They train independent journalists, mostly in Latin America, to cover the stories the corporations won't. They are connected to the Narconews.com site, which has had what I think was the best English-language coverage of the Bolivian revolution, the coup in Honduras, and Javier Sicilia's movement against the bloody drug war in Mexico.
The transformation of Latin America in the last dozen years from neoliberal rape victim to a cauldron of native-peoples', anarchist and anti-globalist agitation and victory at the polls is a remarkable story that our media simply left our public in the dark about. Is Latin America not just as important a part of US hegemony as the Middle East, and more important than Central Asia? We've largely lost all three provinces but while the media lied about the ME and C. Asia, it merely ignored Latin America's uprising against Wall Street.
"Clinton said that in a democracy we are used to people exercising their right to demonstration."
That's ironic. From what I've seen, most Americans are very unfamiliar with that right, especially when it's used to oppose the overwhelming power of wealth.
The point of the 19th Century Scramble For Africa was immediate economic payback. This article cannot directly correlate our obsessive war on Islamists with the big resource payoff. If it were simply about oil, our troops would all be going to Guinea or Nigeria, disgusting as our relationship with those regimes already is.
Meanwhile, all the Chinese have to offer Africa is investment, jobs and trade. They will win.
I'd say that America's senility has advanced to the point where it sends troops places because it has no other idea of how to interact with other societies.
You are correct, but I think the British viewed the Boer camps as a temporary measure in what they mistakenly assumed would be a short foreign war. The Soviet use of camps against their own citizens gets closer to the idea of permanent removal of entire peoples from one's own territory. However, the Czar wasn't exactly running a artist's retreat in Siberia, Mark. Solzhenitsyn was a reactionary maniac who worshipped Czardom. Don't forget the Czar's own black propaganda machine forged the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to slander Jews worldwide. Only a sick society produces the kind of hatred that fed the pogroms, and the Communists, themselves victimized by repression and torture, directed it in a different direction than the Czar did.
In a sense, Ron, America and Israel are the last two unreconstructed European-nationalist states. By which I mean, a Western nation-state that indoctrinates:
Exceptionalism
Military and cultural imperialism as mandate
War as eternal and purifying
The rich as the purest distillment of our tribe's superior culture, the rest as midlevel yet still "brothers" of the elite, and all foreigners as only fit to be ruled
Obviously, this has a religious dimension too. The rest of Europe learned the hard way, got the shit kicked out of it in various wars especially in the 20th Century, and has evolved past these characteristics. But since WW2 crowned America as hegemon without it really suffering, and gave Zionists their special status as victims ("everyone else got liebensraum, now we're owed a shot"), they alone got to skip the lesson that the UN Charter practically requires be enforced on everyone else.
I am not commenting here on non-Western nationalisms. Too complicated. I think there are also many benefits to nationalism, which is why the West had so much power. The problem is that sophisticated nationalists seem not to know how to fight back against atavistic throwbacks like us and the Israelis and a certain fellow with an ugly little mustache.
As for your dogma on the immutability and perfection of private property and markets, here is a link to a mythbusting essay at The Exile on the pioneers of capitalist thought and their real agenda: to use new and artificial claims of property rights to sabotage the traditional communalism of British peasants so they could be exploited in factories and enrich the sainted entrepreneur:
For example:
"Arthur Young, a popular writer and economic thinker respected by John Stuart Mill, wrote in 1771: “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” According to Perelmen, “John Locke, often seen as a philosopher of liberty, called for the commencement of work at the ripe age of three.” "
"Even David Hume, that great humanist, hailed poverty and hunger as positive experiences for the lower classes, and even blamed the “poverty” of France on its good weather and fertile soil:
‘Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.”
This is the context in which the Commons were privatized, and later the Irish deliberately left to starve during the Potato Famine to extinct their "lazy" culture while the aristocracy raised cash crops to export.
By the way, what are people supposed to do when they must choose between buying insurance and making their rent because your free-enterprise theology cheered on mass outsourcing and offshoring by billionaires?
Oh right, that's how Christian Right charities bail out the poor expecting to be repaid by increasing their flocks. No wonder they want the government out of the way of their march to theocracy.
How much free will did we have in the Good Old Days that the Right continually insists it wants to bring back, when church-run censorship boards, religiously-inspired bans on alcohol and blasphemy, Biblically-justified white supremacy, bigotry against "Christ-killers", and bigotry against Papists all operated in a "free" society with limited government? Seems that one institution just fills the power vacuum caused by the fall of another, and I'd rather have the one I can vote in.
According to Adam Smith, true markets have perfect information and perfect mobility and rational decision makers. People are not rational about getting sick and dying; they freak out and take whatever deal they can get. Furthermore, they have no way of knowing whether they're getting a good product unless they are knowledgeable about medical matters, and modern technoloogy has vastly outstripped the common-sense knowledge of the modern worker in an advanced, highly specialized economy. Which means that all the leverage is on the side of the supplier.
And what the Hell ever happened to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"?
Everyplace else has already discovered that medical markets don't really "clear"; too many people have to do without as they must in America; that's why so many countries have done what they've done. So move to Somalia already.
If we are backsliding further and further away from TR's views on health care and social well-being, you can be certain we will eventually backslide on racism and imperialism, because all these failures are a return to the past, and all these injustices in the past worked together to maintain control of the poor by the rich.
In other words, all forms of inequality are branches of one ideological principle, which our enlightened forefathers labored to overcome - and which we are falling back into.
Wow, people are reacting badly to this post and completely skipping the point: why does a significant American cultural faction seem to celebrate as patriotic the fact that the poor get lousy health care? Instead, we're arguing about the geographic distribution of that faction so as to prove that it doesn't exist.
Remember, the Republicans took away much of DC's self-government during the Gingrich era on the implied notion that blacks can't govern themselves. So DC voters have less of a voice in our democracy than anyone who lives in the 50 states.
But you know, those states may be the way they are as a result of the intentional design of 20 generations of oligarchic elites. The Southern states were most opposed, besides the most famous issue, to public education, female suffrage, and the GI Bill. There's a brutal and refreshingly honest War Nerd column where he points out that the US made progress on several domestic fronts during the Civil War because the Southern congressmen were no longer there to block reform. War Nerd didn't even mention the Homestead Act.
Problem is, the oligarchic brainwashing took, and now ordinary people think that their political dogma is an infallible tradition mandated by God, and the rest of the world is Satanic. You can actually see the resistance of the poor Scots-Irish to the agenda of the plantation elite erode from century to century. Ironically, the new elite, the German auto execs who came to Alabama to exploit union-hating proles, are now victims of the xenophobic laws and cops created by this culture.
Yeah, but Harding simply let other people plunder. Romney does his own.
The question is, what % of Americans actually believe that such actions disqualify one to be president? I really want to know; it seems the opinions of Americans on what capitalists should or should not be able to get away with depend heavily on how the question is asked. Maybe pro-business Americans live in a fantasy land where scumbags are an unusual exception, ergo they disapprove of their crimes but oppose regulations that affect all the "good" businessmen. Maybe they even have a certain bigotry that makes them see "bad" businessmen as Jews and effete Eastern liberals, and "good" businessmen as hearty cowboy-hat wearing factory owners who share the values of their workers and would never contaminate their water supplies.
Which is exactly the attitude that has gotten us the oligarchy we have today.
The problem is, by your definition the United States has only had one actual president during any point since Nixon was impeached: another Dick, last name Cheney.
This is too terrifying a concept for me to contemplate.
I think one problem with American perceptions is that we have been kept in the dark about the multi-staged overthrow of pro-US juntas in countries like Turkey, Brazil and South Korea, and the relationship of that to their subsequent economic success. Our capitalist media refused to talk about the crimes of those regimes, so as usual we were surprised when they fell, if we even bothered to notice. Note that fashionably antiwar leftists also have given those developments short shrift; it didn't fit their narratives either.
We really are very ill prepared to deal with the dismantling of the US hegemony, continent after continent, and the inevitable good and bad of the consequent new governments. But looked at in the time scale of the decline of the Hapsburgs or the Ottomans, it is clear that our levers over the rest of the world are being broken faster than we can replace them with new killing machines. This ought to be a cause for celebration, but left and right we're just as stupid as everyone else who lived in a self-absorbed, nostalgic declining empire.
Well no, the USA was a slave oligarchy holding the union's survival hostage over its demands for a government too weak to interfere with the oligarchy's system of exploitation - a dictatorship of property and cultural control. The slave economy was the most valuable thing in the new country, and it in turn fed money into the shipbuilding and banking sectors in the North. So no surprise they got what they wanted, creating the flaws and conflicts that bedeviled a country that rapidly outstripped its slaveowning sector, leading to a civil war 70 years later.
However, the fact that war happened does not illegitimate the very existence of the country beforehand. Our republic, flawed as it was, lent great evidence to the causes of those opponents of monarchical tyranny in Europe. We should be ashamed that it took us so long to overthrow that first oligarchy, and that we so quickly let it be replaced by a second. I don't think the Egyptian junta will prove so durable, do you?
The responses on that article are terrifying. Half are saying that there is no warming and it's all a lie by greedy governments and scientists (as if Big Oil lacks the incentives to tell lies of its own), and the other half says that warming will be good for us.
The first group is being more strategic in its lying. To admit that runaway capitalism is capable of changing climate at all is to open Pandora's box. If 1 degree is good, we still have to deal with the possibility that 2 degrees is harmful, and 4 degrees catastrophic. Better to deny everything than to leave open questions of liability.
Generally, when a great empire is corrupted and lobotomized by its power, the force that finally overthrows it and exposes its fallacies is the rise of a new empire dedicated, for the time, to better ideas.
In other words, people are too greedy to give up a bad idea until they see another idea that's more profitable, not more just.
Well, how can that happen this time? As Kevin Phillips pointed out in "American Theocracy," each great new capitalist power in turn has relied on a form of energy that causes even greater pollution. So whomever surpasses America and overthrows its corporate tyranny and discredits its myths must be an even bigger polluter.
If it comes down to a war, well, there will certainly be a lot fewer people capable of consuming energy afterwards.
No, torture is not new to Syria. It also was probably not new to any of the countries that came to have the worst regimes in history. I bet a few German secret policemen beat a few suspects long before Hitler came along, and same for Italian cops and certainly Czarist cops before their worst tyrants.
The question is, if Syria succeeds this time in putting down a large rebellion via torture, doesn't that strengthen the case for governments to use torture everywhere? Given that government officials universally want to preserve their power and study other governments to see what they can get away with, isn't the victory of torture as a strategy anywhere, including the USA, a threat everywhere?
Well, that's certainly why GOP contribution-seekers are upset. But what's sinister is how energetically their followers, who do not objectively benefit from the private insurance oligopoly, have leapt onto the idea that decent health care for the poor is a deep, horrible, even casus belli injustice. For 3 years I've been telling people that we have to understand the implications of a right-wing movement that literally cannot be happy unless poor people are suffering due to their presumed lack of... what? Whiteness? Christianity? Entrepreneurship?
Yet it just seems to go without saying for the true believers, so the mainstream media buys their cover stories and lies about Canada and Europe wholesale. And Prof. Cole's recent entry about people on average being more against socialized medicine the worse their health is under the current system indicates that they are willing to accept the outcomes that our capitalist class/caste system dishes out to them, as long as they can see even greater suffering among those less "deserving" than themselves. I am not kidding, this is the road back to the Dark Ages, reversing the entire momentum of human progress via growing solidarity since the Renaissance - you know, "secular humanism".
Am I out of line in asking whether the foundation of modern American conservatism is sadism?
If Mr. Y has stuffed his basement full of enough mortar shells to blow up every house in the neighborhood many times over, including Mr. X's, and then lied about it repeatedly, Mr. X has a right to wish Mr. Y would go away.
Well, the Founding Fathers intentionally made the US flowchart complicated because they didn't trust democracy. As the country's wealthiest men they had reasons for this not necessarily valid for anyone else. But they also left the door open in the Constitution for future Americans to amend the situation, which has made the flowchart more democratic, but even more complicated.
Who's got cash to invest in Egyptian industry? Not the US. So it comes down to Saudi, which hates democracy in the Arab world, and China, which will tolerate democracy as long as it's far from China and creates a more stable business climate for its aggressive corporations. Unfortunately, the US can still screw you over if you don't do what it says, which in this case is likely to slavishly favor Saudi and Israel at China's expense.
These are terrible choices. Where did Turkey get its foreign capital from?
One man's rational analysis is another man's loudly proclaimed cultural oppression.
If we want to understand the incredible resistance of Red State America to restrictions on their self-destructive behavior while they vote like crazy to oppress gays and Latinos, we have to figure out what the priorities of their culture are. Problem is, we might discover something so ugly and primitive that even announcing the findings would get us smothered by angry denunciations, even from liberals. Christian extremists keep claiming that THEY'RE oppressed if gays are not being oppressed. If gays even protest at anti-gay rallies, the Santorums claim that this exercise of free speech is oppressive intolerance. If scientists dare to find the world is getting warmer or that fat and sugar are unhealthy, it's communistic oppression. If poor folks demand that their children not have to share their victimization due to inability to afford health insurance, that's oppression.
