the theft of trillions.
The payoff: the things Israel gets away with every day that drive us all crazy. For our engorged elites, it was a bargain.
What's really bizarre? These scared old white people, you have correctly pointed out, are nostalgic for their childhoods, when we had 91% income tax rates on the rich, actually spent money on repairing public infrastructure and schools, and occasionally enforced anti-trust laws, all the legacy of FDR. Yet they are convinced the way to get their childhood back is to revert to the 19th century, which they had no actual experiences of: monopolism, plutocracy, social Darwinism, union-busting, Jim Crow and even secessionism. At least the America of that time was isolationist and thus could afford its policies, but that's the one part of the 19th century the great majority of conservatives reject.
I've never been able to explain this disconnect, but it's too important to give up trying.
What's strikingly different with the new bunch is not just their number, but their lack of deference to the paradigm of Anglo-American corporate capitalism. When Japan had a chance in the early '90s to really hold us hostage for their investments and get us to make needed reforms, it lacked the confidence to push us around, because we had dominated it for so long. China may be cautious about us but it certainly has no deference towards us.
I am glad to see that Escobar agrees with my hypothesis from circa 2006 that China had done its homework and realized that it had no choice but to seize as much power as possible while Cheney was bogged down in Iraq. If Beijing leaders read any of Cheney's bombastic PNAC manifestos about keeping America on top by any means necessary, they had to know he would eventually turn to military and economic sabotage to reduce China back to 3rd-world servitude. They had to seize the moment, running their economy in overdrive and accepting the ugly long-term consequences, so as to force us to accept a fait accompli. I disagree with Escobar that they ever thought they had 2 decades that Obama is now cheating them out of. They're probably amazed we were so blind for so long.
Do you know any actual Tea Party Republicans? I swear to you, here in Texas the entire rank and file are much crazier than you can possibly believe, and the leadership has no choice but to live with the monster its indoctrination has created, by feeding it even crazier indoctrination.
The Afrikaners exploited blacks for a living. They could not make their economy work without them. Like American Southerners, they had to maintain a captive work force large enough to burn down the country in a rebellion.
Though some Israelis benefit from cheap Arab labor in various ways, the main goal of the system is to make life so unbearable that the Palestinians go away, to complete the desired myth that they had never existed. Their labor can always be replaced with Filipinos.
I think there's been an interesting shift in American racism from the former to the latter position; the hardcore bigots today claim they just want blacks to go away. Of course, the modern development of multinational exploitation and outsourcing means you no longer have to live in the same country as your ni**ers to profit from them.
The points made in the comments are very good. I would like to add that capturing an American drone may not even be the right way to get into the drone biz; we live in a golden age of dirt-cheap, Chinese-built RC planes and helicopters. All of these, like their fairly expensive Pentagon cousins, are practically 1930s technology from an airframe and propulsion standpoint. The advanced stuff is in the software and communications, but by that token if Iran were to copy a drone down to its software, that risks it being hijacked or deceived by American countersignals. Beter to develop a completely different approach to control and force our guys to figure it out.
I do think we will see everyone use drones in the future, because of the simple facts of global capitalism: in order to crush our own working wages while continuing to sell us goodies, our oligarchy has shipped almost all high-tech manufacturing overseas. The drone is as compatible with a Chinese circuit or toy factory as a bomber or a tank was with the great American car factories of the 1940s. For every mil-spec one we build, they will build a hundred crappy ones. Not just flying drones, but tiny wheeled drones, undersea drones, and crawling drones will make all our lives miserable in future wars. Just because a 12-year-old guerrilla's life is cheap doesn't mean he can't enthusiastically exploit these technologies.
But this blindingly obvious idea simply doesn't occur to us in rich countries who are driving this process, just as it never occurred to them when they were using Maxim guns to slaughter and enslave the 3rd World that one day their victims would have cheap Kalashnikovs to turn the tables on them. We're just too racist to believe that poor non-whites are as smart as we are and can master technology.
I'm pretty much down to flying wind turbine-generators as the only thing we could build that's power-dense enough to manufacture on the scale needed to shut all coal down. These could operate around the clock, at altitudes where the wind never stops. However, it might mean closing commercial airspace. The biggest problem is that we know so little about what is an optimal design, much less how do deal with the rate of breakdowns and losses. Thus the greedy short-sighted investors feel that if they bet on the wrong design they will get creamed. It could take a generation to do enough testing to nail this down, and that's too long.
But if a country were willing to treat it like World War II, then it would be a manageable technical problem, like having to suddenly build 50,000 warplanes in car factories. We didn't spend 1942-45 dithering about optimal or efficient investments; we weren't competing against the enemy in the stock market, but in the raw numbers of destruction.
Only America no longer has the vast array of machine shops and factories that can be forced by government fiat into creating all the needed parts of a standardized design. The only country that now describes is China. Ironically, that's the birthplace of the kite.
I don't think the Republican Party actually likes the post-1945 Anglo-American civilization. They now routinely denounce FDR as a communist, and hint that the wrong side won the civil rights struggle. What they seem to imply is that if the murderous Great Depression was allowed to cull the herd of dissenters, subsequent years would have seen an even greater pig-fest of gross overconsumption under John Galt-like ubermensch CEOs while the blacks were assimilated by the sheer infallibility of white ways.
Now is this the real agenda, or do the people behind the Right actually know that a collapse is coming, and they're intentionally preparing quite the opposite? A return to 19th century economics complete with prison slave labor (check), unregulated resource rape (check), and the elimination of the evil, cosmopolitan cities and the dispersal of the population among vicious little burgs ruled by "non-state" tyrants like churches, corporate owners, and creepy fatcat star chambers (mostly there).
In other words, the plan is 1855 Mississippi with cell phones.
A remarkably concise summary of how bad our options are. I would recommend that it run on billboards and scoreboards in every city, as a crawl on every "news" station, and as the screen saver on every computer. Except that we would go crazy from sheer terror and either go on rampages or seal ourselves inside our homes. I guess all those science fiction movies where the government is covering up its knowledge of aliens to prevent a mass panic are being proven in reality.
Sure, but what does it mean when conservatives have zero idea of how markets work either? They're the ones saying that if we scrap all pollution and environmental protections we will produce enough oil to lower prices, but oil is sold in a world market with rapidly growing demand. We even hear them talking about somehow outlawing oil exports as if that wouldn't cause a nightmare of retaliation and the death of the free market they are willing to destroy the middle class to defend.
If people were actually taught how markets work and can be rigged or oligopolistic, they'd be a lot more radical than they currently are, which implies they are kept ignorant on purpose. A hundred years ago, workers and farmers discussed the effects of markets on them as a matter of life and death.
Note that those ultra-low natural gas costs will now cause many of the drillers to go broke, until production is slashed and the big operators get their price back. Yet the country is so besotted with the idea that its energy problems have been solved that it will get whiplashed - they've already spent all the money they expect to get back in future savings!
That's the problem with speculators - they exaggerate price moves in a country where people are barely making ends meet and can't withstand instability.
The alternative is to reverse what we have been doing to get into this mess:
Redistributing wealth to the 1% while cutting wages on half the nation, which then creates an irrational terror among them of higher oil prices since they fear they can't cut back on anything else enough to offset them. The rich are able to get away with their crimes by keeping the supply of dirty energy, bad debt, and sprawl going so we can keep cutting our short-term cost of living.
Put the rich back to where they were in the '60s, and tax them to pay for the development of cleaner energy and support better wages for everyone else so we can afford to pay a few % more for our energy sources.
Note that this is what Germany has done, since it never let its wealth get so polarized in the first place, and now its clean energy subsidy is successfully reduced every year. Last year Germany got its unemployment rate down to the lowest level in 20 years. Yes, Germany still pollutes because it is full of factories staffed by the best, highest paid workers in the world. What's our excuse? That we've been hammered so hard by our owners that we will gladly become a 3rd world country exporting raw materials to survive.
Wow, the nuke worshippers are out in force. Fukushima didn't make you folks bat an eyelash, did it? If Japanese engineers are incompetent at nuclear, whom should we trust?
Saying that it's worth it that a major country has to wall off one of its counties every few decades as a death zone is as crazy as Madeline Albright saying 400,000 dead from our sanctions on Iraq was "worth it".
It's not worth it, guys. It's the beginning of the barbaric process of kicking people off the lifeboat that won't stop with energy issues, each of the rest of us hoping we won't be the next one to be sacrificed. Whether sacrificing New Orleans or veterans or the Greeks or Fukushima to higher priorities, it's like the Roman legions withdrawing and leaving the Dark Ages in their wake.
So, Ben David, this means that every single peace activist until the return of the Messiah can justifiably be beaten like a dog? That is not how a civil state operates, that is how a military dictatorship operates. Which is what occupation means, for as long as it lasts.
It has seemed to me that the worst thing that could happen to the Taliban would be actually having to govern Afghanistan. They were doing a terrible job of it in 2001. So it makes sense to keep the war going as a scapegoat for their cruelty and incompetence, rather than being judged by peacetime standards.
However, we should also always consider the interests of the Pakistani Army in what the Taliban does, especially when we hear that the attacks are "sophisticated". What does the Pakistani Army gain by a perpetual war on its border?
The problem, JT, is that we may have entered the time of the decline of both the Enlightenment and the nation-state. It's easy for peaceniks to ridicule the nation-state, but before that the world essentially was ruled by (a) warrior gangs and (b) hierarchies of landlords reaching all the way to kings. The Enlightenment brought enough rationality to Europeans that they saw nationalism was the only path to ensure that rulers at least had some requirement of representing the ruled. Now global corporate plutocracy and its playing of pro-greed ethnic/religious factions against the rest of mankind has people angry and ready to look into mobs and street gangs as a more genuine repository for their loyalty than constitutional republics.
In other words, things will get so bad in the future that the murderous militias will actually be the democratic alternative to a bought-out world order.
Personally, to me the solution is the hard work of creating left-wing militias to fight the right-wing militias that have the unfair advantage of capitalist bankrolling. For instance, the Tea Party should have to see that in order to create its pre-1865 Eden, it would have to fight another all-out civil war with the people who beat them the last time. It might be sufficient deterrence against their side, and sufficient political awakening for our side, to restore the normal, manageable conflicts of a healthy democracy. If not, at least we won't get wiped out by a right-wing first strike a la Weimar, Indonesia or Spain.
Apparently the Left now hates Qatar and Al-Jazeera just as much as the Right does. My congratulations to the country for pissing off all the idiots, and for having been right about a higher % of things than all of America's Gaddafi-lovers and America's neocons have. Not that this counts for a damn with ideologues.
What if the advertisers have a right-wing bias, because they're, after all, capitalists? Seems that OWS was not covered the way the Tea Party was. And if America's news is different than everyone else's, certainly it has become markedly far to the right of most of the industrialized world.
It doesn't just distract the world, it distracts Israeli voters from asking the taboo question about the colonization: does it really benefit ordinary Israelis in the long run, or is it a scam to enrich elite groups who have become the capitalist class of a country which formerly did not have one?
This question could well be asked of all programs of territorial expansion in history.
The dark question being kept from us Americans is how responsible Bush administration officials were for cultivating anti-Shiite paranoia among the Sunni monarchs circa 2006. In stories I was seeing at that time, many of the sovereigns were trying to maintain normal relations and trade with Iran, while US neocons in and out of government cranked out relentless conspiracy theories about Iran to cover their own Occupation's failure in Iraq. It was even claimed that the Administration intervened directly to sabotage negotiations between the Saudi and Iranian governments to settle the existing disputes between them.
The remarkable thing about all this, plus the Big Oil-financed ad campaign pimping GOP drill-baby-drill, is that it only works if conservatives are completely ignorant about how markets work. Consider the implications the next time you're tempted to debate a conservative based on his support for free enterprise.
It's never been about free markets; it's never been about less government; it's always been about nostalgia for a Golden Age of tribal monopoly of power. Any conservative will gladly accept state-rigged markets (Reagan's deal with the Saudi king to crush oil prices in '86 to bankrupt the USSR), or vast and tyrannical power in the hands of armed militias like the KKK and Mississippi Citizens' Council or local church-run censorship boards. What matters is not principle but outcomes, exactly what they accuse the Left of doing. Except they want radically and eternally unequal outcomes. The debate must clear away all ruses like "separate but equal" and "equality of opportunity" and focus on conservative movement ties leading to the true authorities of the far right, monsters like R. J. Rushdoony and the sovereign citizens and neo-Confederate movement who openly proclaim the goal of a wildly unequal society. Annoy them, provoke them, expose them in front of cameras. Get them to admit that they will never tolerate an America of successful minorities with values comparable to middle-class people in the rest of the First World.
