A quick glance around the globe reveals a ruined international economy, wars and more wars in the works, and revolutionary movements aplenty — all connected phenomena. No, the apocalypse is not coming; but the international economic system currently used to arrange the social order is crumbling, taking everyone down with it.
The global capitalist system is in far worse shape than most people realize: it may only take the tiny economy of Greece to go bankrupt to break this camel’s back — and finally the word “recession” will be antiquated and “depression” will be in vogue.
How did this happen?
A great economic downturn would have happened years ago were it not for the monstrous debt that many governments created — consumer, corporate, and state — to prop up the economic system, since debt was needed to fuel the consumption that corporations depended on for the purchase of their products. When this global debt bubble burst, the current crisis was ignited.
The debts started going unpaid and the banks stopped lending, creating the “credit crunch.” Giant corporations thus began failing, and the governments that are heavily “influenced” by these corporations went on a bailout frenzy: billions and trillions of taxpayer money poured into these companies, keeping them alive to plunder another day.
After the bailouts, stupid politicians everywhere declared the capitalist system “saved,” and the crisis over. But bigger crises were already visible on the horizon.
The debt that nations used to bailout private corporations was too massive. If these countries’ currencies are to retain any value, the debt must be trimmed (the Euro for example, is widely believed to be “finished”). The battle over how this trimming takes place can be properly referred to as “class war” — a revolution in Greece is brewing over such an issue, with Portugal, Spain, and Italy not far behind.
All over Europe and the U.S. the corporate elite is demanding that the giant government debts — due to bailouts and wars — be reduced by lowering wages, gutting social services, slashing public education, Social Security, Medicare, etc. Labor unions and progressive groups are demanding that the rich and corporations, instead, pay for the crisis that they created through progressive taxation, eliminating tax havens, and if need be, nationalization. This tug of war over society’s resources is class war. The global crisis has developed to such a degree that no middle ground can be safely bargained.
This revolution-creating dynamic also spawns wars. Corporations demand that wages and benefits be reduced during a recession so that “profitability is restored.” This is the only way out of a global recession, since nothing is produced under capitalism if it doesn’t create a profit; and recessions destroy profit. But there are other ways to restore profits.
While corporate-controlled governments work to restore domestic profitability by attacking the living standards of workers, they likewise look abroad to fix their problems. A sure-fire way to increase profits is to export more products overseas, something Obama has mentioned in dozens of speeches. One way to ensure that a foreign country will accept/market your exported goods is by threatening them, or attacking them. An occupied country, like Iraq for example, was forced to allow a flood of U.S. corporations inside to pillage as they saw fit — an automatic export boom.
When the world market shrinks during a recession — since consumers can afford to buy fewer goods — the urge to dominate markets via war increases dramatically. These same shrinking markets compel international corporations, based in different nations, to insanely compete for markets, raw materials, and cheap labor. War is a very logical outcome in such circumstances. President Obama reminds us:
“The world’s fastest-growing markets are outside our borders. We need to compete for those customers because other nations are competing for them.” Having a giant military establishment to back them up enables U.S. corporations to be better “competitors” than other nations.
War also serves as a valuable distraction to an angry public which is demanding jobs, higher wages, health care, well funded public education, and taxes on the wealthy. Better to channel this anger into hatred toward a “foreign enemy.”
The above issues are the ones certain to dominate major events in the coming years. The class war that is erupting as a result of the global depression will effect the majority of people in many nations, through joblessness, shrinking wages, the destruction of government services, or war. As working people in the U.S. begin a fight against these policies, the corporate elite will stop at nothing to implement them, and the social unrest in Europe will be transferred to the U.S. More working people will come to the realization that an economic system owned by giant corporations — themselves owned by very wealthy individuals — is irrational, and needs to be replaced
I sat down seven years ago this month with my son Adam and told him about the tragic death of a brave American woman named Rachel Corrie. As I informed him who she was, where and how she died, he stared at her two photographs in the paper and said, “Daddy, I will name my first daughter Rachel.” Adam was only nine years old, and I couldn’t have been more proud of him.