What do they consider freedom? In every case it is to go back to the infallible and morally superior past. Except, of course, when it comes to getting handouts that we see going to groups disproportionately composed of right-wingers: the elderly, veterans, and "entrepreneurs"/war profiteers.
So how do we boil this down?
We're not free unless we see people different than us suffer for that sin while the government rewards us for our superior virtue with war/police/prison jobs and cheap oil and subsidized junk food and our better-off relatives fix us up with jobs with health plans.
That's why rational analysis breaks down, Prof. Cole. Their absolute well-being means less to them than seeing that inferiors are kept worse-off. There is no other ideology. If you look at American history, it has always been this way in the hinterlands, among the gullible henchmen of the oligarchs. In Plato's Republic, Socrates asks a young aristocratic bully the meaning of justice, and he responds it is to help your friends and harm your enemies. 2400 years later, much of America still embraces this bigoted formula behind their contradictory bullshit about big government.
Note that Jefferson founded a state university. His self-proclaimed libertarian heirs want to privatize everything. Yet his actual heirs, the Southerners, will privatize the entire school system EXCEPT the universities. Why?
Football.
They're so deep into the culture of their football arms race against each other that they'd never risk disrupting on-field activities by removing the backstop of state support, no matter how Kentucky-Fried Randian the rest of their dogma is. The libertarians in turn prove their hypocrisy by not challenging their grass-roots benefactors on this. Even that douchebag Scott Walker up north in Wisconsin will privatize the branches of the state university, but not the main branch that plays big-time Big 10 football.
Doesn't it seem that this hypocrisy about state support is applied to both football and war? George Carlin long ago demonstrated the similarities of the two. It's as if football is the state-sponsored tribal indoctrination ceremony that keeps the warrior tribe's fresh blood receptive to the biggest state-sponsored activity of all. All this Southern talk about individualism and personal responsibility, and then they pound their sons' brains into damaged mush to loyally serve the most authoritarian and hierarchical of all sports (and yes, my favorite, along with war).
Don't forget all those stadiums that even Tea Partiers vote tax money to rather than lose their NFL teams. No wonder there's no money for health care or education. Priorities.
The modern South Carolinian won't have a cane; he'll be riding in an old-folks scooter paid for by Medicare, wearing a Medicare-provided oxygen mask because his lungs were destroyed by "harmless" cigarettes and "nonexistent" industrial pollution.
The plan in the UK and Canada seems to be to sabotage the functions of public hospitals, then use the decline in quality to justify all-out privatization. The public is easily confused about the difference between a public institution, a public institution that contracts out services, a privatized institution that is guaranteed tax money, and a truly marketized enterprise.
This sounds terribly like what is being done to destroy America's public school system and go back to church-controlled and oligarch-controlled schools which teach superstition and worship of wealth. Here is an example of the wretched education being tax-funded in Louisiana:
Well, the key to that is that in some universal health care systems, like Germany, private insurance companies exist, but apparently they run like non-profits. Now these things are relative, since there's still the matter of what medical bureaucrats, pharmaceutical corporations, and doctors and nurses are paid. But the form of the insurance company (or lack of same) seems to be what drives the rest of the system. America's insurance companies seem to be the most rapacious and arrogant on earth, so no health care plan can be passed without paying them an enormous ransom in some fashion. It is now inconceivable that Americans could nationalize their insurance comopanies the way they once did greedy utility companies.
So according to the map, the best chance to get American funding for your health care is to be a citizen of a country (Afghanistan) that is in a state of war with America.
I think we're awfully close to that already. The govt is only tolerated by the aristocracy as a collection of lucrative contracts awarded to their companies on the basis of campaign contributions. Having the govt as a central collection agent not only is more effective, what with it being armed, but it directs the resentment of the voters about their increasingly crappy services towards the government, instead of the private contractors. Then the contractors kick back their booty to far-right Congressmen (as happened in the Duke Cunningham scandal) to promote more hatred of the government, for which the only solution is to have more businessmen in charge of government and more privatization of services.
You sound like a 1950s southern businessman whining about the activism of the Warren Supreme Court on civil rights - because everybody "knew" that the South's economy absolutely depended on white oligarchy to function and it would be doomed under integration.
Sometimes more inequality is just for the purpose of more inequality.
Respondents may not consciously think that US hegemony over the Middle East is doing anybody any real good. Yet the power of imperialism is that it plays on emotions, emotions we may be ashamed of admitting we have. Fear and pride make people want power over the world even when they don't know what to do with it.
So a fear-based campaign by Romney is not surprising. Reagan pulled that crap on Carter by implying he would have kept the Shah in power if he'd been able. Yet Reagan's people may have already been secretly and illegally dealing with Khomeini during the election campaign, and absolutely did so after Reagan got into power. He planted the fear that Carter had harmed America by not going to war over the Shah, but he obviously had zero intention of doing it himself.
The Morocco part of this entry reflects a continuing problem with electricity supplies: the countries that are best at producing the energy collector (PV panels, wind turbines) are not the best places to locate the installations, and the best countries to locate the installations are not the places that have the most money to pay for the electricity (the West Texas wind problem). Fossil fuels are fungible, and so desirable that we don't much care where they come from as long as they don't get cut off. If we had reached that point in our thinking about renewables, then every PV panel made in Germany would get shipped straight to Morocco where it could be used with maximum benefit instead of wasting its time on a barn roof on the North Sea, and the electricity would go straight to Spain to enter an all-EU power grid largely used by Germany.
But the world's pipelines still have more reach than its power lines, until someone is willing to make all the investments to complete a modern energy system.
I think that renewable energy will prove to be relatively labor-intensive, watt for watt, compared to fossil fuels. That's why so many capitalists loathe renewables. They naturally want everything to be capital-intensive, giving them all the control. But we need jobs, and so do Moroccans. Converting solar and wind energy into electricity can be compared to farming or manufacturing a consumer good. Oil and coal are like siphoning gas tanks in an unguarded parking lot - very little work until you run out of tanks.
Well, it's probably the future of aerial reconnaissance, because it can fly all day, charge its batteries, and maybe never have to come down at all. Which is not necessarily good news for folks worried about Big Brother. What this technology can't do is lift a lot of human beings and move them around quickly. Ironically, the Pentagon and the airlines both feel they must have alternatives to petroleum-based fuel for their jets, and have tried to subsidize the biofuel industry by buying experimental algae-based fuels at a high cost for flight research. But the Republicans in the House Armed Services committee are trying to ban this practice so (the non Big Oil-owned part of) the biofuels industry will starve from lack of funding. Otherwise, that's your best bet for the future of environmentally sound airline travel.
The scenario you outline would be true if the American hegemony did not override the sovereign rights of its allies. Germany is not an independent nuclear actor, the UK is our partner in crime, and France can be pressured. Put it bluntly, with so much love of Israel and hatred of France propagated by every capitalist and conservative institutions, and with Americans totally ignorant of international law and so full of double standards, I could see the US threatening to nuke France for attempting to avenge its contaminated citizens. The people of France, and all Europe, mean nothing to us compared to the People of the Bible.
Yes, there's money and support, but the key is how it is made available and distributed. The really deadly lobbies in the US are the ones that have bought BOTH parties. This seems to require awesome resources, otherwise every pressure group would have already done this generations ago. But Israel got a shortcut. It naturally had its supporters in place in the Democratic Party. But it got the GOP as a gift from the Christian Right in the 1970s, and moved quickly to colonize it (something that Israel is pretty good at).
Also, in order for any of these lobbies to usefully control both parties, it must force at least one of the parties to betray much of its base - which is why it's ridiculous to expect blacks to split their votes between the parties; the GOP will never betray its racist faction to give blacks what they want. The Israel lobby, however, got the Democratic Party because it got many of the party's most loyal factions to embrace blind spots in their principles (and understanding of the facts) where Israel is concerned. Human rights, anti-colonialism and anti-white supremacy simply are not modern Republican principles, so no need for cognitive dissonance on that side.
It seems partly to involve the beliefs of the small businessman sector in Turkey, which was apparently neglected by the wealthy secular ruling elite. However, the AKP's populism - and the anti-US protests that occurred in 2003 when the AKP failed to be sufficiently populist - might have spurred a revival of people's belief that their votes and labor matter. Which is a profound truth completely rejected by US-capitalist mainstream doctrine. Even in a dictatorship like China, shouldn't patriots work harder knowing that the fruits of their labor are being reinvested in national strength instead of being stolen by Wall Street as in the old neoliberal/IMF model?
In any case, the invasion of Iraq and destabilization of Syria have created many economic burdens for Turkey, which makes its successes all the more impressive.
Gee, the results - if not the use of warplanes to obtain them - sound a lot like how the FBI wiped out the Black Panthers during the Cointelpro days (while not having much of a problem with the right-wing, pro-capitalist Black Panthers or for that matter, the heroin gangs, the cocaine gangs, and the crack gangs).
Gee, maybe the bloody record of Iraq has made the Left more afraid of an Egyptian military backed by the USA than anybody else. That's America's legacy in the region.
In the documentary "The Fog of War", McNamara said that General LeMay confessed that the firebombing of every major city in Japan would be ruled a war crime if it was done by the side that lost a war.
I think the legal issues of cremation-bombing millions of people even in a Congressionally-approved war have been ignored by subsequent generations of Americans. I believe this is because the firebombings were so quickly followed by the advent of nuclear weapons. It was in the interest of American policymakers to entangle the two; if the world lets the US kill a million Japanese civilians to retaliate for Pearl Harbor, then there was no doubt that the US would do even worse if the USSR struck US military targets. However, note that once this sequence is played out with nukes, Congressional authorization disappears (probably because Congress would disappear when the first nuke hits Washington).
The irony of this is that the Pearl Harbor-justifies-Tokyo argument made nuclear deterrence very stable; there were no doubts. But America wanted a monopoly on this argument, but ended up with the USSR equipped to join in the chorus, later joined by more and more nations.
So the US hypocritically undermined deterrence, looking for an edge against the USSR. That meant trying to disconnect bombings of Soviet allies from Soviet retaliation, trying to wage covert wars unseen by Congress, and finding ways to reduce the death toll of bombing so we could do it whenever we pleased without consequences.
All of these things reduced the chance of megadeath wars, at the cost of making US wars happen more often. That's the second irony, leading directly to the drone strikes. Pick your poison.
Now if Congress had done its job and ruled the Cold War to be a "special case" because of the USSR's rapid overkill capability, then we'd have a clear line drawn between justifying warfare against civilians as part of a struggle with WW2-level consequences, versus using it to wage pathetic wars of colonial maintenance. But as we've seen with the decay of the War Powers Act, Congress doesn't have the discipline to reassert its prerogatives in conflicts in which there is clearly no imminent danger of America being destroyed. If we lived in such a world, then it would be in Congress' ballpark to decide whether bombing some Pakistanis while aiding other Pakistanis made any sort of sense.
But you know what? I think in that world, Congress would still rubber-stamp whatever the Administration asked for, because it wants global hegemony maintained and the Vietnam experience taught it that merely questioning our conduct in wars of colonial maintenance can endanger our hegemony.
Well, a majority in the Senate doesn't mean a damn thing if your party's senators decide to adopt rules ensuring that every major piece of legislation requires 60% approval. I'm sure the many conservative Democrats in the Senate pushed for that exactly for the purpose of joining Republicans in obstruction when their corporate masters demanded it. The question is, why did neither Senate liberals or Obama see that this would occur and take a hard stand against the Blue Dogs out of simple self-interest? In fact, the concept of single-payer was so obscure among Democrats that even liberals would have been divided on it.
You are correct, but I wanted to word it this way to emphasize how scared Americans would be if they actually found out that everyone else believes in universal health care, decent working conditions, global warming issues. Which by our standards means that the world is Socialist, maybe even Communist. Liberals react badly to being threatened on their left flank, because perserving wealth and capitalism still is vital to them.
It worries me that the gulf between Americans and the rest of the world is now so great that if liberal, moderate, and independent Americans knew how far to the Left everyone else is, they'd freak out and push the button. For instance, do they know that the conservative party in Mexico is the one pushing for legalizing marijuana?
Has there ever been an empire that was not a captive of a self-serving ideology? I don't see how else an empire can be created. And I don't see any alternative to its eventual doom. Unfortunately, declining empires just get mugged and usurped by rising empires with their own lies. Presumably, the newer ones have more recently taken stock of reality, their leaders have developed strategies to deal with that reality, and they have fewer entrenched interests standing in the way of their ambitions. Then the rot starts all over again. That's about all the improvement we get out of this process.
Want to bet that when the post-Reconstruction white Southerners passed laws imposing literacy tests, the grandfather clause, and poll taxes to dilute the black vote, their excuse was that it would stop voter fraud? Not a damn thing has changed in the hearts of conservatives.
Odd that Tea Partiers, and their militia antecedents, spend so much time denouncing armed Federal power as enslavement, but revel in military and surveillance technology pouring into their states to control people's movements.