These are the people Romney must make happy, however much it pains him. Make him pay for that, relentlessly, or those people will eventually enslave our country while we were standing around minding our own business. They literally have nothing better to do with their lives.
As some here have feared, the Arab citizens of Israel are the next big target, both of restrictions on freedom of speech and the right to their lands. Even if the Occupied Territories are excluded, the Jewish vote is so split between multiple parties that there will one day be a danger the Arab citizens will be able to form a governing coalition with disgrunted Jews, like the ones in last year's housing marches. The apartheid state happens with a 1-state solution or a 2-state solution.
It is very important to watch ordinary Americans be indoctrinated into this idea. Is it a coincidence that the GOP's and Christian Right's reversal of their former disdain for Israel happened around 1970, when right-wing Americans became obsessed with being outnumbered and outbattled by vengeful minorities? Ever since, our two countries seem to have been coming under the rule of a single conservative, capitalist, nationalist movement.
And both have a vested interest in eliminating the right of minorities to vote before they become a majority. Will we see Hebrew literacy tests at voting booths there and high poll taxes at voting booths here? Or will it just be mobs and armed intimidation?
No, just the stink from all the corpses of 20 years of US policy, from 400,000 dead due to Bush-Clinton sanctions (which Albright admitted when she said it was worth it) to perhaps 1 million excess deaths on top of the already high sanctions-era death rate since the invasion.
Add that to close to a million killed by our allies in Indonesia, 400,000 killed by our allies in Guatemala, 2 million killed by our foolish attempt to manufacture a fake country in Vietnam. A couple more major interventions and the historians of the future will have to struggle to explain to their students why the ten million killed with our support are different than the tens of millions killed by Hitler or Stalin. Then again, Britain seems to have gotten away with a lot of murder for a failed empire. I guess you just gotta have the right connections.
He ain't religious. He was just born Mormon. We should focus our fears on the sincere holy warmongerers, both the ones who run for office and the millions who vote for them.
Joe, China is still a poor country. Those peasants in the sticks have very low incomes. Israel is the 51st State, run by a Friedmanite extremist from Brooklyn. Stop being cute so we can get to the issue of why only the most extreme right-wingers oppose health care as a right regardless of national wealth.
Joe, all the other countries shown in gray on the map (except Turkey, which Ctanyol below says should be in orange) are poor. So for those people it's not a matter of *should* the government do something, the resources simply don't exist now. Only in America is it widespread social dogma that providing medical care as a universal human right is inherently evil and impossible.
They don't obsess over "death panels" anywhere else.
It's spreading. Cameron in Britain and Harper in Canada are laying the groundwork to destroy national health care via the classic Shock Doctrine/Scott Walker model: give out giant tax cuts to the rich, then declare a fiscal crisis that can only be fixed by privatizing health care. Cameron is already a beneficiary of American private health care corporations, and I expect Harper is too.
Health care is definitely one of America's peculiar institutions. To study those institutions is to get closer to the darkness at the heart of the American concept of liberty.
There are countries which ensure universal health care via private doctors and nonprofit private insurance companies. There are countries which ensure universal health care via private doctors and single payer. There are so many models for universal health care that one could hardly characterize them all as socialism by any textbook definition, unless you also apply it to public education, police protection, firemen and highways.
If America doesn't provide it, then America is stating its position on the class system and what a poor person is worth. We've had civil wars and civil strife over the need of "Good" Americans to have a higher quality of citizenship than "inferior" Americans, or a higher quality of food safety, or a higher quality of political representation.
In each of those cases, and I challenge the inevitable critics to Juan's position on this thread to prove otherwise, none of those were about an objective improvement that results from our pro-wealth, inegalitarian practice; we did better after the Left finally won on those issues.
In each case, it was presented as a life & death matter of national character - if you give "those" people equality with the real, valuable, entrepreneurial Americans, you destroy the latter's incentive to exercise their infallible superiority to keep America great.
In the current example, capitalist apologists scream about every anecdote about a "good" Canadian or Briton having to wait six months for an appendectomy due to socialism while ignoring the many examples (in the movie "Sicko", etc.) of affluent Americans who found that their private insurance cheated them out of coverage they thought they had. The apologists don't care that private insurance firms are obligated by stockholders to screw patients, what matters is that on paper those with money (or pink-collar corporate lackey jobs that they thus can't afford to leave) have a privilege and (false) sense of security that the inferiors don't.
In other words, we must treat the poor as dirt to make ourselves feel more special.
But that core argument must be cloaked, or the poor might finally light their torches and take to the streets demanding an answer to the question, "What will you do to us next to make yourselves feel more special?"
Lisa, have you ever stopped to think that in the eyes of African-Americans, they're the normal Americans of twenty generations provenance and we're the crazy aggressors?
Freedom to only act white means there's no freedom for anyone. And I guess even then a black man can only dress or talk white but not demand a white man's wages or a white man's elected office or a white man's right to armed rebellion. Are there any black people who please you, now that the Pullman porters and shoeshine boys are gone?
Both the numbers showing that foreign lands have much lower total murder rates than the US, and numbers showing that the US gun-lover zones have lower murder rates than the more heavily regulated cities are true.
The problem is, once you are raised in violence-loving American culture, guns are the only thing you respect. People in cities are ALWAYS more violent than people in suburbs and property-owning rural populations. Obviously in America we've had a permanent low-level race war going on for 400 years, and cities are where the combatants rub shoulders and paranoia against each other, from Irish vs Anglo to black vs Hispanic. In the boondocks, most people are white, are buffered by low population density, and don't often feel threatened by people different than themselves. However, before 1940 rural and small-town whites and their guns were quite busy.
It's one of those things about America that it's too late to fix unless a vast shock discredits the underlying culture. Note that 19th century London was so violent that all gentlemen went out armed. I suspect somewhere between the Bolshevik Revolution and two world wars, the rich all over Europe learned that they could not keep outgunning the poor without cultural and economic compromise. America has not yet had that shock.
But Klem, we weren't hunter-gatherers in, say, the 1960s, when we still used a lot less energy per person than we do now, despite our vast technological improvements since then. Our wages haven't gone up much either. Furthermore, other comparably wealthy countries use far less energy per person today.
So it's a false choice between crowning Dick Cheney, Lee Raymond and the other robber barons as our absolute monarchs, and going back to paleolithic times.
Can you imagine that 100 years ago the US government, under a Republican president, actually had the balls to break up Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire? To modern Americans that seems like blasphemy.
"Consumers in the US are going to have to sue Big Oil and Gas if we are to get any serious change."
I think the plan by Big Oil all along has been to force US consumers to take their side or face bankruptcy.
The tobacco companies knew all along. The asbestos companies knew all along. The energy companies have an interest in knowing what's coming and vast resources to find out.
Meanwhile, the conservative movement with which energy companies have been aligned has pushed for lower wages, financial deregulation, and thus the creation of a synthetic economy with abnormal increases in energy consumption and debt. Thus citizen/consumers are programmed with an innate need for continued consumption growth, always hoping that giving in to big business will bring that big wage turnaround we've been waiting for since 1980 so that we can catch up on what we think we deserve.
This is why energy companies knew that any awareness of a connection between said lifestyle and environmental degradation would create a visceral denial among the citizenry. To admit anything would be to open not just oil companies, but the entire USA, to liability for environmental catastrophes overseas, which would ruin us like reparations ruined Weimar. The longer our masters can hold out, the bigger the reparations must be.
At some point, therefore, we will prefer to go to war against the entire rest of the world rather than pay up. Note that we spend as much on our military as the entire rest of the world, and we have more nukes than they.
If growth-hungry US creditor China takes our side, which it might if greedy and short-sighted enough, then it becomes an armed standoff until civilization collapses.
American capital offense: walking while too black.
Little known American history - when Reagan came to power, his officials investigated the idea of creating a backup national militia. It seems they were so sure they might have to tie up the National Guard crushing black rebellion in the big cities (what with their racist policies), that they wanted a volunteer militia able to fill in. Meaning, to point guns at minorities in all the other towns. So they sent people to cruise gun shows to poll the attendees about their interest in joining a hypothetical militia.
The Administration gave up on the project, but it did not die. Its spaces at the gun shows were replaced by real, private militia recruiters. The paranoia behind it seeped into all the media, giving us the neighborhood watch program and plenty of consumer $ for gun magazines spouting extremist agendas.
Where is the convergence between militias and neighborhood watch groups? Or perhaps I should ask, what will happen when there are black neighborhood watches bumping up against turf lines with white neighborhood watches?
I find the paradox of the counterfeit American standard of living to be impossible to escape. It works like this:
Based on past achievements, ordinary Americans would have expected their wages to keep increaasing several % per year, and instead they've been flat for the last 30 years. So they live in a rage of denied expectations, which they offset by wiping out their savings and going into debt that they will never make enough money to pay off.
However, based on what Americans actually do for a living now, they are grossly overpaid! I mean, what would a person get for doing that exact same thing in Brazil or South Africa, much less Pakistan? We don't make anything real. We pimp goods made overseas for crazy markups, which are delivered straight to the CEOs and shareholders of the outsourced American brands. We sell medical insurance that is full of fraudulent promises. Worst of all, we sell each other fake investments. Some of these jobs are so harmful that they actually have negative value.
So a vast chasm has opened up between what Americans think they are worth, and what the rest of humanity thinks they are worth. And when Americans hear talk about famine overseas, or global warming, or Peak Oil, or the devastation that our financial deregulation wreaked on the world, they fear at some level that the world is finally coming to exact brutal redistributive justice. Which is why we increasingly sound like plantation owners in the year 1859, confronting the encroaching world with hostile glare and crazy talk.
Paul is the most de-regulatory of anybody. He wants to legalize everything millionaires want to do to become billionaires; pollute, endanger, usurize. Abortion, not so much.
When a country has a class system as steep as ours, just because a guy's friends are the rich instead of the extremely rich doesn't mean those rich aren't a bunch of murderous bastards too. Sometimes, they're the worst of all.
Breivik definitely was in a loose network of internet communicants. Friends of friends of friends. He was confident that others would follow in his footsteps; that was the key to his whole strategy for victory.
It's been too long since the end of WW2 for people in the powerful states of the world to remember the conditions that motivated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Which is not that it's wrong to commit such acts, but that they escalate into wars that perpetrators will eventually regret.
The lessons of the Depression, we've noticed, have also worn off in our generation.
I've heard that in 2000 Gore actually managed a dead heat with Bush with the Cuban vote. I know that the younger generations are going more Democratic, but that's true of every ethnic group in America. The problem is getting them to the polls.
Civil institutions are pointless when the government itself is viewed as illegitimate in many provinces. For the government to fight that is civil war, and in a civil war the army goes everywhere, as ours did in 1861-65.
If the only thing Afghans could agree on was a military dictator, we'd already have that and conditions there would at least not be worse than, say, Uzbekistan. At least in Uzbekistan there is a single side you can pledge grudging loyalty to and survive. In Afghanistan no one can offer that.
I think you are corrrect. Everything will revert back to the status quo of September 10, 2001, with the Northern Alliance reconstituted and bankrolled by Russia, Iran, India and some anti-Islamist border states, waging a permanent war against the Taliban and its credit line from the Pakistan Army. That Army is the problem; it will not abandon its entitlement to maintain Afghanistan as a client state. The other countries cannot tolerate a Taliban state on their border. So it goes.
Thing is, Santorum seems to be a Catholic without Catholic supporters. A major pollster being interviewed before Super Tuesday said that he didn't seem to do any better with Catholics, and that he was beginning to wonder if voters actually even knew he was Catholic, and intended to put in a new polling question to find out.
According to talk2action.org, Santorum is an Evangelical Catholic. What does this mean? According to Wikipedia:
"In Roman Catholicism, the term Evangelical Catholic refers to Catholics in complete communion with the Catholic Church who exhibit, according to Alister McGrath, the four characteristics of evangelicalism. The first is a strong theological and devotional emphasis on the Bible. Secondly, Evangelical Catholics stress the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the cause of salvation for all mankind. A personal need for interior conversion is the third defining mark, and, consequently, the fourth is a deep commitment to evangelization."