Rachel Corrie had a heart bigger than Texas. She paid the ultimate price fighting to uphold the international law that bans collective punishment.
Rachel was a 23 year-old Evergreen State College student from Olympia, WA. Rachel responded to the U.S. and Israeli rejection of a UN Resolution recommending an International Peace Keeping Force be sent into Palestine to serve as a human rights monitor there by enlisting in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).
ISM is a group of international volunteers who partake in non-violent direct action resistance to the Israeli occupation. Members of the group live in Palestinian communities and experience first-hand the violence to which Palestinians are subjected every day by the Israeli military.
Rachel Corrie shared the Palestinian suffering and took some of the risks they are unfortunately forced to live with. Rachel dashed off to the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. It was important for her to show that the world had not forgotten these people, and that individuals from all over the world are willing to interrupt their comfortable lives to come and risk themselves for the sake of the Palestinians and draw international attention to their plight.
In Rafah, Rachel acted as a human shield, escorting people to water wells and school children between their homes and schools in order to discourage Israeli soldiers from firing at them. Rachel also helped Palestinian children with their homework and with their English language. She was also setting up a sister-city relationship between her home town of Olympia and Rafah. Sadly, her dream vanished on March 16, 2003 when her life was cut short in a savage way.
According to 21 year-old eyewitness Joseph Smith, an ISM member from Missouri: “On that tragic day, Rachel stood in the pathway of an Israeli military bulldozer attempting to demolish the house of a Palestinian physician who was a friend of Rachel and her group, and in whose house Rachel and other activists often stayed.
Rachel was wearing a fluorescent-orange jacket with reflective stripping and armed with a megaphone. Rachel sat in the pathway of the bulldozer. She was 8-10 feet in front of the bulldozer and began waving. The bulldozer continued driving forward, headed straight for Rachel. When it was so closed that it was moving the earth beneath her, Rachel climbed onto the pile of rubble being pushed by the bulldozer. She got so high onto it that she was at an eye-level with the cab of the bulldozer. Her head and upper torso were above the bulldozer’s blade. The driver and co-operator could clearly see her. Rachel was crushed to death under the 10-ton U.S.-made machine.”
Israel claimed the driver didn’t see her. However, eyewitness accounts and Associated Press photos show Rachel standing in direct view of the bulldozer driver, dressed in a bright orange jacket and speaking into a megaphone. The driver would have to be blind and deaf not to notice that!
The next day, Palestinians in Rafah flew the U.S. flag for the first time during a memorial service held in honor of Rachel. Even that did not stop Israeli soldiers from raiding and disrupting the service.
Seven years later, Israel has failed to provide any proof that the Palestinian family, any of their children, Rachel and/or ISM has any link to terrorism. Nor there was a tunnel underneath the house to smuggle weapons. In fact, Israel demolished the house that Rachel tried to protect. And ISM is now nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Price with special recognition to Rachel Corrie. In her memories many streets in Palestine were named after her, so were new-born baby girls, and women’s empowerment centers. Documentaries about her life were made in every country, even Israel.
America acted cold-blooded in the death of Rachel Corrie, but screamed bloody murder regarding the kidnapping and death of Jewish-American reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. I remember the outrage, public condemnations, and call for justice. Mr. Pearl was equally killed in a brutal way. The master mind of his murder is now in U.S. custody. In 1985, when a 69 year-old Jewish-American, Leon Klinghoffer was murdered aboard the hijacked Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean, U.S. fighter jets intercepted the Egyptian plane carrying his killer and forced it to land in Italy. His killers are now serving jail time. In 2003, US special forces in Iraq arrested the master-mind of the cruise ship hijacking. He died later of a heart attack in US custody.