Guess their only problem is with who gets enslaved.
You have the values of a true citizen, which cannot exist under capitalism taken to its logical end. In other words, to the Tea Partiers and libertarians, the very fact that you care about the welfare of others marks you as an inferior, a race traitor, an Ayn Rand villain, who deserves to live in poverty and misery until you accept your proper role of making the rich richer, which is the only source of American power.
Ken Burns' "The Civil War" mentions a naive Mississippi politician who recoiled at the idea of putting slaves in the Confederate Army by innocently bleating, "But if the Negro makes a good soldier, our entire system is wrong."
In the same way, if a person with your values has any worth, their entire system is wrong.
@PRS Bullshit. If government workers are overcompensated, then that would make labor markets more competitive, and drive wages in the private sector up, while "unfairly" driving down earnings of salaried executives and shareholders. In fact, during 30 years of Republican economic war against unions, wages have been going down, while executive and shareholder earnings have swollen grotesquely. Which also demolishes your next bullshit riposte that "globalization" requires the wage cuts to get down to Chinese/Indian levels; why don't our executives and shareholders have to endure the same race to the bottom with their Chinese counterparts?
Well, I'm sure the rich would be just fine with a coast-to-coast return of good old fashioned Southern plantation oligarchy, a tyranny of state-controlling oligarchs, co-opted churches, lynch mobs, and the KKK as ultimate enforcer, none of which required tax money. Conservatives, especially those with a drawl, keep screaming that their ancestors ran a better America than we have now; what else could they be referring to? Fascism is hard work, and it requires keeping the mob involved yet deceived. It's what they will impose on us only if we resist the neo-Confederate model, until they break our will.
All the pieces are in place: lots of ordinary folks in debt, conversion of prisons into for-profit sweatshops, privatization of the military/co-optation of militia extremists, and of course the enthronement of the "entrepreneur" as apex of business, government and Christianity. The passive deference of Wal-Mart employees is an easier path to power than rallying 4 million crazy Brownshirts as Hitler had to do.
It doesn't matter if the voters say they don't have a problem with unions, only public-sector unions. Once you gut the wages of government workers, that deforms the entire labor market. Anyone with the slightest understanding of markets should be able to figure that out. Either they don't care because they hate government workers so much, or they hate the people whom they perceive as receiving government services so much.
We still have a country where close to half the population believes it can save itself by returning to the 19th century, and it's willing to demonize, imprison, outlaw, downsize, outsource, water-cannon, tear-gas, and disenfranchise the other half to get there. It's a civil war being fought by only one side because the other side can't believe that Americanism stands for such evils.
If science will no longer tell a selfish person what he wants to hear, he will turn to ideologues. If ideologues no longer tell him what he wants to hear, he will turn to religion. When religions no longer tell him what he wants to hear, he turns to terrorists.
I could have replaced the word "selfish" with "addicted", and not changed the rest. The ultimate form of capitalism would be the creation and feeding of addictions, since it ensures highest profits even while wages and manufacturing costs are declining. Therefore, we should expect addicts to become the norm, with the ever-more selfish behavior that characterizes the addict as his time horizons shorten.
No matter how many denier scams get knocked down, ordinary addicts will not change until they are conscious that they face ruination, which usually is after it has already happened. That would be too late for the planet, so we'd have to hope for some other kind of ruination to force them to go cold-turkey first. Peak Oil represents one possible avenue for this, but the potential war effects are so vast that we might end up extinct anyway.
If you had just risked your life overthrowing a military dictatorship, which unfortunately has many supporters lurking in the shadows, do you just want to turn around and throw it away months later by letting its generals unite behind a stealth candidate? How about letting top Nazis run in the first democratic elections in Germany after WW2? Not allowed, and democracy got the time it needed to develop genuine support.
As far as I can tell, Hezbollah does a better job of governing both its own Shia base and people of other faiths than any of the other crooks and princelings found east of Suez. Maybe Lebanon and Syria should be reunited under the one organization most competent at basic functions of government until they're all ready for real power sharing. Oh, but I forgot that one's ability to rule Sunnis is strictly based on what bribery the Saudis will subsidize.
I've read that anti-Arab bigots in Israel teach that the Palestinians are the descendants of the Amelekites. Given the growing connections between those bigots and American Christian fundamentalists in cultivating illegal settlements, I wonder how long it is before the CEF curriculum is openly stated as a holy truth, and that America is thereby obligated to assist Israel in ethnic cleansing.
This is probably off topic, but whenever I see one of these stories about Christian extremism in America I can't sleep unless I've passed it along and I can't think of a better place than Prof. Cole's site. In this case, it's the coordinated indoctrination of kids at Christian clubs at over 3200 public schools to not only confront, but embrace Old Testament accounts of Jehovah-ordered genocide by Hebrews against other Middle Eastern peoples.
This is a big step by far-right Christians, who have always soft-pedaled the murderous aspects of Jehovah when in the public eye. Here is a chilling excerpt from the article:
'Paraphrasing the Old Testament scripture I Samuel 15:2-3, the Child Evangelism Fellowship's new lesson plan teaches, "You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) - people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left." The manual then instructs the teacher to tell students, "That was pretty clear, wasn't it?"'
For God's sake (!), every single time you read or hear a Christian proclaim that only Moslems are violent or imperialist, hit them with this. Hit them hard. I'm bookmarking it for that very reason. There is no purpose to such indoctrination unless they're preparing to divine God's intentions about whom to murder right now at home or abroad.
From a strictly scientific standpoint, agribusiness is based on the premise of growing, not food, but ingredients for processed food. Those boxes of gummi worms, Lucky Charms, and individually wrapped breakfast bars that are pimped to kids and time-pressed commuters. They take a hell of a lot of energy to produce. They also use a lot of corn syrup. Since both of those are subsidized, the food seems priced fairly as a tradeoff for convenience. But obviously it won't feed anyone in the 3rd World.
This is turn is based on the premise that if you live in a city or suburb, you have to buy cartoonish foods prepackaged in boxes at a chain grocery; familiar brand names all the way. This is also untrue. We have the means to grow many edible plants in high-density facilities closer to their consumers. If you've ever been to Paris, you might notice early in the morning the trucks are pouring into the city to stock the little groceries on the ground floors of apartment buildings. We could streamline this process with local production. That leaves us with the bigger issue of grain production, which can't be moved on a whim and may face a future of climate shifts.
As for meat, you probably know about the whole grasslands vs. feedlots thing. Crowding cows into feedlots didn't save any land at all because more corn had to be grown to replace the grass they used to graze on.
We've got to spread the word that Robertson did business with a Gadafi agent. That should piss off both Robertson supporters and Gadafi supporters in America. Unfortunately, no one cares about the monstrous Taylor, because obviously he was sort of an ideological free agent. Gee, if only he'd made the mistake of messing with a US Christian Right-backed, gay-bashing regime like Joseph Kony tried in Uganda, every naive kid on the Internet would now be mindlessly chanting "Stop Taylor".
I agree. But it is very dangerous to make war seem consequence-free. Too many empires went down that road when their armies were optimal, and found themselves uncontrollably rolling down the road to hell when conditions turned against them. Remember what General Lee said during one of his great victories: "It is good that war should be so terrible, or we would soon grow too fond of it."
We've been fielding international death squads since the day the Cold War began. Usually we used locals, but I'm sure we've brought in foreign mercenaries many times. Compared to the far worse things we did during the Cold War, like some of the murderous governments we created and the coups we've sponsored, the death toll is pretty trivial. But the largest such act, Operation Phoenix, was very large and very bloody, and perhaps had the perverse result of killing the best and bravest leaders that Vietnam could have had, conveniently clearing the decks for Hanoi bureaucrats to sweep down and unify the country without any role for local Communists.
Church Committee or no Church Committee, it doesn't seem to me that there was ever a mandate from the American people to never use assassination as a weapon again if it saved a few bucks and a few of our boys. We simply don't value the lives of foreign human beings.
I don't know enough about Syria's current borders to comment on their legitimacy against the suggestion of partition. I know that in 1914 it was a Turkish province that included Lebanon, and that Faisal's Arab liberation movement intended it to be the capital of a single Arab kingdom that included Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. The UK approved this, then betrayed its ally Faisal.
So yet again, the problem of legitimate states and borders caused by that British and French treachery bites the world in the ass.
This is the Balkan problem: establishing a military force that truly has no bias or designated enemy, yet is effective at figuring out who the bad guy is and punishing him, even if he was last week's victim. No one ever trusts the referees. It is also an unnatural position for a military to be in. Ultimately, peacekeeping forces tend to fixate on one faction as the aggressor (US in Somalia and Lebanon) and get identified as the ally of its rival, leading to a surprise counterattack.
To me, the question is, what price will the Saudis demand to neutralize Syria as a supposed Shiite agent, and what price will Russia demand to preserve its prized naval base in the Mediterranean? America is too biased on both of these issues to be an honest broker.
Jesper, that sounds really good right up to the morning after the accident. That's the problem with nuclear; when each major nation in turn has its disaster, folks like you go into hiding until memories have faded, and then you all start putting out your crap that "the accidents are worth it". Which tells us that we can't trust you when you switch angles to "Thorium is safe", or "Fast breeders are safe", or "New reactor designs are safe". All of those might be true, but you have already shown by past words that in your hearts you don't care about the victims of the old designs, thus we suspect you might be willing to lie about the new ones.
The one thing that one never, ever, ever sees from a nuke advocate is humility, and that says the most of all.
But the richer you are, the more likely you are to believe that capitalism can't possibly cause the extinction of the human race, so the less motivated you are to buy your own solar homes. Whereas in Europe, rich people might believe differently, but the further north you are the richer you are, yet there's less sunlight. Southern Europe is in short-term survival mode right now. And the best solar sites in the world are either inhabited by the wretchedly poor or by oil economies.
It's like God is setting us all up with extinction by a sick joke, to prove to us that private property and self-interest have no relationship with long-term survival.
Cynical version: the realists have been carrying out a long-term plan to use war and tax cuts to exterminate social programs that give the non-rich leverage against the rich. So the oil war is well worth it.
Charitable version: the realists don't think it's worth the costs and risks changing our existing socioeconomic arrangments and picking a new set of elites via alternative energy when we surely are getting away with the status quo. This seems to be the main excuse given by AGW deniers, who obviously also deny any costs from the status quo.
Wow, so you don't feel bad at all about all the genocides we didn't intervene against? I still feel bad about them, even though I don't know what we should have done to stop them. I think it would have been just if foreign powers had gone to war against our forefathers for what they were doing to the Native Americans. But they didn't, and other white men subsequently did the same in the colonial world with impunity, and then whites began doing it to other whites, and the Zionists took notes for Palestine. Economic sanctions don't seem to stop someone who believes that his economic problems can be permanently solved by eliminating a hostile people.
Just don't come crawling back here five years from now whining that Western failure to intervene against some genocide you actually give a damn about is an imperialist scheme to depopluate the 3rd World.
Time to be Mr. Barbarian again, and remind everyone that if I truly believed in a cause as a moral absolute, I would obey no arbitration, no negotiation, no UN resolution, and no peacekeeping force that opposed me. And people who think like that, rightly or wrongly, have a power that no one else has, and no one else can stand against.
There are situations where people feel they must win or die. Worse, there are situations where two conflicting peoples feel they must defeat the other or existence itself is not worthwhile. Until some transnational agency can work out the means to prevent these insane situations from even beginning, any peacemaking effort is potentially unjust, like some of the doozies the international community has tried to get Palestinians to swallow in order to bury the issue of land theft.
And yes, people can lie, and deliberately brainwash their children, and deceive the media and historians, to intentionally put their nation in a win-or-die siutation. They can claim their "way of life" requires enslaving others, or that their God promised them some dirt, or that their overthrown ruling class must be exterminated to the last child. We can say that international law can determine these to be unjust positions in arbitration of conflicts. We will find we haven't stopped many wars if we can't account for people with this mentality.
A former member of the Reagan administration wrote an autobiography in which he proudly admitted that the famous Reagan tax cut was designed to create a deficit-fueled fiscal crisis in later years so that social programs would be destroyed. Note that the other half of that was the big increase in military spending. War spending is welfare for right-wingers, enabled by bleeding money from welfare for those the right-wingers hate.
You would get in trouble for saying that most Republicans literally would rather start an unnecessary war rather than leave any money that might be used to help poor fellow citizens, but that is essentially what Bush did to our last budget surplus.
Less paranoia = less hunger for military and territorial power
Bad for the entire existing Israeli political establishment.
Maybe the crazies looking for an excuse to extend Greater Israel to the Euphrates (and its oil) have gotten as deeply into government as the Tea Party crazies on the House Armed Services Committee who recently voted to ban the Pentagon from paying a premium for biofuels that it's been testing in its vehicles in order to help develop alternative sources of oil. How dare the Pentagon define security as anything other than expansionism.
If I kick you out of the lifeboat as a sacrifice to the polluters, I get to hold onto my goodies and my house a little longer, until it's time to do it again, and again, and finally I'm the sacrifice. This is now less distasteful to Americans than the collective erosion of their standard of living from increased environmental action (since it goes without saying we won't raise taxes on the rich to do it).