As a pissed-off former Baptist, I tend to see this definition as Catholics who want to be as bullying and aggressive as their Baptist neighbors, who know how to beat you over the head with that Book and leave no marks. If the Pope agrees with Santorum's aggression, then he's in tune with the Bible. If the Pope overrules the Bible, ignore him.
I think Biden should be replaced on the ticket with retiring senator James Webb. Webb was a cold warrior, but his articles in recent years show an economic populism that one doesn't expect of a former military officer. More importantly, I felt in 2008 that Webb needed a special role in being, basically, Obama's ambassador to America's rednecks. I figured there would be ill feelings among that group about a black president but it's been worse than I imagined. The Mid-South now seems more pro-Confederate and pro-secession than the Deep South. Webb understood the culture and issues there, and he had become more of an economic progressive at a time when folks in the south desperately need to learn how they're being screwed by neo-Victorian laissez faire.
No, he's not a progressive on gender and sexual preference issues, but he would have followed orders on DADT.
A recent Wired article had a Republican congressman admitting the real reason subsidizing solar technology in the US was hopeless was that China had already commoditized the market for low-tech cells. As in so many things, it's over, China has won. Now we sit back and see how the Chinese use this market power.
It may dismay us to see the 3rd World jump ahead of us in renewable energy, but it is more logical for solar cells to be sent to the places that have the most sunlight or burn fossil fuels in the most inefficient way. Since wind turbines are harder for China to export here, and require more jobs to build and operate here, we can still do useful things.
The big question is, how do we free ourselves of our panic every time the price of gasoline reaches a new high? No matter how much oil we produce, it must be sold into a world market pumped up by Chinese demand. I can't believe that so few Americans can understand this.
Brazil rejected neoliberal ideology when it elected Lula. Argentina defaulted rather than endure the IMF/World Bank tyranny, and has since recovered. Chile has kids dying in the street protesting their GOP-dream privatized education system and we hardly have to talk about what's wrong with Mexico.
Your guys lost. It happened while we were too entagled in Iraq to interfere effectively, though that coup we backed in Venezuela was a good try. Stop pretending that what's good for the lightest-skinned oligarchs who shop in Miami and send their kids to Vassar has any resemblance to the vast impoverishment visited on ordinary Latin Americans under the Friedmanite shock doctrine.
Yet everything Iran does to get nuclear energy is trumpeted as proof of a weapons program.
America sure didn't act that way when it covered up South Africa's nuclear program and Pakistan's nuclear program. Are those the sort of democracies you're comfortable with? As long as they were anti-Soviet.
I think you are right about the use of brain damage as the government covering its ass. This will just make things worse for veterans, just as "veterans gone berzerk" stories did after Vietnam. It won't win any sympathy among the Afghans, who in effect have all performed combat tours for as long as they've been living since 1979.
Have you considered the possibility that large portions of the American population hate the have-nots among them so much that they would spend on weapons just so it wouldn't be available for social spending? A Reagan cabinet official confessed as much in his autobiography.
Joe, I think you are going to have to address Amir below and say something that matters to ordinary Iranians and their nationalistic pride. It's like the insult the Japanese people felt in the '20s from the Washington Naval Treaty and US immigration quotas, which our racist leaders never considered would have consequences. Tyrants make their living off of this anger.
Either our real agenda is regime change, or it's about arms control. Since for most of the US-Israeli actors it's clearly about regime change, they will block a compromise based on alternative energy with every lie they can come up with. Democrat Zionists who normally support alt-energy like Friedman will sound very different when it's alt-energy that might save an Islamic regime.
But this proposal is valuable precisely because it will function as a wedge issue between imperialists and deluded liberals in the US. Since it means Iran will have more oil to export and thus make it cheaper, we can hoist the conservatives on their own greed-driven "drill baby drill" arguments.
RW, you are missing the larger point of the Hispanic spread throughout the Midwest, Deep South and eventually everywhere, which is built into the structure of capitalism:
1. Right-wing states cater to corporate demands.
2. Corporations and executives want employees to get subhuman wages.
3. The Red states look the other way as employers bring in thousands of legal and illegal Hispanics for that purpose.
4. When these new residents show up on the Census, it gives the Red states more representation even though it's still the same old whites picking racist representatives.
5. When the number of Hispanic babies being born in the Red states (meaning citizens) becomes so large that whites are clearly going to lose control of the state some day, suddenly the whites pass harsh anti-immigrant laws and talk about taking the babies' citizenship away.
6. Then when the Red states try to enforce these laws, like the embarassing detainment of German car execs in Alabama, the states find that their use of cheap brown labor to attract union-busting European and Japanese capital puts them in an impossible situation.
Tactically, there's no difference in attracting Mexican immigrants to inflate Red State numbers in Congress than there was in slaveowners desperately building up the number of slaves they had to preserve Southern dominance in the pre-Civil War Congress; either way the increased numbers are of non-voting people who are the sworn enemy of those who "represent" them. How tenable does this sound in the long run? South Africa, anyone? Israel?
In all those cases, the longer the deformity between democracy and demographics grows, the more impossible it is for the whites to compromise. 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants tend to be a lot more liberal than 1st generation. They must become a majority in Red states to preserve the race to the bottom of wages, but if they actually vote, those aren't Red states anymore.
It's all about turnout. RW may not be aware of the use of Voter ID (overtly) and voter intimidation by flyers and poll watchers (covertly) to drive away Hispanic citizens. The states with the most Hispanics have the whites who most want to intimidate them, ergo Arizona. Texas Hispanics have been very conservative (watch John Sayles' movie "Lone Star", which pokes fun at Rio Grande Valley 2nd-generation immigrants who despise 1st-generation illegals). But when I look on the streets of Houston, I see Latino kids who entirely rely on African-American pop culture as their guide into America. Combined with the above-mentioned Spanish-language tv, they inhabit a very different cultural space than the GOP wishes to enforce.
Ultimately, the only solution for the threat of non-whites that serves both the corporate wing and "cultural" purity wing of the GOP is mass disenfranchisement, followed by not deportation but permanent serfdom in privatized labor prisons, etc. That would be as great a disaster for free labor in America as slavery was, so it will be interesting to see how ALEC's attempts to covertly enact the legal foundations for this atrocity will develop.
Yeah, yeah, Mexican Americans don't find Puerto Rican Jennifer Lopez sexy at all. Too racially different. If Rush Limbaugh called her a slut Californian and Texan Hispanics wouldn't come to her defense at all. Sure.
If you haven't noticed, they've all got the same cable TV stations now. They watch shows from South America. They hear the same pop songs. Some of them even know that the people of South America kicked out almost every US-backed neoliberal regime in a wave of radical discontent against the rich and now enjoy an economic renaissance.
Note that one of the countries with heavy surveillance, Egypt, and two of the countries shown as "under surveillance", Libya and Yemen, have since had their governments overthrown.
This reminds me of a Daffy Duck cartoon from World War 2 where the Nazis capture US courier Daffy, and Hitler and his cronies show up to examine the message. The message says, "Hitler is a stinker!" Goering exclaims, "That's no secret! Everybody knows that!" So he has to shoot himself.
I think those countries' internet Orwell departments must have made the same mistake.
The question is, what roles do the expanding settlements and the military play in Israel's economic success? This is a recurring question - how much impact does military spending have on any economy? Or for historical analogies, would America's extreme pro-capitalist, anti-government views have been established if its people had not had an endless supply of Indian land to steal to act as a pressure valve against the manifest injustices of its capitalist economy?
If the settlements are Israel's frontier, and its real estate bubble, then having to fix its borders to normalize relations with the Arab world might have a traumatic impact like the closing of the American frontier, after which American farmers and workers had no choice but to stay and fight for better pay. With no new illegal subdivisions, the already-tight housing market in the rest of Israel might detonate in a more serious social disruption.
Israel and the US have used each other's history as an excuse for their own crimes, and these are crimes of expansionism. These might be countries that cannot function without the entitlement of expansion, and all the technology in the world cannot replace that.
We're too stupid to do #1. We've had 9 years to realize that Iran is the only country positioned to rebuild the economy of the Shia majority of Iraq, and bail out our asses. We refuse to accept the loss of our global hegemony to regional hegemons, facts or no facts.
So, I'm for #2.
As for #3, I long suspected Ahmadinejad, a veteran representing a political faction based on the Revolutionary Guard, wanted to militarize the situation so as to enhance his limited power relative to the militarily inexperienced clerics. In effect, declare martial law. His pending downfall and Khameini's assertion of power may mean that any danger of this is past.
But David, since sanctions always go badly, aren't we morally responsible for using them, just as we are morally responsible for using Agent Orange on Vietnam when our own environmental agencies knew that the ingredient dioxin caused cancer?
In the case of Japan, I think the Japanese had one very valid, uncomfortable argument:
The US caused the Great Depression to go global with the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. This wrecked Japan's export economy and led to the suffering that brought fascists to power. But the UK and France simply exploited their imperial colonies behind tariff walls, France being especially cruel in Indochina. They were REWARDED for their imperialism, but had hypocritically ordered the rest of the world to stop doing the same, which left Japan with little and Germany with nothing.
The Japanese were extremely angry about double standards forced on them, like the Washington Naval Treaty and the racist US immigration quotas, both of which appeared to designate the Japanese an inferior people. The fascists exploited this with the simple agenda that Japan should be able to rape Asia as the UK and France had.
And was Japanese or Nazi imperialism really any less cruel than the "democratic" variety for the victims?
I am convinced that FDR understood this. His party had opposed tariffs by tradition, but the public wanted protectionism. He pulled US troops out of Latin America and the Caribbean. He vociferously lobbied for the dismantling of the European colonial empires at the end of the war. The conduct of the US occupations of Germany and Japan appear to have intended as an object lesson in the revised international laws on occupations, which intended to take the profit out of conquest. I think all this proves his goal was that in the future, there would never be circumstances that would force advanced countries to turn to invasion as a means to survival due to a global trade war.
However, in 1941 he faced a Japan that had been betrayed by Western free-market promises that it had committed all its resources to, and he had no power to revise the international system to address their grievances, and the US was full of people sympathetic to invaded China, for good reasons and not-so-good. Sanctions were all that were left to buy time for a US military buildup, and they were well known to be a terrible option.
I don't think either side had reasonable choices during what was still a global depression. Japan was in fact better off fighting and losing that war, thus giving FDR and Truman the means to reorganize the world economy to give Japan the chance to unleash its prowest at peaceful growth. If the war had never happened, Japan would have been forever trapped by global tariffs (enforced by the empires) regardless of what kind of government it had.
But making special cases out of countries that America doesn't like is the road to Iraq - or Vietnam, or Panama. Meanwhile, our pet oppressors in Pakistan, South Africa and Israel got nukes which our intelligence services "somehow" overlooked, and suffered no consequences at all. Don't you see that as long as we employ armies of lawyers, bankers, lobbyists and propagandists to turn international law into our arbitrary prejudice, we've made it a loathsome thing that nations would be glad to violate?
The problem, Bill, is that the FDR administration knew that sanctions were a Catch-22 for Japan. According to Daniel Yergin's "The Prize", the Army, the Navy and the British were desperate for FDR to avoid any action in 1940 that would lead to a Japanese attack in the Indies because the West lacked the resources to fight Hitler and Tojo at the same time. The problem was, every move the US made to warn Japan from territorial conquest was interpreted by the extremist Tojo as proof of a US plot to strangle Japan. The final straw was the State Department interpreting an FDR directive for a limited blockade of certain strategic goods in the broadest possible way without this being reviewed. It was impossible for an America long-ignorant of international diplomacy and a Japan culturally alienated from the West to match their actions to their supposed intentions in the eyes of the other.
While I can forgive their clumsiness in employing sanctions given their inexperience, I think the cumulative history of the practice shows that sanctions are a deeply flawed way of signalling genuine intentions, meaning that I genuinely will stop hurting you if you stop doing that thing. That is only credible if it actually costs me something to hurt you with sanctions. If I can do it at little cost to myself, then you might view it as simply the tip of the iceberg of my malign intentions, and unlikely to stop no matter what survivable concessions you make. As a superpower, the US has guaranteed that it will be viewed in this way by many, many countries even if it really is going to hurt us to impose sanctions.