Every red-blooded American should have been outraged by the death of Rachel Corrie. Her picture never made it to the front page, and even a Maryland College newspaper cartoonist depicted her as a stupid girl. The Wall Street Journal shamelessly accused her of being a terrorist sympathizer. The truth of the matter is, Rachel was a brilliant and brave American who stood for peace and justice. She had a rare courage and unflinching determination.
It is about time that our government stopped catering to Israel and its powerful lobby in the United States. It is a travesty of justice that an American citizen was killed in cold blood by Israel with no condemnation or investigation. Who will hold Israel responsible and call for a full and transparent investigation in the tragic death of Rachel Corrie? Justice delayed is justice denied!
As her former teacher said, “Rachel had a big heart that was hard to carry.” A heart that is bigger than Texas. Rachel Corrie deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor.
At least it sure looks like it according to this news release. It seems that the United States has shipped 387 “Blu” bombs to a U.S. military base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. These “Blu” bombs are used specifically for destroying hardened and underground structures (like, uh, allegedunderground nuclear bomb facilities in Iran?).
“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” said Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, co-author of a recent study on US preparations for an attack on Iran. “US bombers are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he added. The preparations were being made by the US military, but it would be up to President Obama to make the final decision. He may decide that it would be better for the US to act instead of Israel, Plesch argued. [emphasis mine]
This should certainly “endear” us even more to the Muslims in the Middle East. Oops, I keep forgetting: Middle Eastern Muslims don’t hate us because of our interference in their political affairs, they hate us because we are rich. (By the way, since Iran does not have the capability to bomb the United States, when exactly did the United States’ Department of Defense become the Department of Israeli Defense?)
The U.S. government is broke. Nevertheless, Washington is currently fighting two wars: one is ebbing while the other is expanding. How to pay for the Afghan build up? Democrats say raise taxes. Republicans say no worries. The best policy would be to scale back America’s international commitments.
The United States will spend more than $700 billion on the military in 2010. The administration’s initial defense-budget proposal, minus the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, was $534 billion, almost as much as total military spending by the rest of the world. Even though the Iraq war is winding down, its costs will persist for years as the government cares for thousands of seriously injured veterans.
Afghanistan cost about $51 billion in 2009 and had been expected to run $65 billion in 2010. However, the president’s build up is estimated to add another $30 billion annually. And if this “surge” doesn’t work—U.S. troop levels still lag well behind the minimum number indicated by Pentagon anti-insurgency doctrine—the administration will feel pressure to further increase force levels. Every extra thousand personnel deployed to Afghanistan costs about $1 billion.
Although the president reportedly plans to emphasize deficit reduction in his upcoming budget, he continues to propose new programs even with $10 trillion in red ink predicted over the next decade. The cost of the Afghan war will be yet another debit added to the national debt.
Some Democrats are demanding measures to pay for the war. For instance, Appropriations Committee Chairman Representative David Obey is advocating a special war tax to “share the burden.” He, along with Rep. John P. Murtha and Rep. John B. Larson, have introduced the Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010. They complain that “the only people who’ve paid any price for our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan are our military families.”
While Rep. Obey would impose a temporary surcharge on people earning as little $30,000 annually, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin proposes adding a new, higher tax bracket to pay for the wars. However, the latter admits that a recession may not be a good time to hike taxes—a sentiment widely shared on Capitol Hill.
Senator Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, argues: “If you’re going to have a presence there [in Afghanistan], you just can’t pass the bill on, as we did in Iraq, to our kids and our grandchildren. I think that’s wrong. I think that’s immoral.” However, he has proposed no specific fiscal response.
Sen. Ben Nelson, the key swing vote for the $2 trillion Senate health-care bill, proposes issuing war bonds—that is, more debt. Doing so, he contends, would “reduce our dependence on foreign creditors and support for our service members and America’s mission.” Of course, in fiscal terms there is no difference between civilian bonds and war bonds. And the proposal mimics the “Patriot Savings Bonds” promoted by the Bush administration in 2001.