Thus we are all turned against each other, as helpless as the people in the death lottery in the Hunger Games, while the polluters destroy one county after another for massive profits.
Well, it does look more and more like an end game to extract the maximum amount of consumption from Americans, lock that into shareholder wealth, while enabling it by creating private debts that one day must either be written off or repaid via some form of serfdom. If the propagandists are getting worse, it's because they don't expect to stick around the USA for the aftermath. If there are a group of propagandists who are getting better, however, one must consider the possibility that they intend to be the last oligarchs standing, holding title to all us serfs. Since we could hardly afford our present hegemonic military in such a scenario, the generals must be in the former group. They don't care about the long-term survival of any form of America.
That will never happen, because our history has never been about a struggle over liberty, but over power. There are no natural rights; the only thing that could be regarded as "natural" for humans is the hunter-gatherer band. We tossed that overboard by inventing agriculture, and thus gaining the power to store wealth, and use it to accumulate leverage over the less fortunate.
That being the case, we can only compare the well-being of ordinary people in wildly unequal societies with less unequal societies. Once the normal advantages of being rich have made a few very, very rich, they will manipulate all other institutions in society - government, religion, and culture, to gain a perpetual monopoly of power, including the ability to change the definition of words like "liberty". There are no principles as to how much government is right, or what the relationship of government power to religious power must be, there are only Darwinian experiments that produce more "successful" societies or less so. But that's a rigged game since our institutions work together to indoctrinate us in what qualifies as success. The final arbiter would be a model that succeeds in world conquest and elimination of all alternatives. Yet modern evolutionary theory suggests that such a monoculture will become a species-endangering disaster.
So that leaves us with the balance of terror between the classes and nations. If the humans who live for endless conquest and exploitation are willing to sacrifice more in pursuit of their sick desires than the rest of us are willing to sacrifice to defend what we call our basic rights, the bad guys will win whether they call themselves corporations or empires or messiahs.
The claim of the extreme libertarian Right is that government served the sole function of protecting property. To square that with a police state, all you need to do is convince property owners, especially the owners of just a little bit of cherished, ego-boosting property, that all other humans in American and in the rest of the world are criminal welfare pinkos, meaning the N-word, who do nothing with their lives except plot to steal from the haves. At that point, an infinitude of repressive measures can be justified, as long as they tend to harm the have-nots more than the haves. The military can take over the "rest of the world" paranoia; we already have private and police institutions hammering home fear of our fellow citizens.
For Pat Buchanan to write that tribalism will always be with us is the equivalent of a heroin dealer proclaiming that the need for a high will always be with us. He's made a lucrative career out of exacerbating it for 45 years.
I think when America was colonized, Whiteness was manufactured by the elites precisely as a way of legitimizing the class system. Look into "Bacon's Rebellion", a 1676 crisis in Virginia which led to white indentured servants winning their freedom (and property! very important) - predicated on the importation of black slaves to replace their labor. In other words, your freedom depends on the black man's bondage, so remember to whip him extra hard.
I think the very first "American" identity was created at that moment, and it was specifically racist. It was designed to convert the ruling English and their Scots-Irish servants from traditional enemies into a single colonizing army. We've never fully repudiated it, because we've never accepted that America needed this giant caste scam to keep investors happy and be economically viable. A new American identity would have to demolish all the values that the rich skillfully wove into the Bacon's Rebellion settlement, the very same values the GOP and Christian Right will kill to preserve.
But what if this pathology had an evolutionary advantage? Humans were never meant by nature to live in a crowded, diverse human environment that requires dealing with strangers and negotiating with radically different moral systems. Loyalty insured one's kinship group would have a survival advantage over others. But aggregation into larger and larger societies means we needed new ways to define "us" and "them". And boy, we've tried them all.
Or, they're just planning to do what they did in 1876, passing one law after another to disqualify more minority voters so that whites always stay ahead. Maybe even swapping Jim Crow schemes with their Likud buddies in Israel.
It's amazing to me that no one believes that many whites are still willing to conspire to disenfranchise blacks, when it's worked all too well in the past. The only logical deterrent to such a monstrous crime is massive, potentially violent resistance, yet if anyone on the Left talks about fighting back on any issue at all, he's shouted down by liberals and centrists.
The reason is that up to now African-Americans have tended to bloc-vote for whichever political faction is most favorable to reducing inequality. So the black dissidents could theoretically obtain a constituency of 40,000,000 citizens and whatever resources a firebrand could talk them into sacrificing. Worse, they might embrace socialism. Whereas white dissidents are always at the political margin of white society, because most whites assume that it is for the best that their values dominate the land. Leave Kunstler to his Sisyphean task, he can't make whites give up what they have. The annihilation of the Black Panther leadership, while black gangsters and the right-wing Black Muslims were mostly left alone, was a way of sending a message to blacks about not challenging white capitalist society.
Good observation on WWII. I think Southerners and northern bigots were fighting that war for a different idea of victory than FDR's liberal supporters. But the need for propagandists to paper this schism over laid the groundwork for much of our cultural strife since 1945: those who think Nazism discredited white supremacy, militarism, and even inequality in total, versus those who think that America simply proved it is populated by and best run by the true master race.
1. No. You're talking about putting a giant blanket over a continent. We don't have the cash, and there would be too many consequences.
2. If, in fact, the methane hydrates are already in runaway release from the Arctic Ocean, we can kiss our asses goodbye, because it's far too late to save ourselves.
Besides the point of paving the way to biomethane use, the main good thing I could see about natural gas is CO2 sequestration at a gas-driven electrical plant being easier than at a coal-driven plant. But that doesn't mean that CO2 sequestration is really a proven concept, and our biased desire to imagine that it is could trap us into business-as-usual thinking.
Oh, but JT, it's much crazier than that. Consider that for 50 years the US was tyrannized by the Prohibition movement. If you saw Ken Burns' documentary "Prohibition", you saw a movement powered by WASP bigotry towards Catholic immigrants disguised as a punishment for behavior that was stereotyped as Catholic. But in those days the GOP was the Protestant party and the northern Democrats were the Catholic party, so it was also about that. In 1920 the GOP was pro-woman's suffrage, and pro-Prohibition. Why? Because their strategists believed if women got the vote, the drunken, wife-beating Micks and Dagos would not let their wives vote, while GOP WASPS would march their wives to the polls to unleash a reign of anti-immigrant terror.
All of which came true, sad to say.
But vengeance came when the GOP ran American into the '29 Crash, and women switched parties out of fear of their children starving. The Catholics and Dems were on top, Prohibition was banned, and alcohol suddenly became as American as apple cider.
Three years later, marijuana was outlawed.
You know, the Ni**er drug.
And that's the politics behind drug policy. Bigotry dictates even to capitalism. White Protestants and Catholics still think that pot makes their children "act black". When that changes, everything else will change.
Do you think that Beijing is improving its university system with an eye to bringing all their students in the US home becuause they recognize our own system is being starved, dismantled and privatized?
The Christian Right has obsessively targeted the USAF, especially at the Academy in Colorado Springs, where many theocratic leaders are located. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has fought this tirelessly, but clearly high-ranking sympathizers within the service are protecting these indoctrination efforts.
However, the very idea of an Air Force is essentially ideological and thus political. Recall Billy Mitchell; he was an acolyte of Douhet as were founders of the RAF. Douhet claimed that strategic bombing of civilian populations would make war unthinkable; the pursuit of this discredited faith (at least short of nukes) by Mitchell's lieutenants led to the very political Strategic Air Command led by Curtis LeMay (later George Wallace's running mate in his '68 White House bid).
I've gotten so angry about it that I'm convinced the nuclear religion of LeMay is simply merging with the apocalyptic religion of the theocrats, with a shared goal of overthrow of the government.
Those forces indoctrinated to attack fake enemies abroad will be available to attack fake enemies at home. I guess since our forces completely bungled the mission of getting even one Moslem country to be our obedient colony, the masterminds behind this were putting all their chips on the domestic option, where the odds would be a lot more favorable to them.
This is not happening by blunder. Christian extremist organizations are pulling every string they can to get their "experts" teaching propaganda courses to government employees and the military.
The theocratic movement spits at the government, yet loves the parts that wear uniforms. Which should tell you something about what they've got planned.
I doubt if many at this site are in the market for a $49,900 full-size luxury sedan, but you ought to know that the US-built Tesla Model S electric-powered sedan is now in pre-production, with cars expected to reach dealers during July. That price will get you an estimated range of 185 miles, depending on which test cycle you measure by. You can probably find out on the Internet how much of your local electricity comes from renewable sources, and you can see if your electric company has a 100% wind plan as an option if you're willing to pay for home charging equipment. Electricity is not produced in the US using imported fuel. Even if that's produced by coal, the CO2 emissions should be less than any non-hybrid gasoline car, since it will be rated at the equivalent of close to 100 mpg.
Due to its lack of an engine, the hatchback sedan has a trunk in the front as well, and 2 rear-facing folding seats in the back. So this is a 7-passenger car, comparable in performance and handling to the largest German and Japanese sedans and the cheaper Chrysler 300. The price is after the US tax credit, but some localities have additional subsidies.
The problem of leaving more oil behind for other nations to burn is called Jevon's Paradox. So you're not alone in your concerns. There's a particular branch of this paradox called the Export Land Model, which says that oil-producing countries will have abnormal economic growth as the price of oil rises, so they will burn more of their own oil and have less to export. Not just joyriding around in Cadillacs or putting up silly skyscrapers, the oil exporters may simply convince the big corporations that the surest way to keep their own factories running is to move to their territory and use the oil for electricity or for plastics.
Ah, but the trap there is that he then has to excuse his relatively liberal positions as governor of Massachusetts to his GOP base as being errors of his middle age. That's a long run of errors to admit to.
Romney beating up somebody because of his hair is truly hilarious. Did Romney use his own nylon perm like a Bob's Big Boy head to bludgeon the poor hippie? I could imagine Romney and George W. Bush running around together terrorizing the campus like the droogs in Clockwork Orange.
The "hint, hint" here is that Mormons = homophobia. It is well-known in the gay community that the Mormon church was the single entity most responsible for getting California's anti-gay marriage proposition passed, a vast effort seemingly unprecedented in Mormon history.
None of that means Romney is still the chuckleheaded punk he was in the '60s, but it forces him to keep "clarifying" how much he shares his church's continuing hatred of sharing equal citizenship with gays. And we know how bad Mitt is at clarifying things.
Looks like this is what the rest of the campaign is going to look like, folks. Good. If we want Democrats to be able to take the advanced positions they took in the New Deal era, they're going to have to learn to play hardball like they did in the New Deal era, instead of the GOP fighting a one-sided civil war that scares all the rest of us away from taking any controversial stands on anything that matters. If they have to finally play defense, the bad guys have to spread that Citizens United blood money more thinly among their offensive projects like scaring blacks away from voting or normalizing prison slave labor.
If Netanyahu and his long-time friend Romney were plotting an October surprise to win the US election, it required unilateral action. It sounds like Netanyahu now has a ramshackle coalition that is incapable of this strength of will. He's lost his leverage in this particular conflict.
Or as Prof. Cole has always said, Netanyahu was just a bully who could be stood up to, and now it's caught up with him.
Excellent observation as to how wage cuts were hidden by two-income families. However, as to the part about reasonable health, energy, food and education systems in the future, it sure seems that the intent of our owners is to do exactly the opposite. Is that because all of those things require deferred gratification, and as we get poorer we lose the ability to stand any more deferrals, or is it because the owners have a replacement socioeconomic model for our future that protects their interests by having the rest of us live lives brutish, nasty and short?
What we know as civilized behavior is something that exists when the pie is growing. Now the pie is shrinking.
This is the first time in our history that the rich have proven that they can get richer by making everyone else poorer. Even the worst robber barons of the GOP-beloved Gilded Age knew they needed more-affluent, better-educated consumers. Now, their descendants don't. They will never let go of this disastrous process, even as society crumbles around them.
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Here is an organization that's fighting back:
http://www.authenticjournalism.org/
They train independent journalists, mostly in Latin America, to cover the stories the corporations won't. They are connected to the Narconews.com site, which has had what I think was the best English-language coverage of the Bolivian revolution, the coup in Honduras, and Javier Sicilia's movement against the bloody drug war in Mexico.
The transformation of Latin America in the last dozen years from neoliberal rape victim to a cauldron of native-peoples', anarchist and anti-globalist agitation and victory at the polls is a remarkable story that our media simply left our public in the dark about. Is Latin America not just as important a part of US hegemony as the Middle East, and more important than Central Asia? We've largely lost all three provinces but while the media lied about the ME and C. Asia, it merely ignored Latin America's uprising against Wall Street.
"Clinton said that in a democracy we are used to people exercising their right to demonstration."
That's ironic. From what I've seen, most Americans are very unfamiliar with that right, especially when it's used to oppose the overwhelming power of wealth.