Actually, money is used successfully to control human beings all the time. The problem is that those who disobey America are "evil", and we don't want to be seen rewarding evil. So we have to either redefine them, as we did the Sunni resistance in Iraq which we bought out to create the illusion of a successful surge, or we must spend far larger amounts of money exterminating them. Compare the net cost of the Marshall Plan, for instance, to the cost of our contributions to NATO. Since the European survivors of WW2 could be redefined as "innocent victims of Hitler now threatened by Communism", we could give them bread instead of brimstone. Moslems, on the other hand, are guilty until we desperately need to declare them innocent, so many of us are secretly pleased that our contractors ripped off Iraq and Afghanistan mercilessly.
Since we are now out of money to control foreigners, foreigners are now in a position to start controlling Americans in the way that rich people have always controlled Americans; buying elections, buying media bias, buying religious leaders, and buying our employers. More on this as it develops.
I love Romney's little scam of pitting Arab Spring against Iranian geopolitical success. It's the tyrants and monarchs of the Arab world who whine about Iran, and only after Bush spent years indoctrinating (or blackmailing) them to do so to provide cover for our Iraq debacle. Post-Mubarak Egypt doesn't seem to have any problems with Iran, and neither do Libya or Tunisia. Romney would have given Mubarak enough weapons to make Cairo look like "Cast Lead".
How can our politicians accept that Islamic leaders are opposed to weapons of mass destruction, when our Catholic politicians refuse to accept that the Papacy has any objections at all to weapons of mass destruction, and our Protestant politicians believe that Christianity actively supports nuclear retaliation and that this must be taught to nuclear launch officers?
Our religious politicians are projecting onto all Moslems their own belief that a movement acting in God's name has the imperative to pursue absolute power by any means necessary. A pacifist is a kind of religious person who cannot succeed as a politician in this country, because we think if he really had faith, he'd be willing to kill for it.
Janine, not enough people have mentioned Netanyahu's need for a diversion from the massive street protests against his party's agenda to polarize wealth to the 1%. Those protests are perhaps the greatest threat ever to the basic source of Zionist legitimacy: that the leaders give a damn about the well-being of ordinary Jews to the ruthless exclusion of everyone else.
Rick, too, is an entertainer, and being absurd. But he demands to be president because only absurd fascistic entertainers can save America! Only they understand God! God is the ultimate absurd entertainer! We must have an absurdly entertaining theocracy!
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is literal truth! We must study it in every public school! And practice the stoning scene during recess!
Guido Sarducci for Cardinal of New York! All Broadway theaters must run Nunsense and Book of Mormon!
All Tom Lehrer songs about religion - played on all PA systems around the clock! No laughing allowed!
If they get hauled in front of a war crimes tribunal, like Nazi hate-mongerer Julius Streicher or those guys who used Rwandan radio to direct the genocide, then the precedent has been established that it is possible for an entertainer to be liable for the acts that he encourages. The question is, what is America's standard going to be short of the aftermath of a genocide?
I had previously sent a reply on how Republican candidates have a history of conspiring with foreign leaders to start or prolong a war, specifically Nixon in 1968. This reply was not posted. If this was for reasons of length (I hope), then you can simply go to this link for veteran Iran-Contra journalist Robert Parry's articles on the evidence that LBJ had collected on Nixon's encouragement of Saigon dictator Thieu to sabotage the peace talks, which he correctly labeled treason.
America is a low-voter turnout society. Israel is a political system balkanized by many special-interest parties. This means that in both systems, a hard core of single-issue fanatics could prevail over the will of a majority, with patience, cunning, and financial interest.
The fanatics of each country could even present the fanatics of the other country as being the only true voice of their people, and thus claim legitimacy for their alliance, while the low-info peaceable majority are simply drowned out by their own indifference or uncertainty. I certainly had no idea of the economic discontent of Israeli Jews until they took to their own version of OWS. Our media had only presented Israeli Jews as prosperous and politically satisfied.
As Sherm was pointing out above, the American and Israeli peoples now judge operations by the question "Can we get away with it?" Israelis knew they could get away with demolishing Gaza. They're not sure they can get away with poking Iran in the eye with a sharp stick but leaving it standing.
And now, maybe Israelis are looking at the term "getting away with it" in a more holistic sense, as are Americans. They sense their worsening economic prospects are connected to the vast costs of their war machines and growing global hostility. But they still hardly dare to say it out loud when they protest in the streets against the symptoms.
Part of the military always wants to fight, but you'd be surprised how much of the command wants the justification to create a powerful machine, without ever having to deal with the hassle of using it. Andrew Bacevich covered the attempts by post-Vietnam generals to limit the conditions under which force could be used by elected leaders in his book "The New American Militarism". But they refused to question the need for such a vast military sitting around. Of course this backfired on them; new politicians campaigned their way into power by arguing that such a powerful, expensive military had to be bloodied every now and then to keep the wogs in line.
After Iraq, the generals are again trying to protect their institution from cultural disintegration due to the effects of real war on the troops. Iran is a scary prospect.
They are the capitalist class, and the rest of us have to work for them to survive, and invest the way they invest to try to survive after we are no longer of use to them. That is no different than the situation our ancestors faced during the great labor wars of 1865-1940, when the capitalist class sicced their National Guard dogs on strikers an average of twice a year. The workers had to fight them and work for them at the same time, in the name of leveraging a more just relationship.
So now they destroy our social safety net so that we become even more reliant on our pension funds invested in their schemes - many of which have been robbed in corporate restructurings and bankruptices - and thus captive to their agendas. Note that economic crises are becoming as common now as they were during the laissez-faire era - but not during the ascendancy of the FDR coalition which forced the capitalists to share power.
If even calling them "capitalists" now makes me a Communist thug, I guess we really will have to go through with the Revolution this time.
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In the '60s science fiction writers were already speculating about an automation crisis. They understood that replacing labor with automated capital meant that society had to make a decision about the distribution of the resulting profits. Why did the citizenry and their elected leaders not confront this with so much advance warning? We left the decision entirely in the hands of those who oppress us now.
And are the 130 countries in which the United States maintains military installations a "Greater America"?
A military base that implies the US will defend a government against its own people is one of the most serious forms of intervention; that's why there have never been foreign military bases on US soil.
It's alarming that the mechanisms that made Sarkozy pay for his sins don't seem to function in America. There are growing ties between the GOP and old white supremacists from the '90s via the Tea Party and Christian Dominionists, yet there are no consequences. Apolitical and even mildly liberal citizens see a flag-waving theocrat and perceive a better American than themselves, thus censor themselves and restrain sensible criticism. Witness monstrous liar David Barton's recent interview by Jon Stewart, who I hear refused to challenge Barton's bullshit that all the Founding Fathers mandated a right-wing Christian republic.
The one great favor Hitler did Europe is that he got all its flag-waving bigots to join his crusade, and dragged them all into dishonor and discredit with him. It hasn't happened in America yet.
I fear the key to everything is Germany. While its internal social and worker policies are far more progressive than America, Britain or the failed Bushite "New Europe", its success has allowed it to pursue a strong Euro which punishes less productive Euro economies that provide the same benefits. If the Euro were controlled by democracy rather than German bankers, it would be different. But once the German people bought into the idea that their greedy bankers were somehow "protecting" them from the lazy, swarthy Mediterranean types, they rallied to Merkel's agenda to starve and crush southern Europe the way America crushed Latin America (see Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine").
This is a tragic victory of narrow tribalism over class solidarity. Once our capitalists Shock-Doctrined Latin America and shipped our jobs over there, they started to do the same to us. Do German workers really think once Italians work for starvation wages, their own jobs are safe?
Pabelmont, you're right. The veto is now more important than the aid, because the Likud has worked for years to reduce US leverage on its actions. Back in the late '90s, the Likud commissioned a study by US Jewish neocons, meaning of course members of Cheney's Project For A New American Century, to plan out a new Israeli power structure. The paper was called "Clean Break". It proposed that Israel do three things:
1. destroy socialistic practices and create a Reaganite right-wing economy
2. turn the revenues from this into a bulwark against Washington using its aid money to blackmail Jerusalem.
3. thus freed from any external constraint, overthrow the governments of all the Moslem countries that it disliked
Of course, once those neocons took over Washington in '00, they tried to carry out #3 themselves and thus made #2 irrelevant. But it pays off now. #1 may in fact have also been imposed on America by these neocons. For all practical purposes, the Likud and the GOP share the same insane Politburo.
I think the Tunisian politicians going on hunger strikes is something that would really get attention. Arabs are used to their leaders being distant, indifferent, and hypocrites gorging on the public trust. For elected Arab leaders to do this together would damage the Israeli-American Catch-22 meme that Palestinians can always move to Arab countries to get their basic rights, but if the other Arabs are too selfish to treat them as equals, then it proves all Arabs are subhuman animals, thus it's okay for Israelis to persecute Arabs. Catch-22.
The rise of capitalism began with Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation. Haven't you heard of the "Protestant work ethic"? The merchant classes of Germany decided that Luther gave them a better God than the Pope and threw in with him. Thus, usury ceased to be a sin, landowning was no longer favored over finance, and that bastard Calvin could preach that getting rich was a sign of God's favor.
There was no egalitarian social dream until the poor saw the bourgeoise get away with this heresy. The first I've heard of were Thomas Munster's movement, which Protestant princes exterminated with Luther's thumbs-up, and the Diggers and Levellers who arose in the army that Cromwell created so his bourgeoise Puritans could overthrow the feudalist King. The first broad-based egalitarian movements to get anywhere came AFTER agnostic writers like Voltaire and Tom Paine stirred up revolution in their countries. It is ridiculous to blame anything on secularism before 1776.
The thing that increasingly bugs me about America as I've gotten older is the sense that American society, unlike the ones that came before it, waa a construct manufactured by the creators of the original colonies (joint-stock corporations, plantation owners). Other societies must have evolved norms of fairness and participation, which reassert themselves in revolutionary times and regenerate human feelings. But our society was engineered only to extract wealth from a continent of unclaimed resources in the quickest possible time.
Thus the America definition of freedom seems to have hidden codicils, that restrict it to the pursuit of material wealth and power over others; the haves are granted the power to dictate to all which behaviors are liberties, and which are license, and any who feel oppressed under that setup are persecuted.
Until now we've never foreseen the end of this pursuit, and it seems we're so addicted to it as a substitute for true social relations that we will run the country off a cliff before we evolve.
But Mr. Morrone, those examples imply that free speech isn't the only weapon or a particular end in itself; it's a means of aggregating like-minded people to take disruptive action against their oppressors. Talking without planning how to win a revolution gets you slaughtered like in Indonesia in '66. We need free speech to spread the evidence that already exists on the Internet that the right-wing, as an organized movement, has been planned and led by people who do not believe in multiparty elections or the Bill of Rights or freedom of religion or, especially, the equality of humanity. Liberals are afraid to talk about this evidence because they are bullied by extremists who threaten (in their media circles) to use violence against "Un-Americans". Either we tell the bullies that we will shut down the whole economy even if they slaughter us, or we tell them that we will fight them.
Andrew Bacevich's book "The New American Militarism" attempted an explanation of why Republicans with no military service can call Democrats who are veterans (like John Kerry) traitors and peaceniks. He pointed to a 1980 Reagan campaign speech where the bastard semantically shifted the burden of patriotism from "serving the country" to "supporting the troops". Because Reagan had done nothing in his Army service but make propaganda movies, he magically tied himself to the new generation of draft-free Americans who wanted someone else to do the dirty work of war, while the rest of us "supported" them by blindly cheering for warmongerers who get them killed. Thus it becomes impossible to criticize the war as useless and wasteful without being accused of calling the troops those things.
I think something like this also applies to Stephen Kriz' comment above about Romney's silver spoon. Free enterprise is no longer about the genuine ability of men to rise via small business, government service, academia, etc. It is a ritual of blind support for the tiny corporate nobility that we expect to keep us in goodies even as our social mobility increasingly disappears. Producing actual goods, or inventing actually useful machines (as Carter helped do), or especially rising by any means except by serving the corporate idols, is now a subversion of a tribal hierarchy that says the only useful humans are billion-buck salesmen of financial scams, because all the lower-level white petty bourgeoise owe their own positions to the favorable judgment of those princelings. If a Bush or Romney is proven a fool, the little Bushes and Romneys who run our lives know we might start recognizing them as useless parasites.
If you can't criticize the barons, and you can't criticize the knights, you are a dumb powerless serf.
I think that progressive ire towards Carter has to do with his lack of enthusiasm for traditional Democratic programs. In '80 this led to Ted Kennedy's serious run against Carter, knowingly risking his own party's hold on the White House, on the grounds that Carter had betrayed the soul of the party as defined by FDR. People now think that Kennedy's run was very damaging for both Carter and the party.