Some Democrats want the administration to lead. Rep. Mike Honda opines: “If the president intends to go in over our objections, he should have to bear the burden of asking for a tax to pay for it.” The administration refuses to endorse either surtaxes or bonds, but plans on including the cost of the Afghan war, including the surge, in the 2010 budget. The Bush administration preferred to hide the cost of its conflicts by placing war spending in supplemental bills. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained: “The president is committed to making it fully accounted for.”
“Pay-as-you-go” proponents have a point. Although the Republican Party historically supported balanced budgets, President George W. Bush and the Republican congressional majority turned a surplus into a deficit while upping domestic outlays across the board, creating a big new health care program (the Medicare drug benefit), and initiating two wars. For the GOP to now rail against wasteful spending is a bit of shameless political theater all too typical for Washington.
However, the Democrats’ new-found concern for fiscal responsibility also looks suspect. Rep. Obey, who in 2007 proposed a similar levy for Iraq, complains that the money spent in Afghanistan “will cost us on education, on our efforts to build the entire economy.” Rep. Lynn Woolsey similarly objects that the war has “diverted funds from desperately needed domestic priorities.” Sen. Levin admits that he wants higher taxes in principle—the wealthy “have done incredibly well”—arguing that taxes should have been raised during the previous administration.
In rebuttal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell lost no time in pointing out the obvious: “The Democrats are willing to bust the budget to pass a domestic program that the American people are against, but all of a sudden find it offensive to do something that is absolutely essential to the security of Americans here in the United States.” There’s little evidence that attempting to build an effective, pro-Western central government in Kabul, essentially where the mission is heading, has much to do with U.S. security, but Sen. McConnell’s broader point remains valid: Democrats were far less concerned about excessive borrowing when they were voting for hundreds of billions of dollars for social programs, bailouts and “stimulus” packages. For this reason Republican legislators have proposed to pay for the Afghan surge by freezing discretionary outlays, using unspent “stimulus” funds, and delaying debates over health-care reform and cap and trade. There likely is another objective lurking beneath the surface of the proposed tax hike. Just as Rep. Charles Rangel advocated reinstating conscription in an attempt raise the perceived public cost of the Iraq war, surcharge advocates may hope to highlight the cost of the Afghan war.
Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute complains that “Certain members of the progressive caucus see this as very attractive because it has the chance of increasing the unpopularity of the war.” Roberton Williams of the Urban Institute-Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center makes the same point: “Look at who’s pushing this. It’s people opposed to the war.”
While Republican politicians continue the raise the alarm over new domestic spending initiatives, they fall curiously silent when it comes to America’s oversize military budget and war costs.
Indeed, the conservative Heritage Foundation, long a proponent of reduced spending, put out a special handout entitled “THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN: Costs in Context.” According to Heritage, $95 billion in 2010 is “a small price to pay,” “a tiny fraction of federal spending,” “small relative to America’s past wars,” “far less than TARP, bailouts, and the stimulus,” and “smaller than the annual growth in entitlements.”
These are all true as far as they go, but spending on almost every federal program is small compared to the overall deficit. When Rep. Woolsey complained that war outlays had “exploded the lid off our national debt,” she could have made the same comment about a myriad of domestic programs as well.
Moreover, Heritage’s statements are not ones conservatives typically make regarding proposals for new domestic spending initiatives. And the military spending adds up: since 2001 Washington has spent nearly $1 trillion on Afghanistan and Iraq. The Congressional Budget Office figures the cost over the next decade could run $1.6 trillion. The interest on war-related debt adds another $100 billion. And the Obama administration is hiking non-war related military outlays, merely slowing the rate of increase.
Washington is spending far too much. There is no easy way to pay for an expanded war in Afghanistan. Higher taxes at least impose the real cost on the present generation. More debt continues the dishonest fiction that the American people can get something for nothing.
But the solution is to cut expenditures. The fact that Washington is spending too much money on domestic programs is no excuse for unnecessary military expenditures. Defense outlays need to be evaluated critically on their own terms.