The point of the 19th Century Scramble For Africa was immediate economic payback. This article cannot directly correlate our obsessive war on Islamists with the big resource payoff. If it were simply about oil, our troops would all be going to Guinea or Nigeria, disgusting as our relationship with those regimes already is.
Meanwhile, all the Chinese have to offer Africa is investment, jobs and trade. They will win.
I'd say that America's senility has advanced to the point where it sends troops places because it has no other idea of how to interact with other societies.
You are correct, but I think the British viewed the Boer camps as a temporary measure in what they mistakenly assumed would be a short foreign war. The Soviet use of camps against their own citizens gets closer to the idea of permanent removal of entire peoples from one's own territory. However, the Czar wasn't exactly running a artist's retreat in Siberia, Mark. Solzhenitsyn was a reactionary maniac who worshipped Czardom. Don't forget the Czar's own black propaganda machine forged the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to slander Jews worldwide. Only a sick society produces the kind of hatred that fed the pogroms, and the Communists, themselves victimized by repression and torture, directed it in a different direction than the Czar did.
In a sense, Ron, America and Israel are the last two unreconstructed European-nationalist states. By which I mean, a Western nation-state that indoctrinates:
Exceptionalism
Military and cultural imperialism as mandate
War as eternal and purifying
The rich as the purest distillment of our tribe's superior culture, the rest as midlevel yet still "brothers" of the elite, and all foreigners as only fit to be ruled
Obviously, this has a religious dimension too. The rest of Europe learned the hard way, got the shit kicked out of it in various wars especially in the 20th Century, and has evolved past these characteristics. But since WW2 crowned America as hegemon without it really suffering, and gave Zionists their special status as victims ("everyone else got liebensraum, now we're owed a shot"), they alone got to skip the lesson that the UN Charter practically requires be enforced on everyone else.
I am not commenting here on non-Western nationalisms. Too complicated. I think there are also many benefits to nationalism, which is why the West had so much power. The problem is that sophisticated nationalists seem not to know how to fight back against atavistic throwbacks like us and the Israelis and a certain fellow with an ugly little mustache.
As for your dogma on the immutability and perfection of private property and markets, here is a link to a mythbusting essay at The Exile on the pioneers of capitalist thought and their real agenda: to use new and artificial claims of property rights to sabotage the traditional communalism of British peasants so they could be exploited in factories and enrich the sainted entrepreneur:
http://exiledonline.com/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/
For example:
"Arthur Young, a popular writer and economic thinker respected by John Stuart Mill, wrote in 1771: “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” According to Perelmen, “John Locke, often seen as a philosopher of liberty, called for the commencement of work at the ripe age of three.” "
"Even David Hume, that great humanist, hailed poverty and hunger as positive experiences for the lower classes, and even blamed the “poverty” of France on its good weather and fertile soil:
‘Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.”
This is the context in which the Commons were privatized, and later the Irish deliberately left to starve during the Potato Famine to extinct their "lazy" culture while the aristocracy raised cash crops to export.
All sounds pretty coercive to me.
By the way, what are people supposed to do when they must choose between buying insurance and making their rent because your free-enterprise theology cheered on mass outsourcing and offshoring by billionaires?
Oh right, that's how Christian Right charities bail out the poor expecting to be repaid by increasing their flocks. No wonder they want the government out of the way of their march to theocracy.
How much free will did we have in the Good Old Days that the Right continually insists it wants to bring back, when church-run censorship boards, religiously-inspired bans on alcohol and blasphemy, Biblically-justified white supremacy, bigotry against "Christ-killers", and bigotry against Papists all operated in a "free" society with limited government? Seems that one institution just fills the power vacuum caused by the fall of another, and I'd rather have the one I can vote in.
So basically, just like Medieval feudalism?
According to Adam Smith, true markets have perfect information and perfect mobility and rational decision makers. People are not rational about getting sick and dying; they freak out and take whatever deal they can get. Furthermore, they have no way of knowing whether they're getting a good product unless they are knowledgeable about medical matters, and modern technoloogy has vastly outstripped the common-sense knowledge of the modern worker in an advanced, highly specialized economy. Which means that all the leverage is on the side of the supplier.
And what the Hell ever happened to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's"?
Everyplace else has already discovered that medical markets don't really "clear"; too many people have to do without as they must in America; that's why so many countries have done what they've done. So move to Somalia already.
If we are backsliding further and further away from TR's views on health care and social well-being, you can be certain we will eventually backslide on racism and imperialism, because all these failures are a return to the past, and all these injustices in the past worked together to maintain control of the poor by the rich.
In other words, all forms of inequality are branches of one ideological principle, which our enlightened forefathers labored to overcome - and which we are falling back into.
I think that because things went so badly when the US tried to manufacture elections in Iraq:
(a) US media expects everyplace Arab to be like this.
(b) Far too much of the audience hates seeing that Arabs can do it better without us.
So now the meme is stuck too deep to debunk. Sorry, just a whole other area of reality that is permanently off limits to the American mind.
Wow, people are reacting badly to this post and completely skipping the point: why does a significant American cultural faction seem to celebrate as patriotic the fact that the poor get lousy health care? Instead, we're arguing about the geographic distribution of that faction so as to prove that it doesn't exist.
Remember, the Republicans took away much of DC's self-government during the Gingrich era on the implied notion that blacks can't govern themselves. So DC voters have less of a voice in our democracy than anyone who lives in the 50 states.
But you know, those states may be the way they are as a result of the intentional design of 20 generations of oligarchic elites. The Southern states were most opposed, besides the most famous issue, to public education, female suffrage, and the GI Bill. There's a brutal and refreshingly honest War Nerd column where he points out that the US made progress on several domestic fronts during the Civil War because the Southern congressmen were no longer there to block reform. War Nerd didn't even mention the Homestead Act.
Problem is, the oligarchic brainwashing took, and now ordinary people think that their political dogma is an infallible tradition mandated by God, and the rest of the world is Satanic. You can actually see the resistance of the poor Scots-Irish to the agenda of the plantation elite erode from century to century. Ironically, the new elite, the German auto execs who came to Alabama to exploit union-hating proles, are now victims of the xenophobic laws and cops created by this culture.
Yeah, but Harding simply let other people plunder. Romney does his own.
The question is, what % of Americans actually believe that such actions disqualify one to be president? I really want to know; it seems the opinions of Americans on what capitalists should or should not be able to get away with depend heavily on how the question is asked. Maybe pro-business Americans live in a fantasy land where scumbags are an unusual exception, ergo they disapprove of their crimes but oppose regulations that affect all the "good" businessmen. Maybe they even have a certain bigotry that makes them see "bad" businessmen as Jews and effete Eastern liberals, and "good" businessmen as hearty cowboy-hat wearing factory owners who share the values of their workers and would never contaminate their water supplies.
Which is exactly the attitude that has gotten us the oligarchy we have today.
The problem is, by your definition the United States has only had one actual president during any point since Nixon was impeached: another Dick, last name Cheney.
This is too terrifying a concept for me to contemplate.
I think one problem with American perceptions is that we have been kept in the dark about the multi-staged overthrow of pro-US juntas in countries like Turkey, Brazil and South Korea, and the relationship of that to their subsequent economic success. Our capitalist media refused to talk about the crimes of those regimes, so as usual we were surprised when they fell, if we even bothered to notice. Note that fashionably antiwar leftists also have given those developments short shrift; it didn't fit their narratives either.
We really are very ill prepared to deal with the dismantling of the US hegemony, continent after continent, and the inevitable good and bad of the consequent new governments. But looked at in the time scale of the decline of the Hapsburgs or the Ottomans, it is clear that our levers over the rest of the world are being broken faster than we can replace them with new killing machines. This ought to be a cause for celebration, but left and right we're just as stupid as everyone else who lived in a self-absorbed, nostalgic declining empire.
Well no, the USA was a slave oligarchy holding the union's survival hostage over its demands for a government too weak to interfere with the oligarchy's system of exploitation - a dictatorship of property and cultural control. The slave economy was the most valuable thing in the new country, and it in turn fed money into the shipbuilding and banking sectors in the North. So no surprise they got what they wanted, creating the flaws and conflicts that bedeviled a country that rapidly outstripped its slaveowning sector, leading to a civil war 70 years later.
However, the fact that war happened does not illegitimate the very existence of the country beforehand. Our republic, flawed as it was, lent great evidence to the causes of those opponents of monarchical tyranny in Europe. We should be ashamed that it took us so long to overthrow that first oligarchy, and that we so quickly let it be replaced by a second. I don't think the Egyptian junta will prove so durable, do you?
The responses on that article are terrifying. Half are saying that there is no warming and it's all a lie by greedy governments and scientists (as if Big Oil lacks the incentives to tell lies of its own), and the other half says that warming will be good for us.
The first group is being more strategic in its lying. To admit that runaway capitalism is capable of changing climate at all is to open Pandora's box. If 1 degree is good, we still have to deal with the possibility that 2 degrees is harmful, and 4 degrees catastrophic. Better to deny everything than to leave open questions of liability.
Generally, when a great empire is corrupted and lobotomized by its power, the force that finally overthrows it and exposes its fallacies is the rise of a new empire dedicated, for the time, to better ideas.
In other words, people are too greedy to give up a bad idea until they see another idea that's more profitable, not more just.
Well, how can that happen this time? As Kevin Phillips pointed out in "American Theocracy," each great new capitalist power in turn has relied on a form of energy that causes even greater pollution. So whomever surpasses America and overthrows its corporate tyranny and discredits its myths must be an even bigger polluter.
If it comes down to a war, well, there will certainly be a lot fewer people capable of consuming energy afterwards.
No, torture is not new to Syria. It also was probably not new to any of the countries that came to have the worst regimes in history. I bet a few German secret policemen beat a few suspects long before Hitler came along, and same for Italian cops and certainly Czarist cops before their worst tyrants.
The question is, if Syria succeeds this time in putting down a large rebellion via torture, doesn't that strengthen the case for governments to use torture everywhere? Given that government officials universally want to preserve their power and study other governments to see what they can get away with, isn't the victory of torture as a strategy anywhere, including the USA, a threat everywhere?
Orders of magnitude, anyone?
Well, that's certainly why GOP contribution-seekers are upset. But what's sinister is how energetically their followers, who do not objectively benefit from the private insurance oligopoly, have leapt onto the idea that decent health care for the poor is a deep, horrible, even casus belli injustice. For 3 years I've been telling people that we have to understand the implications of a right-wing movement that literally cannot be happy unless poor people are suffering due to their presumed lack of... what? Whiteness? Christianity? Entrepreneurship?
Yet it just seems to go without saying for the true believers, so the mainstream media buys their cover stories and lies about Canada and Europe wholesale. And Prof. Cole's recent entry about people on average being more against socialized medicine the worse their health is under the current system indicates that they are willing to accept the outcomes that our capitalist class/caste system dishes out to them, as long as they can see even greater suffering among those less "deserving" than themselves. I am not kidding, this is the road back to the Dark Ages, reversing the entire momentum of human progress via growing solidarity since the Renaissance - you know, "secular humanism".
Am I out of line in asking whether the foundation of modern American conservatism is sadism?
If Mr. Y has stuffed his basement full of enough mortar shells to blow up every house in the neighborhood many times over, including Mr. X's, and then lied about it repeatedly, Mr. X has a right to wish Mr. Y would go away.
Well, the Founding Fathers intentionally made the US flowchart complicated because they didn't trust democracy. As the country's wealthiest men they had reasons for this not necessarily valid for anyone else. But they also left the door open in the Constitution for future Americans to amend the situation, which has made the flowchart more democratic, but even more complicated.
Who's got cash to invest in Egyptian industry? Not the US. So it comes down to Saudi, which hates democracy in the Arab world, and China, which will tolerate democracy as long as it's far from China and creates a more stable business climate for its aggressive corporations. Unfortunately, the US can still screw you over if you don't do what it says, which in this case is likely to slavishly favor Saudi and Israel at China's expense.
These are terrible choices. Where did Turkey get its foreign capital from?
One man's rational analysis is another man's loudly proclaimed cultural oppression.
If we want to understand the incredible resistance of Red State America to restrictions on their self-destructive behavior while they vote like crazy to oppress gays and Latinos, we have to figure out what the priorities of their culture are. Problem is, we might discover something so ugly and primitive that even announcing the findings would get us smothered by angry denunciations, even from liberals. Christian extremists keep claiming that THEY'RE oppressed if gays are not being oppressed. If gays even protest at anti-gay rallies, the Santorums claim that this exercise of free speech is oppressive intolerance. If scientists dare to find the world is getting warmer or that fat and sugar are unhealthy, it's communistic oppression. If poor folks demand that their children not have to share their victimization due to inability to afford health insurance, that's oppression.
What do they consider freedom? In every case it is to go back to the infallible and morally superior past. Except, of course, when it comes to getting handouts that we see going to groups disproportionately composed of right-wingers: the elderly, veterans, and "entrepreneurs"/war profiteers.
So how do we boil this down?