However, Kennedy was right in the long run. Centrist Southern Dems have failed to educate the citizenry on WHY the Depression and New Deal happened and why we couldn't go back to '20s laissez faire - instead Clinton embraced it.
Now the actual reason progressives should be pissed at Carter is because his national security adviser boasted, years later, that he and Carter made the decision to intervene in Afghanistan BEFORE the Soviets even invaded; that in fact he warned Carter that the CIA aiding the Islamists might provoke that very invasion, but that he secretly hoped Carter would do it because he wanted the Soviets to get slaughtered and ruined in Afghanistan. That is a very serious black mark on both men. Millions have died in Afghanistan because of that, our subsequent escalation of aid in conjunction with Saudi fanatics and Pakistani tyrants is one of the prime causes of the current wars on Islam (we created the very enemy we now butcher), and millions of Russians died of hunger and deprivation after the collapse of the USSR ("shortened life expectancies" is the euphemism used to report this).
On the other hand, if I'd been President I would probably have okayed the aid AFTER the invasion, and all of these terrible things would have happened anyway. I don't think Carter did it out of bloody vindictiveness, but he created the worst of both worlds: dragging America to an imperial role in the Middle East, yet still cleverly damned by Reaganite propaganda for being too wimpy and pacifistic, thus meaning Reagan got a free pass to double down on the madness.
The point of stories like the Pat Tillman coverup is that the government has a pro-war bias, isn't it? If that's the bias, then why should I believe that a government that has been exaggerating threats and committing crimes would be looking for an excuse to do nothing at all about actual terrorists targeting the US?
The awful question that we should be asking is, how many of our fellow citizens are willing to deny global warming just because they think the sacrifices they'd be forced to make to counter it outweigh making as much money as they can by raping as much of the Earth as possible and riding out the effects?
There's a problem with Americans and their shallow customs of "niceness" hiding monstrous agendas. We act as if racism is merely a misunderstanding, not a way to get what practitioners view as tangible benefits, benefits worth dying and killing for. We act as if imperialism is a sincere effort to improve the lives of non-Americans, not a way to make blood money ripping off both our taxpayers and the conquered. You don't dare hypothesize that our leaders and owners might help terrorists carry out an attack to create a pretext for war, or intentionally create a bubble economy knowing they will have the power to blackmail the state for a bailout.
In other words, you can no longer use the word evil to describe any other American unless he is "un-American".
Greed and inequality, alas, are still regarded as sacred American values.
Did G. H. W. Bush get Congressional authorization to overthrow the government of Panama? Not that I approved of that, but did he?
Actually, a democracy can be an empire. Besides the now-forgotten Athenian example, there were the French 3rd and 4th Republics, which may make an interesting comparison with what Engelhardt is talking about: paralyzed at home, with no way for leaders to distinguish themselves except by staking far too much on wars of colonial maintenance. Recall what happened when DeGaulle tried to pull the plug on Algeria; the colonists and military attempted a coup.
With the help of racism, a democracy might be the most dangerous, irresponsible empire of all. We should know better than this by now.
There was some discussion in non-mainstream media like The Asia Times a few years ago about Saudi Arabia's support of Islamist democratic parties like the AKP in Turkey and PML-N in Pakistan. The implication was that Saudi was quietly reducing its dependence on Washington by creating a sphere of influence of elected governments more palatable to the world than its own tyranny.
If so, then neither that nor the attempt to extend the model to the Arab Spring parties is going quite the way the monarchy wants. No two conservative Islamist parties are the same, but none of them obeys a foreign king in quite the servile manner that the Sauds have grown accustomed to from their guest workers. Conservative Egyptians and Pakistanis and Tunisians do not seem to give a damn about the purported Shiite threat. They may not be willing to sell the Palestinians down the river to keep the US and Israel happy either.
But if the Sauds want to keep pouring money into undermining the US-backed model of secular generalissimos, I'm all for it.
This is the consequence of the government trying to pack the settlements with the only available immigrants, Russians who don't give a damn about Judaism but do want wealth and power. This is Evigdor Lieberman's gang, so I wouldn't expect that he will define "compensation" in any reasonable fashion.
The Democrats were in it simply (and stupidly) to hold on to the Jewish vote. They didn't gain anything useful ideologically from Israeli extremism the way the Reaganites, neocons, and Christian nuts have. In fact, giving in to Israel has put the Dems in an impossible situation, since Israel is run by part of a global (but US-headquartered) right-wing movement that works to crush progressives in all countries. No matter how much any leader of the Left gives Israel, he gets screwed in return, and the bullies laugh and agree that they don't have to bargain fairly with liberal softies. That is the utility of Israel's warrior cult for the Right. Thus the intransigence of the Likud led to the intransigence of the Tea Party; they've proven the Right can take what it wishes over and over while the rest of us try to be "reasonable".
You already know the answer to your question. This has never been about what is good for "Israel". Israel's leadership, over generations of success, have turned their country into a kind of clearing house for dangerous right-wing ideas for the purpose of selling the legitimacy of those ideas to powerful allies in the West. In effect, they and the US neocons have put the "Holocaust Victim - Above All Criticism" brand on:
militarism / expansionism at the expense of non-whites
Friedmanite hypercapitalism
military-industrial complex domination of policy-making
the War on Terrorism as basis for government
Orwellian surveillance
torture
nuclear proliferation
Moslems as a unique evil who must be permanently defeated
Then they've sold these now-protected doctrines back to right-wing bastards in the US, UK and Europe, so that the buyers can call any critics on the Left "anti-semitic" (ironically many of the critics are Jewish). They can also claim that these aggressive doctrines win wars, please Jehovah, and cure the common cold.
The buyers: the GOP, the Christian Right, Tony Blair, all austerity pimps in Europe, and of course the war machine. When you see those charts showing the vast increase in inequality in the US over the last 30 years, a part of that wedge came from the use of Israeli legitimization of right-wing policies. Maybe not the biggest part, but then we're talking about the theft of trillions.
The payoff: the things Israel gets away with every day that drive us all crazy. For our engorged elites, it was a bargain.
What's really bizarre? These scared old white people, you have correctly pointed out, are nostalgic for their childhoods, when we had 91% income tax rates on the rich, actually spent money on repairing public infrastructure and schools, and occasionally enforced anti-trust laws, all the legacy of FDR. Yet they are convinced the way to get their childhood back is to revert to the 19th century, which they had no actual experiences of: monopolism, plutocracy, social Darwinism, union-busting, Jim Crow and even secessionism. At least the America of that time was isolationist and thus could afford its policies, but that's the one part of the 19th century the great majority of conservatives reject.
I've never been able to explain this disconnect, but it's too important to give up trying.
What's strikingly different with the new bunch is not just their number, but their lack of deference to the paradigm of Anglo-American corporate capitalism. When Japan had a chance in the early '90s to really hold us hostage for their investments and get us to make needed reforms, it lacked the confidence to push us around, because we had dominated it for so long. China may be cautious about us but it certainly has no deference towards us.
I am glad to see that Escobar agrees with my hypothesis from circa 2006 that China had done its homework and realized that it had no choice but to seize as much power as possible while Cheney was bogged down in Iraq. If Beijing leaders read any of Cheney's bombastic PNAC manifestos about keeping America on top by any means necessary, they had to know he would eventually turn to military and economic sabotage to reduce China back to 3rd-world servitude. They had to seize the moment, running their economy in overdrive and accepting the ugly long-term consequences, so as to force us to accept a fait accompli. I disagree with Escobar that they ever thought they had 2 decades that Obama is now cheating them out of. They're probably amazed we were so blind for so long.
Do you know any actual Tea Party Republicans? I swear to you, here in Texas the entire rank and file are much crazier than you can possibly believe, and the leadership has no choice but to live with the monster its indoctrination has created, by feeding it even crazier indoctrination.
The difference is the need for cheap labor.
The Afrikaners exploited blacks for a living. They could not make their economy work without them. Like American Southerners, they had to maintain a captive work force large enough to burn down the country in a rebellion.
Though some Israelis benefit from cheap Arab labor in various ways, the main goal of the system is to make life so unbearable that the Palestinians go away, to complete the desired myth that they had never existed. Their labor can always be replaced with Filipinos.
I think there's been an interesting shift in American racism from the former to the latter position; the hardcore bigots today claim they just want blacks to go away. Of course, the modern development of multinational exploitation and outsourcing means you no longer have to live in the same country as your ni**ers to profit from them.
In other words, their spokesmen act exactly like our own on-air elites, so the public will not change until it has turned against even our own elites.
The points made in the comments are very good. I would like to add that capturing an American drone may not even be the right way to get into the drone biz; we live in a golden age of dirt-cheap, Chinese-built RC planes and helicopters. All of these, like their fairly expensive Pentagon cousins, are practically 1930s technology from an airframe and propulsion standpoint. The advanced stuff is in the software and communications, but by that token if Iran were to copy a drone down to its software, that risks it being hijacked or deceived by American countersignals. Beter to develop a completely different approach to control and force our guys to figure it out.
I do think we will see everyone use drones in the future, because of the simple facts of global capitalism: in order to crush our own working wages while continuing to sell us goodies, our oligarchy has shipped almost all high-tech manufacturing overseas. The drone is as compatible with a Chinese circuit or toy factory as a bomber or a tank was with the great American car factories of the 1940s. For every mil-spec one we build, they will build a hundred crappy ones. Not just flying drones, but tiny wheeled drones, undersea drones, and crawling drones will make all our lives miserable in future wars. Just because a 12-year-old guerrilla's life is cheap doesn't mean he can't enthusiastically exploit these technologies.
But this blindingly obvious idea simply doesn't occur to us in rich countries who are driving this process, just as it never occurred to them when they were using Maxim guns to slaughter and enslave the 3rd World that one day their victims would have cheap Kalashnikovs to turn the tables on them. We're just too racist to believe that poor non-whites are as smart as we are and can master technology.
I'm pretty much down to flying wind turbine-generators as the only thing we could build that's power-dense enough to manufacture on the scale needed to shut all coal down. These could operate around the clock, at altitudes where the wind never stops. However, it might mean closing commercial airspace. The biggest problem is that we know so little about what is an optimal design, much less how do deal with the rate of breakdowns and losses. Thus the greedy short-sighted investors feel that if they bet on the wrong design they will get creamed. It could take a generation to do enough testing to nail this down, and that's too long.
But if a country were willing to treat it like World War II, then it would be a manageable technical problem, like having to suddenly build 50,000 warplanes in car factories. We didn't spend 1942-45 dithering about optimal or efficient investments; we weren't competing against the enemy in the stock market, but in the raw numbers of destruction.
Only America no longer has the vast array of machine shops and factories that can be forced by government fiat into creating all the needed parts of a standardized design. The only country that now describes is China. Ironically, that's the birthplace of the kite.
I don't think the Republican Party actually likes the post-1945 Anglo-American civilization. They now routinely denounce FDR as a communist, and hint that the wrong side won the civil rights struggle. What they seem to imply is that if the murderous Great Depression was allowed to cull the herd of dissenters, subsequent years would have seen an even greater pig-fest of gross overconsumption under John Galt-like ubermensch CEOs while the blacks were assimilated by the sheer infallibility of white ways.
Now is this the real agenda, or do the people behind the Right actually know that a collapse is coming, and they're intentionally preparing quite the opposite? A return to 19th century economics complete with prison slave labor (check), unregulated resource rape (check), and the elimination of the evil, cosmopolitan cities and the dispersal of the population among vicious little burgs ruled by "non-state" tyrants like churches, corporate owners, and creepy fatcat star chambers (mostly there).
In other words, the plan is 1855 Mississippi with cell phones.
A remarkably concise summary of how bad our options are. I would recommend that it run on billboards and scoreboards in every city, as a crawl on every "news" station, and as the screen saver on every computer. Except that we would go crazy from sheer terror and either go on rampages or seal ourselves inside our homes. I guess all those science fiction movies where the government is covering up its knowledge of aliens to prevent a mass panic are being proven in reality.
Sure, but what does it mean when conservatives have zero idea of how markets work either? They're the ones saying that if we scrap all pollution and environmental protections we will produce enough oil to lower prices, but oil is sold in a world market with rapidly growing demand. We even hear them talking about somehow outlawing oil exports as if that wouldn't cause a nightmare of retaliation and the death of the free market they are willing to destroy the middle class to defend.