This is where congressional Democrats should mount their attack. Neither higher taxes nor new war bonds is the issue. The problem is the extension of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and expansion of conflict in Afghanistan. Even more dubious are military deployments protecting prosperous and populous allies throughout Asia and Europe. Americans no longer can afford to subsidize rich friends and remake poor dependents all around the globe.
The United States is attempting to run a quasi-empire on the cheap. How we do the paying is less important than what we are paying for. Much of today’s “defense” spending has nothing to do with defending America. Washington should bring our foreign ends into conformity with our domestic means.
The Middle Eastern nation – in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, bordering the Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Red Sea – has been exporting a couple of billion dollars worth of crude oil per year.
But it’s oil supplies are shrinking rapidly, and may be totally depleted within 10 years.
Yemeni crude oil exports decreased to $1.5 billion during the fiscal period from January –October of 2009, compared with $4.2 billion during the same period of 2008, a decrease of $2.7 billion, the Central Bank of Yemen reported.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said Yemen was rapidly losing its crude oil reserves.
In a report, Carnegie said Yemeni oil exports, a key source of foreign currency, declined from 450,000 barrels per day in 2003 to 280,000 in early 2009, Middle East Newsline reported.
“Barring any major new discoveries, energy experts generously estimate that Yemen’s oil exports will cease in 10 years,” the report, titled “Yemen: Avoiding a Downward Spiral,” said.
Did America slip into a semiliterate, polarized, pre-fascist state over the past decade or so, allowing greedy oligarchs and corporate elites to run the government? Two books I recently read offer reasonably persuasive evidence and arguments that the country did, and a third suggests that dictatorial mindsets could besiege Americans, with an assist from the Internet, if they don’t come to their more deliberative senses. Each of the books offers an informed diagnosis of the dangers that widespread ignorance and ideological polarization pose for American democracy, though none offers a comprehensive treatment for the malaise.
I read the three books in less than two weeks; friends ask how that was possible. The trick is to avoid not only Facebook and Twitter but also: celebrity news, cable news, Oprah, Jerry Springer, American Idol, The Swan, other reality-TV shows, professional wrestling, violent pornography, positive psychology and right-wing Christian fundamentalism.
The latter list includes some of the spectacularly mind-numbing American pursuits that Chris Hedges examines in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Hedges submits that while they mesmerized large portions of the American citizenry, CEOs being paid millions of dollars a year to run companies that feed on taxpayer money usurped our government — with the help of elected officials bought by campaign contributions and tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists who now write many of the nation’s laws.
“Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports,” Hedges writes. “The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not understand the predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on credit card agreements that plunge them into unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating clichés and slogans. They seek refuge in familiar brands and labels. … Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification.”
Of course, they did not get into this clueless state by themselves. They were manipulated by “agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers, and television news personalities who create the vast stage for illusion,” Hedges continues. “They are the puppet masters. … The techniques of theater have leeched into politics, religion, education, literature, news, commerce, warfare, and crime.”
I know those fools are out there — many millions of them. I might even be one. But what is absolutely maddening about this book is Hedges’ penchant for stating sweeping, generalized claims as absolutes. And yet this master of divinity turned New York Times war correspondent become sociological scholar often bolsters his summations with just enough research, statistical data and anecdotal evidence to make them plausible. The book takes readers to Madison Square Garden for an exegesis of professional wrestling; to the Adult Video News Expo in Las Vegas for lengthy interviews with porn actors and producers and an inflatable doll vendor; and to Claremont Graduate University in California for a seminar on positive psychology, which Hedges terms a “quack science” that “is to the corporate state what eugenics was for the Nazis.”
As a resident of Miami Beach, where the pornographic sensibility is a way of life, I wasn’t shocked to read that annual porn sales in the United States “are estimated at $10 billion or higher” or that DIRECTV distributes “more than 40 million streams of porn into American homes every month.” But I shuddered when Hedges documented not just a growing appetite for violent forms of porn in America but their remarkable visual similarity to photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. “Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society,” he writes. “The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy. … The Abu Ghraib images that were released, and the hundreds more disturbing images that remain classified, could be stills from porn films.”