We're not free unless we see people different than us suffer for that sin while the government rewards us for our superior virtue with war/police/prison jobs and cheap oil and subsidized junk food and our better-off relatives fix us up with jobs with health plans.
That's why rational analysis breaks down, Prof. Cole. Their absolute well-being means less to them than seeing that inferiors are kept worse-off. There is no other ideology. If you look at American history, it has always been this way in the hinterlands, among the gullible henchmen of the oligarchs. In Plato's Republic, Socrates asks a young aristocratic bully the meaning of justice, and he responds it is to help your friends and harm your enemies. 2400 years later, much of America still embraces this bigoted formula behind their contradictory bullshit about big government.
Note that Jefferson founded a state university. His self-proclaimed libertarian heirs want to privatize everything. Yet his actual heirs, the Southerners, will privatize the entire school system EXCEPT the universities. Why?
Football.
They're so deep into the culture of their football arms race against each other that they'd never risk disrupting on-field activities by removing the backstop of state support, no matter how Kentucky-Fried Randian the rest of their dogma is. The libertarians in turn prove their hypocrisy by not challenging their grass-roots benefactors on this. Even that douchebag Scott Walker up north in Wisconsin will privatize the branches of the state university, but not the main branch that plays big-time Big 10 football.
Doesn't it seem that this hypocrisy about state support is applied to both football and war? George Carlin long ago demonstrated the similarities of the two. It's as if football is the state-sponsored tribal indoctrination ceremony that keeps the warrior tribe's fresh blood receptive to the biggest state-sponsored activity of all. All this Southern talk about individualism and personal responsibility, and then they pound their sons' brains into damaged mush to loyally serve the most authoritarian and hierarchical of all sports (and yes, my favorite, along with war).
Don't forget all those stadiums that even Tea Partiers vote tax money to rather than lose their NFL teams. No wonder there's no money for health care or education. Priorities.
The modern South Carolinian won't have a cane; he'll be riding in an old-folks scooter paid for by Medicare, wearing a Medicare-provided oxygen mask because his lungs were destroyed by "harmless" cigarettes and "nonexistent" industrial pollution.
But a scooter can run you down, man.
The plan in the UK and Canada seems to be to sabotage the functions of public hospitals, then use the decline in quality to justify all-out privatization. The public is easily confused about the difference between a public institution, a public institution that contracts out services, a privatized institution that is guaranteed tax money, and a truly marketized enterprise.
This sounds terribly like what is being done to destroy America's public school system and go back to church-controlled and oligarch-controlled schools which teach superstition and worship of wealth. Here is an example of the wretched education being tax-funded in Louisiana:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/6/17/9311/48633/Front_Page/Nessie_a_Plesiosaur_Louisiana_To_Fund_Schools_Using_Odd_Bigoted_Fundamentalist_Textbooks
Well, the key to that is that in some universal health care systems, like Germany, private insurance companies exist, but apparently they run like non-profits. Now these things are relative, since there's still the matter of what medical bureaucrats, pharmaceutical corporations, and doctors and nurses are paid. But the form of the insurance company (or lack of same) seems to be what drives the rest of the system. America's insurance companies seem to be the most rapacious and arrogant on earth, so no health care plan can be passed without paying them an enormous ransom in some fashion. It is now inconceivable that Americans could nationalize their insurance comopanies the way they once did greedy utility companies.
So according to the map, the best chance to get American funding for your health care is to be a citizen of a country (Afghanistan) that is in a state of war with America.
The mouse roars again!
I think we're awfully close to that already. The govt is only tolerated by the aristocracy as a collection of lucrative contracts awarded to their companies on the basis of campaign contributions. Having the govt as a central collection agent not only is more effective, what with it being armed, but it directs the resentment of the voters about their increasingly crappy services towards the government, instead of the private contractors. Then the contractors kick back their booty to far-right Congressmen (as happened in the Duke Cunningham scandal) to promote more hatred of the government, for which the only solution is to have more businessmen in charge of government and more privatization of services.
It's a no-lose gambit for the bad guys.
You sound like a 1950s southern businessman whining about the activism of the Warren Supreme Court on civil rights - because everybody "knew" that the South's economy absolutely depended on white oligarchy to function and it would be doomed under integration.
Sometimes more inequality is just for the purpose of more inequality.
Respondents may not consciously think that US hegemony over the Middle East is doing anybody any real good. Yet the power of imperialism is that it plays on emotions, emotions we may be ashamed of admitting we have. Fear and pride make people want power over the world even when they don't know what to do with it.
So a fear-based campaign by Romney is not surprising. Reagan pulled that crap on Carter by implying he would have kept the Shah in power if he'd been able. Yet Reagan's people may have already been secretly and illegally dealing with Khomeini during the election campaign, and absolutely did so after Reagan got into power. He planted the fear that Carter had harmed America by not going to war over the Shah, but he obviously had zero intention of doing it himself.
The Morocco part of this entry reflects a continuing problem with electricity supplies: the countries that are best at producing the energy collector (PV panels, wind turbines) are not the best places to locate the installations, and the best countries to locate the installations are not the places that have the most money to pay for the electricity (the West Texas wind problem). Fossil fuels are fungible, and so desirable that we don't much care where they come from as long as they don't get cut off. If we had reached that point in our thinking about renewables, then every PV panel made in Germany would get shipped straight to Morocco where it could be used with maximum benefit instead of wasting its time on a barn roof on the North Sea, and the electricity would go straight to Spain to enter an all-EU power grid largely used by Germany.
But the world's pipelines still have more reach than its power lines, until someone is willing to make all the investments to complete a modern energy system.
I think that renewable energy will prove to be relatively labor-intensive, watt for watt, compared to fossil fuels. That's why so many capitalists loathe renewables. They naturally want everything to be capital-intensive, giving them all the control. But we need jobs, and so do Moroccans. Converting solar and wind energy into electricity can be compared to farming or manufacturing a consumer good. Oil and coal are like siphoning gas tanks in an unguarded parking lot - very little work until you run out of tanks.
Well, it's probably the future of aerial reconnaissance, because it can fly all day, charge its batteries, and maybe never have to come down at all. Which is not necessarily good news for folks worried about Big Brother. What this technology can't do is lift a lot of human beings and move them around quickly. Ironically, the Pentagon and the airlines both feel they must have alternatives to petroleum-based fuel for their jets, and have tried to subsidize the biofuel industry by buying experimental algae-based fuels at a high cost for flight research. But the Republicans in the House Armed Services committee are trying to ban this practice so (the non Big Oil-owned part of) the biofuels industry will starve from lack of funding. Otherwise, that's your best bet for the future of environmentally sound airline travel.
The scenario you outline would be true if the American hegemony did not override the sovereign rights of its allies. Germany is not an independent nuclear actor, the UK is our partner in crime, and France can be pressured. Put it bluntly, with so much love of Israel and hatred of France propagated by every capitalist and conservative institutions, and with Americans totally ignorant of international law and so full of double standards, I could see the US threatening to nuke France for attempting to avenge its contaminated citizens. The people of France, and all Europe, mean nothing to us compared to the People of the Bible.
Yes, there's money and support, but the key is how it is made available and distributed. The really deadly lobbies in the US are the ones that have bought BOTH parties. This seems to require awesome resources, otherwise every pressure group would have already done this generations ago. But Israel got a shortcut. It naturally had its supporters in place in the Democratic Party. But it got the GOP as a gift from the Christian Right in the 1970s, and moved quickly to colonize it (something that Israel is pretty good at).
Also, in order for any of these lobbies to usefully control both parties, it must force at least one of the parties to betray much of its base - which is why it's ridiculous to expect blacks to split their votes between the parties; the GOP will never betray its racist faction to give blacks what they want. The Israel lobby, however, got the Democratic Party because it got many of the party's most loyal factions to embrace blind spots in their principles (and understanding of the facts) where Israel is concerned. Human rights, anti-colonialism and anti-white supremacy simply are not modern Republican principles, so no need for cognitive dissonance on that side.
It seems partly to involve the beliefs of the small businessman sector in Turkey, which was apparently neglected by the wealthy secular ruling elite. However, the AKP's populism - and the anti-US protests that occurred in 2003 when the AKP failed to be sufficiently populist - might have spurred a revival of people's belief that their votes and labor matter. Which is a profound truth completely rejected by US-capitalist mainstream doctrine. Even in a dictatorship like China, shouldn't patriots work harder knowing that the fruits of their labor are being reinvested in national strength instead of being stolen by Wall Street as in the old neoliberal/IMF model?
In any case, the invasion of Iraq and destabilization of Syria have created many economic burdens for Turkey, which makes its successes all the more impressive.
Gee, the results - if not the use of warplanes to obtain them - sound a lot like how the FBI wiped out the Black Panthers during the Cointelpro days (while not having much of a problem with the right-wing, pro-capitalist Black Panthers or for that matter, the heroin gangs, the cocaine gangs, and the crack gangs).
Gee, maybe the bloody record of Iraq has made the Left more afraid of an Egyptian military backed by the USA than anybody else. That's America's legacy in the region.
Scott, Kat;
In the documentary "The Fog of War", McNamara said that General LeMay confessed that the firebombing of every major city in Japan would be ruled a war crime if it was done by the side that lost a war.
I think the legal issues of cremation-bombing millions of people even in a Congressionally-approved war have been ignored by subsequent generations of Americans. I believe this is because the firebombings were so quickly followed by the advent of nuclear weapons. It was in the interest of American policymakers to entangle the two; if the world lets the US kill a million Japanese civilians to retaliate for Pearl Harbor, then there was no doubt that the US would do even worse if the USSR struck US military targets. However, note that once this sequence is played out with nukes, Congressional authorization disappears (probably because Congress would disappear when the first nuke hits Washington).
The irony of this is that the Pearl Harbor-justifies-Tokyo argument made nuclear deterrence very stable; there were no doubts. But America wanted a monopoly on this argument, but ended up with the USSR equipped to join in the chorus, later joined by more and more nations.
So the US hypocritically undermined deterrence, looking for an edge against the USSR. That meant trying to disconnect bombings of Soviet allies from Soviet retaliation, trying to wage covert wars unseen by Congress, and finding ways to reduce the death toll of bombing so we could do it whenever we pleased without consequences.
All of these things reduced the chance of megadeath wars, at the cost of making US wars happen more often. That's the second irony, leading directly to the drone strikes. Pick your poison.
Now if Congress had done its job and ruled the Cold War to be a "special case" because of the USSR's rapid overkill capability, then we'd have a clear line drawn between justifying warfare against civilians as part of a struggle with WW2-level consequences, versus using it to wage pathetic wars of colonial maintenance. But as we've seen with the decay of the War Powers Act, Congress doesn't have the discipline to reassert its prerogatives in conflicts in which there is clearly no imminent danger of America being destroyed. If we lived in such a world, then it would be in Congress' ballpark to decide whether bombing some Pakistanis while aiding other Pakistanis made any sort of sense.
But you know what? I think in that world, Congress would still rubber-stamp whatever the Administration asked for, because it wants global hegemony maintained and the Vietnam experience taught it that merely questioning our conduct in wars of colonial maintenance can endanger our hegemony.
Well, a majority in the Senate doesn't mean a damn thing if your party's senators decide to adopt rules ensuring that every major piece of legislation requires 60% approval. I'm sure the many conservative Democrats in the Senate pushed for that exactly for the purpose of joining Republicans in obstruction when their corporate masters demanded it. The question is, why did neither Senate liberals or Obama see that this would occur and take a hard stand against the Blue Dogs out of simple self-interest? In fact, the concept of single-payer was so obscure among Democrats that even liberals would have been divided on it.
That is the nature of the Democratic Party.
You are correct, but I wanted to word it this way to emphasize how scared Americans would be if they actually found out that everyone else believes in universal health care, decent working conditions, global warming issues. Which by our standards means that the world is Socialist, maybe even Communist. Liberals react badly to being threatened on their left flank, because perserving wealth and capitalism still is vital to them.
It worries me that the gulf between Americans and the rest of the world is now so great that if liberal, moderate, and independent Americans knew how far to the Left everyone else is, they'd freak out and push the button. For instance, do they know that the conservative party in Mexico is the one pushing for legalizing marijuana?
Has there ever been an empire that was not a captive of a self-serving ideology? I don't see how else an empire can be created. And I don't see any alternative to its eventual doom. Unfortunately, declining empires just get mugged and usurped by rising empires with their own lies. Presumably, the newer ones have more recently taken stock of reality, their leaders have developed strategies to deal with that reality, and they have fewer entrenched interests standing in the way of their ambitions. Then the rot starts all over again. That's about all the improvement we get out of this process.
Want to bet that when the post-Reconstruction white Southerners passed laws imposing literacy tests, the grandfather clause, and poll taxes to dilute the black vote, their excuse was that it would stop voter fraud? Not a damn thing has changed in the hearts of conservatives.
Odd that Tea Partiers, and their militia antecedents, spend so much time denouncing armed Federal power as enslavement, but revel in military and surveillance technology pouring into their states to control people's movements.
Guess their only problem is with who gets enslaved.