If people were actually taught how markets work and can be rigged or oligopolistic, they'd be a lot more radical than they currently are, which implies they are kept ignorant on purpose. A hundred years ago, workers and farmers discussed the effects of markets on them as a matter of life and death.
Note that those ultra-low natural gas costs will now cause many of the drillers to go broke, until production is slashed and the big operators get their price back. Yet the country is so besotted with the idea that its energy problems have been solved that it will get whiplashed - they've already spent all the money they expect to get back in future savings!
That's the problem with speculators - they exaggerate price moves in a country where people are barely making ends meet and can't withstand instability.
The alternative is to reverse what we have been doing to get into this mess:
Redistributing wealth to the 1% while cutting wages on half the nation, which then creates an irrational terror among them of higher oil prices since they fear they can't cut back on anything else enough to offset them. The rich are able to get away with their crimes by keeping the supply of dirty energy, bad debt, and sprawl going so we can keep cutting our short-term cost of living.
Put the rich back to where they were in the '60s, and tax them to pay for the development of cleaner energy and support better wages for everyone else so we can afford to pay a few % more for our energy sources.
Note that this is what Germany has done, since it never let its wealth get so polarized in the first place, and now its clean energy subsidy is successfully reduced every year. Last year Germany got its unemployment rate down to the lowest level in 20 years. Yes, Germany still pollutes because it is full of factories staffed by the best, highest paid workers in the world. What's our excuse? That we've been hammered so hard by our owners that we will gladly become a 3rd world country exporting raw materials to survive.
Wow, the nuke worshippers are out in force. Fukushima didn't make you folks bat an eyelash, did it? If Japanese engineers are incompetent at nuclear, whom should we trust?
Saying that it's worth it that a major country has to wall off one of its counties every few decades as a death zone is as crazy as Madeline Albright saying 400,000 dead from our sanctions on Iraq was "worth it".
It's not worth it, guys. It's the beginning of the barbaric process of kicking people off the lifeboat that won't stop with energy issues, each of the rest of us hoping we won't be the next one to be sacrificed. Whether sacrificing New Orleans or veterans or the Greeks or Fukushima to higher priorities, it's like the Roman legions withdrawing and leaving the Dark Ages in their wake.
So, Ben David, this means that every single peace activist until the return of the Messiah can justifiably be beaten like a dog? That is not how a civil state operates, that is how a military dictatorship operates. Which is what occupation means, for as long as it lasts.
It has seemed to me that the worst thing that could happen to the Taliban would be actually having to govern Afghanistan. They were doing a terrible job of it in 2001. So it makes sense to keep the war going as a scapegoat for their cruelty and incompetence, rather than being judged by peacetime standards.
However, we should also always consider the interests of the Pakistani Army in what the Taliban does, especially when we hear that the attacks are "sophisticated". What does the Pakistani Army gain by a perpetual war on its border?
The problem, JT, is that we may have entered the time of the decline of both the Enlightenment and the nation-state. It's easy for peaceniks to ridicule the nation-state, but before that the world essentially was ruled by (a) warrior gangs and (b) hierarchies of landlords reaching all the way to kings. The Enlightenment brought enough rationality to Europeans that they saw nationalism was the only path to ensure that rulers at least had some requirement of representing the ruled. Now global corporate plutocracy and its playing of pro-greed ethnic/religious factions against the rest of mankind has people angry and ready to look into mobs and street gangs as a more genuine repository for their loyalty than constitutional republics.
In other words, things will get so bad in the future that the murderous militias will actually be the democratic alternative to a bought-out world order.
Personally, to me the solution is the hard work of creating left-wing militias to fight the right-wing militias that have the unfair advantage of capitalist bankrolling. For instance, the Tea Party should have to see that in order to create its pre-1865 Eden, it would have to fight another all-out civil war with the people who beat them the last time. It might be sufficient deterrence against their side, and sufficient political awakening for our side, to restore the normal, manageable conflicts of a healthy democracy. If not, at least we won't get wiped out by a right-wing first strike a la Weimar, Indonesia or Spain.
Apparently the Left now hates Qatar and Al-Jazeera just as much as the Right does. My congratulations to the country for pissing off all the idiots, and for having been right about a higher % of things than all of America's Gaddafi-lovers and America's neocons have. Not that this counts for a damn with ideologues.
What if the advertisers have a right-wing bias, because they're, after all, capitalists? Seems that OWS was not covered the way the Tea Party was. And if America's news is different than everyone else's, certainly it has become markedly far to the right of most of the industrialized world.
It doesn't just distract the world, it distracts Israeli voters from asking the taboo question about the colonization: does it really benefit ordinary Israelis in the long run, or is it a scam to enrich elite groups who have become the capitalist class of a country which formerly did not have one?
This question could well be asked of all programs of territorial expansion in history.
The dark question being kept from us Americans is how responsible Bush administration officials were for cultivating anti-Shiite paranoia among the Sunni monarchs circa 2006. In stories I was seeing at that time, many of the sovereigns were trying to maintain normal relations and trade with Iran, while US neocons in and out of government cranked out relentless conspiracy theories about Iran to cover their own Occupation's failure in Iraq. It was even claimed that the Administration intervened directly to sabotage negotiations between the Saudi and Iranian governments to settle the existing disputes between them.
The remarkable thing about all this, plus the Big Oil-financed ad campaign pimping GOP drill-baby-drill, is that it only works if conservatives are completely ignorant about how markets work. Consider the implications the next time you're tempted to debate a conservative based on his support for free enterprise.
It's never been about free markets; it's never been about less government; it's always been about nostalgia for a Golden Age of tribal monopoly of power. Any conservative will gladly accept state-rigged markets (Reagan's deal with the Saudi king to crush oil prices in '86 to bankrupt the USSR), or vast and tyrannical power in the hands of armed militias like the KKK and Mississippi Citizens' Council or local church-run censorship boards. What matters is not principle but outcomes, exactly what they accuse the Left of doing. Except they want radically and eternally unequal outcomes. The debate must clear away all ruses like "separate but equal" and "equality of opportunity" and focus on conservative movement ties leading to the true authorities of the far right, monsters like R. J. Rushdoony and the sovereign citizens and neo-Confederate movement who openly proclaim the goal of a wildly unequal society. Annoy them, provoke them, expose them in front of cameras. Get them to admit that they will never tolerate an America of successful minorities with values comparable to middle-class people in the rest of the First World.
These are the people Romney must make happy, however much it pains him. Make him pay for that, relentlessly, or those people will eventually enslave our country while we were standing around minding our own business. They literally have nothing better to do with their lives.
As some here have feared, the Arab citizens of Israel are the next big target, both of restrictions on freedom of speech and the right to their lands. Even if the Occupied Territories are excluded, the Jewish vote is so split between multiple parties that there will one day be a danger the Arab citizens will be able to form a governing coalition with disgrunted Jews, like the ones in last year's housing marches. The apartheid state happens with a 1-state solution or a 2-state solution.
It is very important to watch ordinary Americans be indoctrinated into this idea. Is it a coincidence that the GOP's and Christian Right's reversal of their former disdain for Israel happened around 1970, when right-wing Americans became obsessed with being outnumbered and outbattled by vengeful minorities? Ever since, our two countries seem to have been coming under the rule of a single conservative, capitalist, nationalist movement.
And both have a vested interest in eliminating the right of minorities to vote before they become a majority. Will we see Hebrew literacy tests at voting booths there and high poll taxes at voting booths here? Or will it just be mobs and armed intimidation?
No, just the stink from all the corpses of 20 years of US policy, from 400,000 dead due to Bush-Clinton sanctions (which Albright admitted when she said it was worth it) to perhaps 1 million excess deaths on top of the already high sanctions-era death rate since the invasion.
Add that to close to a million killed by our allies in Indonesia, 400,000 killed by our allies in Guatemala, 2 million killed by our foolish attempt to manufacture a fake country in Vietnam. A couple more major interventions and the historians of the future will have to struggle to explain to their students why the ten million killed with our support are different than the tens of millions killed by Hitler or Stalin. Then again, Britain seems to have gotten away with a lot of murder for a failed empire. I guess you just gotta have the right connections.
He ain't religious. He was just born Mormon. We should focus our fears on the sincere holy warmongerers, both the ones who run for office and the millions who vote for them.
Joe, China is still a poor country. Those peasants in the sticks have very low incomes. Israel is the 51st State, run by a Friedmanite extremist from Brooklyn. Stop being cute so we can get to the issue of why only the most extreme right-wingers oppose health care as a right regardless of national wealth.
Joe, all the other countries shown in gray on the map (except Turkey, which Ctanyol below says should be in orange) are poor. So for those people it's not a matter of *should* the government do something, the resources simply don't exist now. Only in America is it widespread social dogma that providing medical care as a universal human right is inherently evil and impossible.
They don't obsess over "death panels" anywhere else.
It's spreading. Cameron in Britain and Harper in Canada are laying the groundwork to destroy national health care via the classic Shock Doctrine/Scott Walker model: give out giant tax cuts to the rich, then declare a fiscal crisis that can only be fixed by privatizing health care. Cameron is already a beneficiary of American private health care corporations, and I expect Harper is too.
Health care is definitely one of America's peculiar institutions. To study those institutions is to get closer to the darkness at the heart of the American concept of liberty.
There are countries which ensure universal health care via private doctors and nonprofit private insurance companies. There are countries which ensure universal health care via private doctors and single payer. There are so many models for universal health care that one could hardly characterize them all as socialism by any textbook definition, unless you also apply it to public education, police protection, firemen and highways.
If America doesn't provide it, then America is stating its position on the class system and what a poor person is worth. We've had civil wars and civil strife over the need of "Good" Americans to have a higher quality of citizenship than "inferior" Americans, or a higher quality of food safety, or a higher quality of political representation.
In each of those cases, and I challenge the inevitable critics to Juan's position on this thread to prove otherwise, none of those were about an objective improvement that results from our pro-wealth, inegalitarian practice; we did better after the Left finally won on those issues.
In each case, it was presented as a life & death matter of national character - if you give "those" people equality with the real, valuable, entrepreneurial Americans, you destroy the latter's incentive to exercise their infallible superiority to keep America great.
In the current example, capitalist apologists scream about every anecdote about a "good" Canadian or Briton having to wait six months for an appendectomy due to socialism while ignoring the many examples (in the movie "Sicko", etc.) of affluent Americans who found that their private insurance cheated them out of coverage they thought they had. The apologists don't care that private insurance firms are obligated by stockholders to screw patients, what matters is that on paper those with money (or pink-collar corporate lackey jobs that they thus can't afford to leave) have a privilege and (false) sense of security that the inferiors don't.
In other words, we must treat the poor as dirt to make ourselves feel more special.
But that core argument must be cloaked, or the poor might finally light their torches and take to the streets demanding an answer to the question, "What will you do to us next to make yourselves feel more special?"
Lisa, have you ever stopped to think that in the eyes of African-Americans, they're the normal Americans of twenty generations provenance and we're the crazy aggressors?
Freedom to only act white means there's no freedom for anyone. And I guess even then a black man can only dress or talk white but not demand a white man's wages or a white man's elected office or a white man's right to armed rebellion. Are there any black people who please you, now that the Pullman porters and shoeshine boys are gone?
Both the numbers showing that foreign lands have much lower total murder rates than the US, and numbers showing that the US gun-lover zones have lower murder rates than the more heavily regulated cities are true.
The problem is, once you are raised in violence-loving American culture, guns are the only thing you respect. People in cities are ALWAYS more violent than people in suburbs and property-owning rural populations. Obviously in America we've had a permanent low-level race war going on for 400 years, and cities are where the combatants rub shoulders and paranoia against each other, from Irish vs Anglo to black vs Hispanic. In the boondocks, most people are white, are buffered by low population density, and don't often feel threatened by people different than themselves. However, before 1940 rural and small-town whites and their guns were quite busy.
It's one of those things about America that it's too late to fix unless a vast shock discredits the underlying culture. Note that 19th century London was so violent that all gentlemen went out armed. I suspect somewhere between the Bolshevik Revolution and two world wars, the rich all over Europe learned that they could not keep outgunning the poor without cultural and economic compromise. America has not yet had that shock.
But Klem, we weren't hunter-gatherers in, say, the 1960s, when we still used a lot less energy per person than we do now, despite our vast technological improvements since then. Our wages haven't gone up much either. Furthermore, other comparably wealthy countries use far less energy per person today.