Unfortunately, Empire of Illusion won’t enlighten or offend the large swaths of functionally illiterate Americans transfixed by smut, pro wrestling, reality TV or celebrity gossip, because those people won’t read the book. But this scholarly 193-page diatribe, which draws from a 100-author bibliography ranging from the late neo-Marxist Frankfurt School icon Theodor Adorno(The Culture Industry) to Princeton professor emeritus Sheldon Wolin (Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism), would surely madden many proud affiliates and alumni of America’s elite university system.
Hedges, who attended New England prep schools, Colgate and Harvard as a young man, and later taught at Princeton, Columbia and New York University, asserts in Chapter 3, “The Illusion of Wisdom,” that Harvard, Yale, Princeton and most elite schools “do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think.” Elite universities are in the business of producing “hordes of competent systems managers” not critical thinkers. Those statements strike me as generally accurate. But I’d expect some fierce academic blowback from this notion: “The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive.” And Hedges suggests that these high-end schools “refuse to question a self-justifying system” in which “organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter.”
Hedges not only blames the elite universities for our mortgage-fueled financial crisis but is sure their alumni on Wall Street and in Washington have no capacity to really fix the economic system. “Indeed, they’ll make it worse,” he predicts, exchanging his reportorial register for the absolutist. “They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one.” (He includes George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Obama’s “degree-laden” cabinet members in this group.)
If Hedges knows how to fix the system, he doesn’t tell us inEmpire of Illusion. I hope that’ll be the subject of his next book, because in the meantime, “powerful corporate entities, fearful of losing their influence and wealth” are waiting for “a national crisis that will allow them, in the name of national security and moral renewal, to take complete control,” he warns, without citing verifiable evidence for his dire prediction.
What if PBS, Fox and YouTube organized a national debate featuring Chris Hedges, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, his predecessor Hank Paulson, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Christian Coalition president Roberta Combs and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid? That panel is a little far-fetched, but it’s the sort of cross-ideological forum that Cass Sunsteinprescribes in Republic.com 2.0 as a way of preventing the nation from sliding into factional, perhaps even violent strife.
Sunstein is a law professor, author and perennial all-star in the world of public intellectuals; he took leave from Harvard Law School to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget. “The American constitutional order was designed to create a republic, as opposed to a monarch or direct democracy,” he writes. “Representatives would be accountable to the public at large. But there was also supposed to be a large degree of reflection and debate, both within the citizenry and within government itself.”
Of course, the Founding Fathers knew public debate could get ugly. Sunstein notes Alexander Hamilton’s belief that the “jarring of parties” was a good thing because it would engender deliberation and, over time, a “republic of reasons.”
Are we one today? Not as much as we could be, Sunstein thinks. His fundamental concern in Republic.com 2.0 is the Internet’s potential for impeding deliberation between groups with opposing viewpoints, eventually increasing ideological rigidity and polarization to a point of no return. It’s vastly easier to join like-minded Internet “enclaves” across the world than to drive across town for a meeting in which someone might challenge one’s pre-established beliefs and positions. Sunstein walks readers through behavioral studies finding that when groups of like-minded individuals are isolated from different viewpoints, they tend toward consensus on the most extreme position held within the group.
At worst, Sunstein says, Internet-induced polarization could lead to social instability. “The danger is that through the mechanisms of persuasive arguments, social comparisons, and corroboration, members will move to positions that lack merit,” he writes. “It is impossible to say, in the abstract, that those who sort themselves into enclaves will generally move in a direction that is desirable for society at large or even for its own members. It is easy to think of examples to the contrary, as, for example, Nazism, hate groups, terrorists, and cults of various sorts.”