Mr. Wayne,
You have the values of a true citizen, which cannot exist under capitalism taken to its logical end. In other words, to the Tea Partiers and libertarians, the very fact that you care about the welfare of others marks you as an inferior, a race traitor, an Ayn Rand villain, who deserves to live in poverty and misery until you accept your proper role of making the rich richer, which is the only source of American power.
Ken Burns' "The Civil War" mentions a naive Mississippi politician who recoiled at the idea of putting slaves in the Confederate Army by innocently bleating, "But if the Negro makes a good soldier, our entire system is wrong."
In the same way, if a person with your values has any worth, their entire system is wrong.
@PRS Bullshit. If government workers are overcompensated, then that would make labor markets more competitive, and drive wages in the private sector up, while "unfairly" driving down earnings of salaried executives and shareholders. In fact, during 30 years of Republican economic war against unions, wages have been going down, while executive and shareholder earnings have swollen grotesquely. Which also demolishes your next bullshit riposte that "globalization" requires the wage cuts to get down to Chinese/Indian levels; why don't our executives and shareholders have to endure the same race to the bottom with their Chinese counterparts?
Well, I'm sure the rich would be just fine with a coast-to-coast return of good old fashioned Southern plantation oligarchy, a tyranny of state-controlling oligarchs, co-opted churches, lynch mobs, and the KKK as ultimate enforcer, none of which required tax money. Conservatives, especially those with a drawl, keep screaming that their ancestors ran a better America than we have now; what else could they be referring to? Fascism is hard work, and it requires keeping the mob involved yet deceived. It's what they will impose on us only if we resist the neo-Confederate model, until they break our will.
All the pieces are in place: lots of ordinary folks in debt, conversion of prisons into for-profit sweatshops, privatization of the military/co-optation of militia extremists, and of course the enthronement of the "entrepreneur" as apex of business, government and Christianity. The passive deference of Wal-Mart employees is an easier path to power than rallying 4 million crazy Brownshirts as Hitler had to do.
It doesn't matter if the voters say they don't have a problem with unions, only public-sector unions. Once you gut the wages of government workers, that deforms the entire labor market. Anyone with the slightest understanding of markets should be able to figure that out. Either they don't care because they hate government workers so much, or they hate the people whom they perceive as receiving government services so much.
We still have a country where close to half the population believes it can save itself by returning to the 19th century, and it's willing to demonize, imprison, outlaw, downsize, outsource, water-cannon, tear-gas, and disenfranchise the other half to get there. It's a civil war being fought by only one side because the other side can't believe that Americanism stands for such evils.
If science will no longer tell a selfish person what he wants to hear, he will turn to ideologues. If ideologues no longer tell him what he wants to hear, he will turn to religion. When religions no longer tell him what he wants to hear, he turns to terrorists.
I could have replaced the word "selfish" with "addicted", and not changed the rest. The ultimate form of capitalism would be the creation and feeding of addictions, since it ensures highest profits even while wages and manufacturing costs are declining. Therefore, we should expect addicts to become the norm, with the ever-more selfish behavior that characterizes the addict as his time horizons shorten.
No matter how many denier scams get knocked down, ordinary addicts will not change until they are conscious that they face ruination, which usually is after it has already happened. That would be too late for the planet, so we'd have to hope for some other kind of ruination to force them to go cold-turkey first. Peak Oil represents one possible avenue for this, but the potential war effects are so vast that we might end up extinct anyway.
If you had just risked your life overthrowing a military dictatorship, which unfortunately has many supporters lurking in the shadows, do you just want to turn around and throw it away months later by letting its generals unite behind a stealth candidate? How about letting top Nazis run in the first democratic elections in Germany after WW2? Not allowed, and democracy got the time it needed to develop genuine support.
As far as I can tell, Hezbollah does a better job of governing both its own Shia base and people of other faiths than any of the other crooks and princelings found east of Suez. Maybe Lebanon and Syria should be reunited under the one organization most competent at basic functions of government until they're all ready for real power sharing. Oh, but I forgot that one's ability to rule Sunnis is strictly based on what bribery the Saudis will subsidize.
I've read that anti-Arab bigots in Israel teach that the Palestinians are the descendants of the Amelekites. Given the growing connections between those bigots and American Christian fundamentalists in cultivating illegal settlements, I wonder how long it is before the CEF curriculum is openly stated as a holy truth, and that America is thereby obligated to assist Israel in ethnic cleansing.
This is probably off topic, but whenever I see one of these stories about Christian extremism in America I can't sleep unless I've passed it along and I can't think of a better place than Prof. Cole's site. In this case, it's the coordinated indoctrination of kids at Christian clubs at over 3200 public schools to not only confront, but embrace Old Testament accounts of Jehovah-ordered genocide by Hebrews against other Middle Eastern peoples.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/6/1/143236/9245
This is a big step by far-right Christians, who have always soft-pedaled the murderous aspects of Jehovah when in the public eye. Here is a chilling excerpt from the article:
'Paraphrasing the Old Testament scripture I Samuel 15:2-3, the Child Evangelism Fellowship's new lesson plan teaches, "You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) - people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left." The manual then instructs the teacher to tell students, "That was pretty clear, wasn't it?"'
For God's sake (!), every single time you read or hear a Christian proclaim that only Moslems are violent or imperialist, hit them with this. Hit them hard. I'm bookmarking it for that very reason. There is no purpose to such indoctrination unless they're preparing to divine God's intentions about whom to murder right now at home or abroad.
From a strictly scientific standpoint, agribusiness is based on the premise of growing, not food, but ingredients for processed food. Those boxes of gummi worms, Lucky Charms, and individually wrapped breakfast bars that are pimped to kids and time-pressed commuters. They take a hell of a lot of energy to produce. They also use a lot of corn syrup. Since both of those are subsidized, the food seems priced fairly as a tradeoff for convenience. But obviously it won't feed anyone in the 3rd World.
This is turn is based on the premise that if you live in a city or suburb, you have to buy cartoonish foods prepackaged in boxes at a chain grocery; familiar brand names all the way. This is also untrue. We have the means to grow many edible plants in high-density facilities closer to their consumers. If you've ever been to Paris, you might notice early in the morning the trucks are pouring into the city to stock the little groceries on the ground floors of apartment buildings. We could streamline this process with local production. That leaves us with the bigger issue of grain production, which can't be moved on a whim and may face a future of climate shifts.
As for meat, you probably know about the whole grasslands vs. feedlots thing. Crowding cows into feedlots didn't save any land at all because more corn had to be grown to replace the grass they used to graze on.
We've got to spread the word that Robertson did business with a Gadafi agent. That should piss off both Robertson supporters and Gadafi supporters in America. Unfortunately, no one cares about the monstrous Taylor, because obviously he was sort of an ideological free agent. Gee, if only he'd made the mistake of messing with a US Christian Right-backed, gay-bashing regime like Joseph Kony tried in Uganda, every naive kid on the Internet would now be mindlessly chanting "Stop Taylor".
I agree. But it is very dangerous to make war seem consequence-free. Too many empires went down that road when their armies were optimal, and found themselves uncontrollably rolling down the road to hell when conditions turned against them. Remember what General Lee said during one of his great victories: "It is good that war should be so terrible, or we would soon grow too fond of it."
We've been fielding international death squads since the day the Cold War began. Usually we used locals, but I'm sure we've brought in foreign mercenaries many times. Compared to the far worse things we did during the Cold War, like some of the murderous governments we created and the coups we've sponsored, the death toll is pretty trivial. But the largest such act, Operation Phoenix, was very large and very bloody, and perhaps had the perverse result of killing the best and bravest leaders that Vietnam could have had, conveniently clearing the decks for Hanoi bureaucrats to sweep down and unify the country without any role for local Communists.
Church Committee or no Church Committee, it doesn't seem to me that there was ever a mandate from the American people to never use assassination as a weapon again if it saved a few bucks and a few of our boys. We simply don't value the lives of foreign human beings.
I don't know enough about Syria's current borders to comment on their legitimacy against the suggestion of partition. I know that in 1914 it was a Turkish province that included Lebanon, and that Faisal's Arab liberation movement intended it to be the capital of a single Arab kingdom that included Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. The UK approved this, then betrayed its ally Faisal.
So yet again, the problem of legitimate states and borders caused by that British and French treachery bites the world in the ass.
This is the Balkan problem: establishing a military force that truly has no bias or designated enemy, yet is effective at figuring out who the bad guy is and punishing him, even if he was last week's victim. No one ever trusts the referees. It is also an unnatural position for a military to be in. Ultimately, peacekeeping forces tend to fixate on one faction as the aggressor (US in Somalia and Lebanon) and get identified as the ally of its rival, leading to a surprise counterattack.
To me, the question is, what price will the Saudis demand to neutralize Syria as a supposed Shiite agent, and what price will Russia demand to preserve its prized naval base in the Mediterranean? America is too biased on both of these issues to be an honest broker.
Jesper, that sounds really good right up to the morning after the accident. That's the problem with nuclear; when each major nation in turn has its disaster, folks like you go into hiding until memories have faded, and then you all start putting out your crap that "the accidents are worth it". Which tells us that we can't trust you when you switch angles to "Thorium is safe", or "Fast breeders are safe", or "New reactor designs are safe". All of those might be true, but you have already shown by past words that in your hearts you don't care about the victims of the old designs, thus we suspect you might be willing to lie about the new ones.
The one thing that one never, ever, ever sees from a nuke advocate is humility, and that says the most of all.
But the richer you are, the more likely you are to believe that capitalism can't possibly cause the extinction of the human race, so the less motivated you are to buy your own solar homes. Whereas in Europe, rich people might believe differently, but the further north you are the richer you are, yet there's less sunlight. Southern Europe is in short-term survival mode right now. And the best solar sites in the world are either inhabited by the wretchedly poor or by oil economies.
It's like God is setting us all up with extinction by a sick joke, to prove to us that private property and self-interest have no relationship with long-term survival.
Cynical version: the realists have been carrying out a long-term plan to use war and tax cuts to exterminate social programs that give the non-rich leverage against the rich. So the oil war is well worth it.
Charitable version: the realists don't think it's worth the costs and risks changing our existing socioeconomic arrangments and picking a new set of elites via alternative energy when we surely are getting away with the status quo. This seems to be the main excuse given by AGW deniers, who obviously also deny any costs from the status quo.
A proxy war between Russia and Iran on one side and the Arab monarchies on the other. What a sickening nightmare, and a tribute to the evils of oil.
Wow, so you don't feel bad at all about all the genocides we didn't intervene against? I still feel bad about them, even though I don't know what we should have done to stop them. I think it would have been just if foreign powers had gone to war against our forefathers for what they were doing to the Native Americans. But they didn't, and other white men subsequently did the same in the colonial world with impunity, and then whites began doing it to other whites, and the Zionists took notes for Palestine. Economic sanctions don't seem to stop someone who believes that his economic problems can be permanently solved by eliminating a hostile people.
Just don't come crawling back here five years from now whining that Western failure to intervene against some genocide you actually give a damn about is an imperialist scheme to depopluate the 3rd World.
Time to be Mr. Barbarian again, and remind everyone that if I truly believed in a cause as a moral absolute, I would obey no arbitration, no negotiation, no UN resolution, and no peacekeeping force that opposed me. And people who think like that, rightly or wrongly, have a power that no one else has, and no one else can stand against.
There are situations where people feel they must win or die. Worse, there are situations where two conflicting peoples feel they must defeat the other or existence itself is not worthwhile. Until some transnational agency can work out the means to prevent these insane situations from even beginning, any peacemaking effort is potentially unjust, like some of the doozies the international community has tried to get Palestinians to swallow in order to bury the issue of land theft.
And yes, people can lie, and deliberately brainwash their children, and deceive the media and historians, to intentionally put their nation in a win-or-die siutation. They can claim their "way of life" requires enslaving others, or that their God promised them some dirt, or that their overthrown ruling class must be exterminated to the last child. We can say that international law can determine these to be unjust positions in arbitration of conflicts. We will find we haven't stopped many wars if we can't account for people with this mentality.
A former member of the Reagan administration wrote an autobiography in which he proudly admitted that the famous Reagan tax cut was designed to create a deficit-fueled fiscal crisis in later years so that social programs would be destroyed. Note that the other half of that was the big increase in military spending. War spending is welfare for right-wingers, enabled by bleeding money from welfare for those the right-wingers hate.
You would get in trouble for saying that most Republicans literally would rather start an unnecessary war rather than leave any money that might be used to help poor fellow citizens, but that is essentially what Bush did to our last budget surplus.
Less energy vulnerability = less paranoia
Less paranoia = less hunger for military and territorial power
Bad for the entire existing Israeli political establishment.
Maybe the crazies looking for an excuse to extend Greater Israel to the Euphrates (and its oil) have gotten as deeply into government as the Tea Party crazies on the House Armed Services Committee who recently voted to ban the Pentagon from paying a premium for biofuels that it's been testing in its vehicles in order to help develop alternative sources of oil. How dare the Pentagon define security as anything other than expansionism.
Still Dancing With Bashir, eh, IAF?