So it's a false choice between crowning Dick Cheney, Lee Raymond and the other robber barons as our absolute monarchs, and going back to paleolithic times.
Can you imagine that 100 years ago the US government, under a Republican president, actually had the balls to break up Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire? To modern Americans that seems like blasphemy.
"Consumers in the US are going to have to sue Big Oil and Gas if we are to get any serious change."
I think the plan by Big Oil all along has been to force US consumers to take their side or face bankruptcy.
The tobacco companies knew all along. The asbestos companies knew all along. The energy companies have an interest in knowing what's coming and vast resources to find out.
Meanwhile, the conservative movement with which energy companies have been aligned has pushed for lower wages, financial deregulation, and thus the creation of a synthetic economy with abnormal increases in energy consumption and debt. Thus citizen/consumers are programmed with an innate need for continued consumption growth, always hoping that giving in to big business will bring that big wage turnaround we've been waiting for since 1980 so that we can catch up on what we think we deserve.
This is why energy companies knew that any awareness of a connection between said lifestyle and environmental degradation would create a visceral denial among the citizenry. To admit anything would be to open not just oil companies, but the entire USA, to liability for environmental catastrophes overseas, which would ruin us like reparations ruined Weimar. The longer our masters can hold out, the bigger the reparations must be.
At some point, therefore, we will prefer to go to war against the entire rest of the world rather than pay up. Note that we spend as much on our military as the entire rest of the world, and we have more nukes than they.
If growth-hungry US creditor China takes our side, which it might if greedy and short-sighted enough, then it becomes an armed standoff until civilization collapses.
American capital offense: walking while too black.
Little known American history - when Reagan came to power, his officials investigated the idea of creating a backup national militia. It seems they were so sure they might have to tie up the National Guard crushing black rebellion in the big cities (what with their racist policies), that they wanted a volunteer militia able to fill in. Meaning, to point guns at minorities in all the other towns. So they sent people to cruise gun shows to poll the attendees about their interest in joining a hypothetical militia.
The Administration gave up on the project, but it did not die. Its spaces at the gun shows were replaced by real, private militia recruiters. The paranoia behind it seeped into all the media, giving us the neighborhood watch program and plenty of consumer $ for gun magazines spouting extremist agendas.
Where is the convergence between militias and neighborhood watch groups? Or perhaps I should ask, what will happen when there are black neighborhood watches bumping up against turf lines with white neighborhood watches?
I find the paradox of the counterfeit American standard of living to be impossible to escape. It works like this:
Based on past achievements, ordinary Americans would have expected their wages to keep increaasing several % per year, and instead they've been flat for the last 30 years. So they live in a rage of denied expectations, which they offset by wiping out their savings and going into debt that they will never make enough money to pay off.
However, based on what Americans actually do for a living now, they are grossly overpaid! I mean, what would a person get for doing that exact same thing in Brazil or South Africa, much less Pakistan? We don't make anything real. We pimp goods made overseas for crazy markups, which are delivered straight to the CEOs and shareholders of the outsourced American brands. We sell medical insurance that is full of fraudulent promises. Worst of all, we sell each other fake investments. Some of these jobs are so harmful that they actually have negative value.
So a vast chasm has opened up between what Americans think they are worth, and what the rest of humanity thinks they are worth. And when Americans hear talk about famine overseas, or global warming, or Peak Oil, or the devastation that our financial deregulation wreaked on the world, they fear at some level that the world is finally coming to exact brutal redistributive justice. Which is why we increasingly sound like plantation owners in the year 1859, confronting the encroaching world with hostile glare and crazy talk.
Paul is the most de-regulatory of anybody. He wants to legalize everything millionaires want to do to become billionaires; pollute, endanger, usurize. Abortion, not so much.
When a country has a class system as steep as ours, just because a guy's friends are the rich instead of the extremely rich doesn't mean those rich aren't a bunch of murderous bastards too. Sometimes, they're the worst of all.
Well, nothing for it, time to bomb Utah.
Breivik definitely was in a loose network of internet communicants. Friends of friends of friends. He was confident that others would follow in his footsteps; that was the key to his whole strategy for victory.
It's been too long since the end of WW2 for people in the powerful states of the world to remember the conditions that motivated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Which is not that it's wrong to commit such acts, but that they escalate into wars that perpetrators will eventually regret.
The lessons of the Depression, we've noticed, have also worn off in our generation.
The Precautionary Principle never applies to the excesses of capitalism. Until after the catastrophe.
And what about ocean acidification, which buffers the CO2 emissions?
I've heard that in 2000 Gore actually managed a dead heat with Bush with the Cuban vote. I know that the younger generations are going more Democratic, but that's true of every ethnic group in America. The problem is getting them to the polls.
Civil institutions are pointless when the government itself is viewed as illegitimate in many provinces. For the government to fight that is civil war, and in a civil war the army goes everywhere, as ours did in 1861-65.
If the only thing Afghans could agree on was a military dictator, we'd already have that and conditions there would at least not be worse than, say, Uzbekistan. At least in Uzbekistan there is a single side you can pledge grudging loyalty to and survive. In Afghanistan no one can offer that.
I think you are corrrect. Everything will revert back to the status quo of September 10, 2001, with the Northern Alliance reconstituted and bankrolled by Russia, Iran, India and some anti-Islamist border states, waging a permanent war against the Taliban and its credit line from the Pakistan Army. That Army is the problem; it will not abandon its entitlement to maintain Afghanistan as a client state. The other countries cannot tolerate a Taliban state on their border. So it goes.
Thing is, Santorum seems to be a Catholic without Catholic supporters. A major pollster being interviewed before Super Tuesday said that he didn't seem to do any better with Catholics, and that he was beginning to wonder if voters actually even knew he was Catholic, and intended to put in a new polling question to find out.
According to talk2action.org, Santorum is an Evangelical Catholic. What does this mean? According to Wikipedia:
"In Roman Catholicism, the term Evangelical Catholic refers to Catholics in complete communion with the Catholic Church who exhibit, according to Alister McGrath, the four characteristics of evangelicalism. The first is a strong theological and devotional emphasis on the Bible. Secondly, Evangelical Catholics stress the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the cause of salvation for all mankind. A personal need for interior conversion is the third defining mark, and, consequently, the fourth is a deep commitment to evangelization."
As a pissed-off former Baptist, I tend to see this definition as Catholics who want to be as bullying and aggressive as their Baptist neighbors, who know how to beat you over the head with that Book and leave no marks. If the Pope agrees with Santorum's aggression, then he's in tune with the Bible. If the Pope overrules the Bible, ignore him.
I think Biden should be replaced on the ticket with retiring senator James Webb. Webb was a cold warrior, but his articles in recent years show an economic populism that one doesn't expect of a former military officer. More importantly, I felt in 2008 that Webb needed a special role in being, basically, Obama's ambassador to America's rednecks. I figured there would be ill feelings among that group about a black president but it's been worse than I imagined. The Mid-South now seems more pro-Confederate and pro-secession than the Deep South. Webb understood the culture and issues there, and he had become more of an economic progressive at a time when folks in the south desperately need to learn how they're being screwed by neo-Victorian laissez faire.
No, he's not a progressive on gender and sexual preference issues, but he would have followed orders on DADT.
A recent Wired article had a Republican congressman admitting the real reason subsidizing solar technology in the US was hopeless was that China had already commoditized the market for low-tech cells. As in so many things, it's over, China has won. Now we sit back and see how the Chinese use this market power.
It may dismay us to see the 3rd World jump ahead of us in renewable energy, but it is more logical for solar cells to be sent to the places that have the most sunlight or burn fossil fuels in the most inefficient way. Since wind turbines are harder for China to export here, and require more jobs to build and operate here, we can still do useful things.
The big question is, how do we free ourselves of our panic every time the price of gasoline reaches a new high? No matter how much oil we produce, it must be sold into a world market pumped up by Chinese demand. I can't believe that so few Americans can understand this.
Brazil rejected neoliberal ideology when it elected Lula. Argentina defaulted rather than endure the IMF/World Bank tyranny, and has since recovered. Chile has kids dying in the street protesting their GOP-dream privatized education system and we hardly have to talk about what's wrong with Mexico.
Your guys lost. It happened while we were too entagled in Iraq to interfere effectively, though that coup we backed in Venezuela was a good try. Stop pretending that what's good for the lightest-skinned oligarchs who shop in Miami and send their kids to Vassar has any resemblance to the vast impoverishment visited on ordinary Latin Americans under the Friedmanite shock doctrine.
Yet everything Iran does to get nuclear energy is trumpeted as proof of a weapons program.
America sure didn't act that way when it covered up South Africa's nuclear program and Pakistan's nuclear program. Are those the sort of democracies you're comfortable with? As long as they were anti-Soviet.
Gee, when he was trying to evade the draft during Vietnam, Canada must have been looking pretty good to him.
I think you are right about the use of brain damage as the government covering its ass. This will just make things worse for veterans, just as "veterans gone berzerk" stories did after Vietnam. It won't win any sympathy among the Afghans, who in effect have all performed combat tours for as long as they've been living since 1979.
Have you considered the possibility that large portions of the American population hate the have-nots among them so much that they would spend on weapons just so it wouldn't be available for social spending? A Reagan cabinet official confessed as much in his autobiography.
Only US allies are allowed to have strategic ambiguity, it appears.
Joe, I think you are going to have to address Amir below and say something that matters to ordinary Iranians and their nationalistic pride. It's like the insult the Japanese people felt in the '20s from the Washington Naval Treaty and US immigration quotas, which our racist leaders never considered would have consequences. Tyrants make their living off of this anger.
Either our real agenda is regime change, or it's about arms control. Since for most of the US-Israeli actors it's clearly about regime change, they will block a compromise based on alternative energy with every lie they can come up with. Democrat Zionists who normally support alt-energy like Friedman will sound very different when it's alt-energy that might save an Islamic regime.
But this proposal is valuable precisely because it will function as a wedge issue between imperialists and deluded liberals in the US. Since it means Iran will have more oil to export and thus make it cheaper, we can hoist the conservatives on their own greed-driven "drill baby drill" arguments.
RW, you are missing the larger point of the Hispanic spread throughout the Midwest, Deep South and eventually everywhere, which is built into the structure of capitalism:
1. Right-wing states cater to corporate demands.
2. Corporations and executives want employees to get subhuman wages.
3. The Red states look the other way as employers bring in thousands of legal and illegal Hispanics for that purpose.
4. When these new residents show up on the Census, it gives the Red states more representation even though it's still the same old whites picking racist representatives.
5. When the number of Hispanic babies being born in the Red states (meaning citizens) becomes so large that whites are clearly going to lose control of the state some day, suddenly the whites pass harsh anti-immigrant laws and talk about taking the babies' citizenship away.
6. Then when the Red states try to enforce these laws, like the embarassing detainment of German car execs in Alabama, the states find that their use of cheap brown labor to attract union-busting European and Japanese capital puts them in an impossible situation.
Tactically, there's no difference in attracting Mexican immigrants to inflate Red State numbers in Congress than there was in slaveowners desperately building up the number of slaves they had to preserve Southern dominance in the pre-Civil War Congress; either way the increased numbers are of non-voting people who are the sworn enemy of those who "represent" them. How tenable does this sound in the long run? South Africa, anyone? Israel?
In all those cases, the longer the deformity between democracy and demographics grows, the more impossible it is for the whites to compromise. 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants tend to be a lot more liberal than 1st generation. They must become a majority in Red states to preserve the race to the bottom of wages, but if they actually vote, those aren't Red states anymore.
It's all about turnout. RW may not be aware of the use of Voter ID (overtly) and voter intimidation by flyers and poll watchers (covertly) to drive away Hispanic citizens. The states with the most Hispanics have the whites who most want to intimidate them, ergo Arizona. Texas Hispanics have been very conservative (watch John Sayles' movie "Lone Star", which pokes fun at Rio Grande Valley 2nd-generation immigrants who despise 1st-generation illegals). But when I look on the streets of Houston, I see Latino kids who entirely rely on African-American pop culture as their guide into America. Combined with the above-mentioned Spanish-language tv, they inhabit a very different cultural space than the GOP wishes to enforce.
Ultimately, the only solution for the threat of non-whites that serves both the corporate wing and "cultural" purity wing of the GOP is mass disenfranchisement, followed by not deportation but permanent serfdom in privatized labor prisons, etc. That would be as great a disaster for free labor in America as slavery was, so it will be interesting to see how ALEC's attempts to covertly enact the legal foundations for this atrocity will develop.