Clearly, the Internet has potential to create political good. Citizens have access to vast amounts of information and commentary. Even like-minded enclave proliferation can be good: The more there are, the greater the potential for inter-enclave discussion.
But a study of 1,400 liberal and conservative blogs found the vast majority of bloggers link only to like-minded blogs. Worse, another study showed that when “liberal” bloggers comment on “conservative” blog posts, and vice-versa, a plurality of comments simply cast contempt on opposing views. “Only a quarter of cross-ideological posts involve genuine substantive discussion. In this way, real deliberation is often occurring within established points of view, but only infrequently across them,” Sunstein reports.
One cure for Internet-driven polarization lies with “general interest intermediaries.” By that terminology, Sunstein means media outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, current affairs magazines, PBS, NPR and old-fashioned network news broadcasts: “People who rely on such intermediaries have a range of chance encounters, involving shared experiences with diverse others, and also exposure to materials and topics that they did not seek out in advance.”
Of course, these are the media that are in decline because of the Internet. Sunstein imagines a greater role for private and public institutions, including the federal government, in ensuring enough general-interest intermediaries exist to make the republic’s communications system “a help rather than a hindrance to democratic self-government” and a counterbalance to the echo chambers of the Web.
For the most part, Thom Hartmann’s Threshold: Crisis of Western Civilization functions as a general-interest intermediary in book form. Still, readers can be forgiven for wondering, at times, whether they are in a no-conservatives zone. Hartmann is host of the Thom Hartmann Show, a nationally syndicated “progressive” radio talk show.
Just the same, Threshold is so geographically and temporally sprawling that it offers material even progressive readers might not have chosen in advance: a refugee camp in contemporary Darfur in southern Sudan (Lesson: Famine leads to war and more suffering.); ancient New Zealand, where the Maoris exterminated the moa birds, forcing them to become cannibals (Don’t repeat this mistake.); contemporary Denmark, where people happily send 30 to 60 percent of their income to the government in exchange for free health care, free university tuition, yearlong maternity leave, ample unemployment coverage and more (Americans should consider this.); Caral in ancient Peru, where anthropologists have found no evidence of weaponry (”Maybe peace is the natural state of things.”); the Iroquois people, who made certain decisions based on how they would affect tribe members seven generations hence. (If only the rest of us Americans would do that.)
In sum, Threshold is 262 pages of scientific and historical anecdote suggesting that unregulated markets, undemocratic behavior and unecological practices lead to catastrophe. If you haven’t already read a good overview of topsoil depletion, the marine fisheries crisis, rain forest destruction, the democratic behavior of red deer, the 1888 Supreme Court decision that defined corporations as “persons,” the $15 million that 30,000 corporate lobbyists spend weekly when Congress is in session, President Eisenhower’s premonition of a military-industrial complex with “unwarranted influence,” the 2004 computerized voting machines controversy, the $1 trillion in tax dollars the U.S. government spent on war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not on infrastructure and schools, and the subprime loan/toxic securities debacle — you can find one in Threshold. Hartmann’s common-sense remedies include “recovering a culture of democracy,” “balancing the power of men and women,” “reuniting with nature,” “creating an economy modeled on biology” and “influencing people by helping them rather than bombing them.” His book offers few specifics on how these ends might be accomplished in the real world.
So are we drifting along in a pre-fascist state? Has our democratic system really fallen under the control of corporate America? Hartmann’s take obviously starts and stays (far) to the left of center, and we’ll just have to stay tuned and see whether future events support the dire view he and Hedges have of America’s political direction. Meanwhile, I’ll be on the lookout for a persuasive book telling me how it isn’t exactly so, and why America can escape from the economic and ecological spectacle it has made itself.
This month Eric Prince has resigned from the scandal ridden Xe inc. formerly know as Blackwater, revealing a decade long relationship as a deep cover CIA operative specifically tasked with building and mobilizing an elite army of private assassins for the CIA.