If I kick you out of the lifeboat as a sacrifice to the polluters, I get to hold onto my goodies and my house a little longer, until it's time to do it again, and again, and finally I'm the sacrifice. This is now less distasteful to Americans than the collective erosion of their standard of living from increased environmental action (since it goes without saying we won't raise taxes on the rich to do it).
Thus we are all turned against each other, as helpless as the people in the death lottery in the Hunger Games, while the polluters destroy one county after another for massive profits.
Well, it does look more and more like an end game to extract the maximum amount of consumption from Americans, lock that into shareholder wealth, while enabling it by creating private debts that one day must either be written off or repaid via some form of serfdom. If the propagandists are getting worse, it's because they don't expect to stick around the USA for the aftermath. If there are a group of propagandists who are getting better, however, one must consider the possibility that they intend to be the last oligarchs standing, holding title to all us serfs. Since we could hardly afford our present hegemonic military in such a scenario, the generals must be in the former group. They don't care about the long-term survival of any form of America.
That will never happen, because our history has never been about a struggle over liberty, but over power. There are no natural rights; the only thing that could be regarded as "natural" for humans is the hunter-gatherer band. We tossed that overboard by inventing agriculture, and thus gaining the power to store wealth, and use it to accumulate leverage over the less fortunate.
That being the case, we can only compare the well-being of ordinary people in wildly unequal societies with less unequal societies. Once the normal advantages of being rich have made a few very, very rich, they will manipulate all other institutions in society - government, religion, and culture, to gain a perpetual monopoly of power, including the ability to change the definition of words like "liberty". There are no principles as to how much government is right, or what the relationship of government power to religious power must be, there are only Darwinian experiments that produce more "successful" societies or less so. But that's a rigged game since our institutions work together to indoctrinate us in what qualifies as success. The final arbiter would be a model that succeeds in world conquest and elimination of all alternatives. Yet modern evolutionary theory suggests that such a monoculture will become a species-endangering disaster.
So that leaves us with the balance of terror between the classes and nations. If the humans who live for endless conquest and exploitation are willing to sacrifice more in pursuit of their sick desires than the rest of us are willing to sacrifice to defend what we call our basic rights, the bad guys will win whether they call themselves corporations or empires or messiahs.
The claim of the extreme libertarian Right is that government served the sole function of protecting property. To square that with a police state, all you need to do is convince property owners, especially the owners of just a little bit of cherished, ego-boosting property, that all other humans in American and in the rest of the world are criminal welfare pinkos, meaning the N-word, who do nothing with their lives except plot to steal from the haves. At that point, an infinitude of repressive measures can be justified, as long as they tend to harm the have-nots more than the haves. The military can take over the "rest of the world" paranoia; we already have private and police institutions hammering home fear of our fellow citizens.
Rand > Friedman > Pinochet. It's easy.
For Pat Buchanan to write that tribalism will always be with us is the equivalent of a heroin dealer proclaiming that the need for a high will always be with us. He's made a lucrative career out of exacerbating it for 45 years.
I think when America was colonized, Whiteness was manufactured by the elites precisely as a way of legitimizing the class system. Look into "Bacon's Rebellion", a 1676 crisis in Virginia which led to white indentured servants winning their freedom (and property! very important) - predicated on the importation of black slaves to replace their labor. In other words, your freedom depends on the black man's bondage, so remember to whip him extra hard.
I think the very first "American" identity was created at that moment, and it was specifically racist. It was designed to convert the ruling English and their Scots-Irish servants from traditional enemies into a single colonizing army. We've never fully repudiated it, because we've never accepted that America needed this giant caste scam to keep investors happy and be economically viable. A new American identity would have to demolish all the values that the rich skillfully wove into the Bacon's Rebellion settlement, the very same values the GOP and Christian Right will kill to preserve.
It would look a lot like being Canadian.
But what if this pathology had an evolutionary advantage? Humans were never meant by nature to live in a crowded, diverse human environment that requires dealing with strangers and negotiating with radically different moral systems. Loyalty insured one's kinship group would have a survival advantage over others. But aggregation into larger and larger societies means we needed new ways to define "us" and "them". And boy, we've tried them all.
Or, they're just planning to do what they did in 1876, passing one law after another to disqualify more minority voters so that whites always stay ahead. Maybe even swapping Jim Crow schemes with their Likud buddies in Israel.
It's amazing to me that no one believes that many whites are still willing to conspire to disenfranchise blacks, when it's worked all too well in the past. The only logical deterrent to such a monstrous crime is massive, potentially violent resistance, yet if anyone on the Left talks about fighting back on any issue at all, he's shouted down by liberals and centrists.
The reason is that up to now African-Americans have tended to bloc-vote for whichever political faction is most favorable to reducing inequality. So the black dissidents could theoretically obtain a constituency of 40,000,000 citizens and whatever resources a firebrand could talk them into sacrificing. Worse, they might embrace socialism. Whereas white dissidents are always at the political margin of white society, because most whites assume that it is for the best that their values dominate the land. Leave Kunstler to his Sisyphean task, he can't make whites give up what they have. The annihilation of the Black Panther leadership, while black gangsters and the right-wing Black Muslims were mostly left alone, was a way of sending a message to blacks about not challenging white capitalist society.
Good observation on WWII. I think Southerners and northern bigots were fighting that war for a different idea of victory than FDR's liberal supporters. But the need for propagandists to paper this schism over laid the groundwork for much of our cultural strife since 1945: those who think Nazism discredited white supremacy, militarism, and even inequality in total, versus those who think that America simply proved it is populated by and best run by the true master race.
1. No. You're talking about putting a giant blanket over a continent. We don't have the cash, and there would be too many consequences.
2. If, in fact, the methane hydrates are already in runaway release from the Arctic Ocean, we can kiss our asses goodbye, because it's far too late to save ourselves.
Besides the point of paving the way to biomethane use, the main good thing I could see about natural gas is CO2 sequestration at a gas-driven electrical plant being easier than at a coal-driven plant. But that doesn't mean that CO2 sequestration is really a proven concept, and our biased desire to imagine that it is could trap us into business-as-usual thinking.
See, with this kind of comprehensive strategic thinking, you have a real future at the Heritage Foundation or ALEC.
Oh, but JT, it's much crazier than that. Consider that for 50 years the US was tyrannized by the Prohibition movement. If you saw Ken Burns' documentary "Prohibition", you saw a movement powered by WASP bigotry towards Catholic immigrants disguised as a punishment for behavior that was stereotyped as Catholic. But in those days the GOP was the Protestant party and the northern Democrats were the Catholic party, so it was also about that. In 1920 the GOP was pro-woman's suffrage, and pro-Prohibition. Why? Because their strategists believed if women got the vote, the drunken, wife-beating Micks and Dagos would not let their wives vote, while GOP WASPS would march their wives to the polls to unleash a reign of anti-immigrant terror.
All of which came true, sad to say.
But vengeance came when the GOP ran American into the '29 Crash, and women switched parties out of fear of their children starving. The Catholics and Dems were on top, Prohibition was banned, and alcohol suddenly became as American as apple cider.
Three years later, marijuana was outlawed.
You know, the Ni**er drug.
And that's the politics behind drug policy. Bigotry dictates even to capitalism. White Protestants and Catholics still think that pot makes their children "act black". When that changes, everything else will change.
Do you think that Beijing is improving its university system with an eye to bringing all their students in the US home becuause they recognize our own system is being starved, dismantled and privatized?
The Christian Right has obsessively targeted the USAF, especially at the Academy in Colorado Springs, where many theocratic leaders are located. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has fought this tirelessly, but clearly high-ranking sympathizers within the service are protecting these indoctrination efforts.
However, the very idea of an Air Force is essentially ideological and thus political. Recall Billy Mitchell; he was an acolyte of Douhet as were founders of the RAF. Douhet claimed that strategic bombing of civilian populations would make war unthinkable; the pursuit of this discredited faith (at least short of nukes) by Mitchell's lieutenants led to the very political Strategic Air Command led by Curtis LeMay (later George Wallace's running mate in his '68 White House bid).
I've gotten so angry about it that I'm convinced the nuclear religion of LeMay is simply merging with the apocalyptic religion of the theocrats, with a shared goal of overthrow of the government.
Those forces indoctrinated to attack fake enemies abroad will be available to attack fake enemies at home. I guess since our forces completely bungled the mission of getting even one Moslem country to be our obedient colony, the masterminds behind this were putting all their chips on the domestic option, where the odds would be a lot more favorable to them.
This is not happening by blunder. Christian extremist organizations are pulling every string they can to get their "experts" teaching propaganda courses to government employees and the military.
Specifically their fake anti-terrorism experts:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/7/27/124440/274
And teaching missile crews that God supports nuclear war:
http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2356:jesus-loves-nukes-air-force-cites-new-testament-exnazi-to-train-officers-on-ethics-of-launching-nuclear-weapons
But also many other areas of military life:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/5/13/112530/361
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/10/27/161326/88
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2009/6/23/111516/011
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/9/17/15847/7077
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/11/30/11914/687
It's even happening at the state and local level:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/2/24/184312/553/Front_Page/_Constitution_Course_Suggested_for_Public_Employees_Produced_by_Theocratic_Southern_Nationalists
The theocratic movement spits at the government, yet loves the parts that wear uniforms. Which should tell you something about what they've got planned.
I doubt if many at this site are in the market for a $49,900 full-size luxury sedan, but you ought to know that the US-built Tesla Model S electric-powered sedan is now in pre-production, with cars expected to reach dealers during July. That price will get you an estimated range of 185 miles, depending on which test cycle you measure by. You can probably find out on the Internet how much of your local electricity comes from renewable sources, and you can see if your electric company has a 100% wind plan as an option if you're willing to pay for home charging equipment. Electricity is not produced in the US using imported fuel. Even if that's produced by coal, the CO2 emissions should be less than any non-hybrid gasoline car, since it will be rated at the equivalent of close to 100 mpg.
Due to its lack of an engine, the hatchback sedan has a trunk in the front as well, and 2 rear-facing folding seats in the back. So this is a 7-passenger car, comparable in performance and handling to the largest German and Japanese sedans and the cheaper Chrysler 300. The price is after the US tax credit, but some localities have additional subsidies.
The problem of leaving more oil behind for other nations to burn is called Jevon's Paradox. So you're not alone in your concerns. There's a particular branch of this paradox called the Export Land Model, which says that oil-producing countries will have abnormal economic growth as the price of oil rises, so they will burn more of their own oil and have less to export. Not just joyriding around in Cadillacs or putting up silly skyscrapers, the oil exporters may simply convince the big corporations that the surest way to keep their own factories running is to move to their territory and use the oil for electricity or for plastics.
Ah, but the trap there is that he then has to excuse his relatively liberal positions as governor of Massachusetts to his GOP base as being errors of his middle age. That's a long run of errors to admit to.
Romney beating up somebody because of his hair is truly hilarious. Did Romney use his own nylon perm like a Bob's Big Boy head to bludgeon the poor hippie? I could imagine Romney and George W. Bush running around together terrorizing the campus like the droogs in Clockwork Orange.
The "hint, hint" here is that Mormons = homophobia. It is well-known in the gay community that the Mormon church was the single entity most responsible for getting California's anti-gay marriage proposition passed, a vast effort seemingly unprecedented in Mormon history.
None of that means Romney is still the chuckleheaded punk he was in the '60s, but it forces him to keep "clarifying" how much he shares his church's continuing hatred of sharing equal citizenship with gays. And we know how bad Mitt is at clarifying things.
Looks like this is what the rest of the campaign is going to look like, folks. Good. If we want Democrats to be able to take the advanced positions they took in the New Deal era, they're going to have to learn to play hardball like they did in the New Deal era, instead of the GOP fighting a one-sided civil war that scares all the rest of us away from taking any controversial stands on anything that matters. If they have to finally play defense, the bad guys have to spread that Citizens United blood money more thinly among their offensive projects like scaring blacks away from voting or normalizing prison slave labor.
If Netanyahu and his long-time friend Romney were plotting an October surprise to win the US election, it required unilateral action. It sounds like Netanyahu now has a ramshackle coalition that is incapable of this strength of will. He's lost his leverage in this particular conflict.
Or as Prof. Cole has always said, Netanyahu was just a bully who could be stood up to, and now it's caught up with him.
Excellent observation as to how wage cuts were hidden by two-income families. However, as to the part about reasonable health, energy, food and education systems in the future, it sure seems that the intent of our owners is to do exactly the opposite. Is that because all of those things require deferred gratification, and as we get poorer we lose the ability to stand any more deferrals, or is it because the owners have a replacement socioeconomic model for our future that protects their interests by having the rest of us live lives brutish, nasty and short?
What we know as civilized behavior is something that exists when the pie is growing. Now the pie is shrinking.
This is the first time in our history that the rich have proven that they can get richer by making everyone else poorer. Even the worst robber barons of the GOP-beloved Gilded Age knew they needed more-affluent, better-educated consumers. Now, their descendants don't. They will never let go of this disastrous process, even as society crumbles around them.