That definitely qualifies him to be a Republican presidential candidate.
At least when George said the wrong thing about being deceived by the Administration about Vietnam, it was an honest truth.
Yeah, yeah, Mexican Americans don't find Puerto Rican Jennifer Lopez sexy at all. Too racially different. If Rush Limbaugh called her a slut Californian and Texan Hispanics wouldn't come to her defense at all. Sure.
If you haven't noticed, they've all got the same cable TV stations now. They watch shows from South America. They hear the same pop songs. Some of them even know that the people of South America kicked out almost every US-backed neoliberal regime in a wave of radical discontent against the rich and now enjoy an economic renaissance.
Where does identity come from, anyway?
In a declining country it looks easier to push people out of the lifeboat.
Islands will have to be evacuated well before they disappear, due to salt water contamination of ground water.
Note that one of the countries with heavy surveillance, Egypt, and two of the countries shown as "under surveillance", Libya and Yemen, have since had their governments overthrown.
This reminds me of a Daffy Duck cartoon from World War 2 where the Nazis capture US courier Daffy, and Hitler and his cronies show up to examine the message. The message says, "Hitler is a stinker!" Goering exclaims, "That's no secret! Everybody knows that!" So he has to shoot himself.
I think those countries' internet Orwell departments must have made the same mistake.
Ever heard of Operation Phoenix?
The question is, what roles do the expanding settlements and the military play in Israel's economic success? This is a recurring question - how much impact does military spending have on any economy? Or for historical analogies, would America's extreme pro-capitalist, anti-government views have been established if its people had not had an endless supply of Indian land to steal to act as a pressure valve against the manifest injustices of its capitalist economy?
If the settlements are Israel's frontier, and its real estate bubble, then having to fix its borders to normalize relations with the Arab world might have a traumatic impact like the closing of the American frontier, after which American farmers and workers had no choice but to stay and fight for better pay. With no new illegal subdivisions, the already-tight housing market in the rest of Israel might detonate in a more serious social disruption.
Israel and the US have used each other's history as an excuse for their own crimes, and these are crimes of expansionism. These might be countries that cannot function without the entitlement of expansion, and all the technology in the world cannot replace that.
Well, I guess the Gaddafis were capitalists after all.
We're too stupid to do #1. We've had 9 years to realize that Iran is the only country positioned to rebuild the economy of the Shia majority of Iraq, and bail out our asses. We refuse to accept the loss of our global hegemony to regional hegemons, facts or no facts.
So, I'm for #2.
As for #3, I long suspected Ahmadinejad, a veteran representing a political faction based on the Revolutionary Guard, wanted to militarize the situation so as to enhance his limited power relative to the militarily inexperienced clerics. In effect, declare martial law. His pending downfall and Khameini's assertion of power may mean that any danger of this is past.
"Washington has dramatically accelerated development of new nuclear warheads with no international threat to justify it."
Now, do you automatically assume that we're about to nuke someone?
But David, since sanctions always go badly, aren't we morally responsible for using them, just as we are morally responsible for using Agent Orange on Vietnam when our own environmental agencies knew that the ingredient dioxin caused cancer?
In the case of Japan, I think the Japanese had one very valid, uncomfortable argument:
The US caused the Great Depression to go global with the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. This wrecked Japan's export economy and led to the suffering that brought fascists to power. But the UK and France simply exploited their imperial colonies behind tariff walls, France being especially cruel in Indochina. They were REWARDED for their imperialism, but had hypocritically ordered the rest of the world to stop doing the same, which left Japan with little and Germany with nothing.
The Japanese were extremely angry about double standards forced on them, like the Washington Naval Treaty and the racist US immigration quotas, both of which appeared to designate the Japanese an inferior people. The fascists exploited this with the simple agenda that Japan should be able to rape Asia as the UK and France had.
And was Japanese or Nazi imperialism really any less cruel than the "democratic" variety for the victims?
I am convinced that FDR understood this. His party had opposed tariffs by tradition, but the public wanted protectionism. He pulled US troops out of Latin America and the Caribbean. He vociferously lobbied for the dismantling of the European colonial empires at the end of the war. The conduct of the US occupations of Germany and Japan appear to have intended as an object lesson in the revised international laws on occupations, which intended to take the profit out of conquest. I think all this proves his goal was that in the future, there would never be circumstances that would force advanced countries to turn to invasion as a means to survival due to a global trade war.
However, in 1941 he faced a Japan that had been betrayed by Western free-market promises that it had committed all its resources to, and he had no power to revise the international system to address their grievances, and the US was full of people sympathetic to invaded China, for good reasons and not-so-good. Sanctions were all that were left to buy time for a US military buildup, and they were well known to be a terrible option.
I don't think either side had reasonable choices during what was still a global depression. Japan was in fact better off fighting and losing that war, thus giving FDR and Truman the means to reorganize the world economy to give Japan the chance to unleash its prowest at peaceful growth. If the war had never happened, Japan would have been forever trapped by global tariffs (enforced by the empires) regardless of what kind of government it had.
But making special cases out of countries that America doesn't like is the road to Iraq - or Vietnam, or Panama. Meanwhile, our pet oppressors in Pakistan, South Africa and Israel got nukes which our intelligence services "somehow" overlooked, and suffered no consequences at all. Don't you see that as long as we employ armies of lawyers, bankers, lobbyists and propagandists to turn international law into our arbitrary prejudice, we've made it a loathsome thing that nations would be glad to violate?
The problem, Bill, is that the FDR administration knew that sanctions were a Catch-22 for Japan. According to Daniel Yergin's "The Prize", the Army, the Navy and the British were desperate for FDR to avoid any action in 1940 that would lead to a Japanese attack in the Indies because the West lacked the resources to fight Hitler and Tojo at the same time. The problem was, every move the US made to warn Japan from territorial conquest was interpreted by the extremist Tojo as proof of a US plot to strangle Japan. The final straw was the State Department interpreting an FDR directive for a limited blockade of certain strategic goods in the broadest possible way without this being reviewed. It was impossible for an America long-ignorant of international diplomacy and a Japan culturally alienated from the West to match their actions to their supposed intentions in the eyes of the other.
While I can forgive their clumsiness in employing sanctions given their inexperience, I think the cumulative history of the practice shows that sanctions are a deeply flawed way of signalling genuine intentions, meaning that I genuinely will stop hurting you if you stop doing that thing. That is only credible if it actually costs me something to hurt you with sanctions. If I can do it at little cost to myself, then you might view it as simply the tip of the iceberg of my malign intentions, and unlikely to stop no matter what survivable concessions you make. As a superpower, the US has guaranteed that it will be viewed in this way by many, many countries even if it really is going to hurt us to impose sanctions.
Actually, money is used successfully to control human beings all the time. The problem is that those who disobey America are "evil", and we don't want to be seen rewarding evil. So we have to either redefine them, as we did the Sunni resistance in Iraq which we bought out to create the illusion of a successful surge, or we must spend far larger amounts of money exterminating them. Compare the net cost of the Marshall Plan, for instance, to the cost of our contributions to NATO. Since the European survivors of WW2 could be redefined as "innocent victims of Hitler now threatened by Communism", we could give them bread instead of brimstone. Moslems, on the other hand, are guilty until we desperately need to declare them innocent, so many of us are secretly pleased that our contractors ripped off Iraq and Afghanistan mercilessly.
Since we are now out of money to control foreigners, foreigners are now in a position to start controlling Americans in the way that rich people have always controlled Americans; buying elections, buying media bias, buying religious leaders, and buying our employers. More on this as it develops.
I love Romney's little scam of pitting Arab Spring against Iranian geopolitical success. It's the tyrants and monarchs of the Arab world who whine about Iran, and only after Bush spent years indoctrinating (or blackmailing) them to do so to provide cover for our Iraq debacle. Post-Mubarak Egypt doesn't seem to have any problems with Iran, and neither do Libya or Tunisia. Romney would have given Mubarak enough weapons to make Cairo look like "Cast Lead".
How can our politicians accept that Islamic leaders are opposed to weapons of mass destruction, when our Catholic politicians refuse to accept that the Papacy has any objections at all to weapons of mass destruction, and our Protestant politicians believe that Christianity actively supports nuclear retaliation and that this must be taught to nuclear launch officers?
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/9/8/175144/4230
Our religious politicians are projecting onto all Moslems their own belief that a movement acting in God's name has the imperative to pursue absolute power by any means necessary. A pacifist is a kind of religious person who cannot succeed as a politician in this country, because we think if he really had faith, he'd be willing to kill for it.
Janine, not enough people have mentioned Netanyahu's need for a diversion from the massive street protests against his party's agenda to polarize wealth to the 1%. Those protests are perhaps the greatest threat ever to the basic source of Zionist legitimacy: that the leaders give a damn about the well-being of ordinary Jews to the ruthless exclusion of everyone else.
Rick, too, is an entertainer, and being absurd. But he demands to be president because only absurd fascistic entertainers can save America! Only they understand God! God is the ultimate absurd entertainer! We must have an absurdly entertaining theocracy!
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is literal truth! We must study it in every public school! And practice the stoning scene during recess!
Guido Sarducci for Cardinal of New York! All Broadway theaters must run Nunsense and Book of Mormon!
All Tom Lehrer songs about religion - played on all PA systems around the clock! No laughing allowed!
Speaking in tongues? New national language!
If they get hauled in front of a war crimes tribunal, like Nazi hate-mongerer Julius Streicher or those guys who used Rwandan radio to direct the genocide, then the precedent has been established that it is possible for an entertainer to be liable for the acts that he encourages. The question is, what is America's standard going to be short of the aftermath of a genocide?
I had previously sent a reply on how Republican candidates have a history of conspiring with foreign leaders to start or prolong a war, specifically Nixon in 1968. This reply was not posted. If this was for reasons of length (I hope), then you can simply go to this link for veteran Iran-Contra journalist Robert Parry's articles on the evidence that LBJ had collected on Nixon's encouragement of Saigon dictator Thieu to sabotage the peace talks, which he correctly labeled treason.
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/03/lbjs-x-file-on-nixons-treason/
America is a low-voter turnout society. Israel is a political system balkanized by many special-interest parties. This means that in both systems, a hard core of single-issue fanatics could prevail over the will of a majority, with patience, cunning, and financial interest.
The fanatics of each country could even present the fanatics of the other country as being the only true voice of their people, and thus claim legitimacy for their alliance, while the low-info peaceable majority are simply drowned out by their own indifference or uncertainty. I certainly had no idea of the economic discontent of Israeli Jews until they took to their own version of OWS. Our media had only presented Israeli Jews as prosperous and politically satisfied.
As Sherm was pointing out above, the American and Israeli peoples now judge operations by the question "Can we get away with it?" Israelis knew they could get away with demolishing Gaza. They're not sure they can get away with poking Iran in the eye with a sharp stick but leaving it standing.
And now, maybe Israelis are looking at the term "getting away with it" in a more holistic sense, as are Americans. They sense their worsening economic prospects are connected to the vast costs of their war machines and growing global hostility. But they still hardly dare to say it out loud when they protest in the streets against the symptoms.
Part of the military always wants to fight, but you'd be surprised how much of the command wants the justification to create a powerful machine, without ever having to deal with the hassle of using it. Andrew Bacevich covered the attempts by post-Vietnam generals to limit the conditions under which force could be used by elected leaders in his book "The New American Militarism". But they refused to question the need for such a vast military sitting around. Of course this backfired on them; new politicians campaigned their way into power by arguing that such a powerful, expensive military had to be bloodied every now and then to keep the wogs in line.
After Iraq, the generals are again trying to protect their institution from cultural disintegration due to the effects of real war on the troops. Iran is a scary prospect.
They are the capitalist class, and the rest of us have to work for them to survive, and invest the way they invest to try to survive after we are no longer of use to them. That is no different than the situation our ancestors faced during the great labor wars of 1865-1940, when the capitalist class sicced their National Guard dogs on strikers an average of twice a year. The workers had to fight them and work for them at the same time, in the name of leveraging a more just relationship.
So now they destroy our social safety net so that we become even more reliant on our pension funds invested in their schemes - many of which have been robbed in corporate restructurings and bankruptices - and thus captive to their agendas. Note that economic crises are becoming as common now as they were during the laissez-faire era - but not during the ascendancy of the FDR coalition which forced the capitalists to share power.
If even calling them "capitalists" now makes me a Communist thug, I guess we really will have to go through with the Revolution this time.