For the past six years, Prince “appears to have led an astonishing double life,” writes Adam Ciralsky. “Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s CEO and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the CIA’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into ‘denied areas’—places US intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting Al-Qaeda members and their allies.”
As barbarically unnecessary and costly Blackwater is, the media has tried to dismiss a lot of these reports as just another one of Dick Cheney’s Frankenstein monster hold overs from the Bush administration that is slowly being dismantled. Unfortunately Obama has also been utilizing the ever eager Blackwater special operatives for the Pakistani drone program that has been an absolute PR disaster due to the civilian casualties that stain headlines on a weekly basis.
With these startling revelations, it is little wonder the U.S. government can’t seem to stop using, or separate itself from an obviously mismanaged and brutal element of their supposed war on terror. This death squad role and relationship can be traced back to Israel and the training they gave these special forces in the lead up to the major ground assults in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Pakistani drone program Jeremy Scahill writes in the nation is really a top-secret Joint Strategic Operation Command (JSOC) program.
The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency’s director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. “This is a parallel operation to the CIA,” said the source. “They are two separate beasts.” The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war–knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country.
Allowing the CIA, the masters of overthrowing Governments and staging coups to have it’s own private army, stationed in training facilities on American soil has got to be the greatest threat to liberty America has seen in recent years.
“Two senior military officers from the shadowy world of Special Operations are playing a large and previously unreported role in shaping the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, a move that underscores that the internal debate has moved past a rigid choice between expansive missions to provide security for Afghan civilians and narrowly tailored missions to find and kill terrorists.”
The Big Picture
So besides protecting the Opium and Oil fields, what is the strategic objective of funding a Blackwater staffed JSOC organized, covert operations against middle eastern targets of the United States? Especially when Al-Qaeda is nothing more than an admitted specter.
The answer is given to us through the suspiciously precognitive writing of former Sen. Gary Hart who writes in a Huffington post article this past Nov. 11, 2009
“Among the early lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, however, is that 21st century conflict demands Special Forces and small unit capabilities even more than traditional big divisions, large carrier task groups, and long range strategic bombers. Historic nation-state wars, though always plausible, are declining. Irregular, unconventional warfare involving dispersed terrorist cells, stateless nations, insurgencies, and tribes, clans, and gangs are increasing dramatically.”
He then asks,
“…are our present and planned force structures configured for new military threats; are weapons procurement programs continuation of traditional acquisitions or focused on future requirements; is the intelligence community properly coordinated and focused on emerging realities; for non-military concerns–such as failed states, radical fundamentalism, pandemics, climate degradation, energy dependence, and resource competition–are new international coalitions needed; are existing alliances adequate to anticipate and respond to these crises or are new ones required; most of all, does our government require new legislative authority to achieve national security under dramatically changing conditions?”
We see here that Hart who also wrote a book on the subject called Under the Eagles Wings: A National Security Strategy of the United States for 2009 has easily just expanded the use and role of these rogue assassination units from foreign operations against terrorists, to operations against what he terms as “non-military threats” or “stateless nations” inside the United States and abroad.
He goes further in his book stating,
“We will be required to conduct multinational training exercises between our special forces and those of other nations. We must operate jointly and collectively against Jihadi and other terrorist groups that endanger the security of all. We will find it necessary to integrate communications systems and databases among law enforcement and public safety agencies of liberal democratic nations. Pg. 17″
Isn’t this exactly what we are seeing with the reported CIA/Blackwater operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? They’re not over their just fighting Al-Qaeda, but using the war on terror as a front operation to train multinational privatized commandos and integrating the fighting forces of the developed nations? We have Delta Force, Rangers, CIA, Green Beret, S.E.A.L’s, IDF,Mossad, Mi5, SAS, Marines etc. etc., all being utilized and training as rapid deployment forces and occupation forces to better serve as a cohesive militarily force in a increasingly globalized world.
In the Homeland
It would be one thing if it was only Al-Qaeda and militants on foreign shores they were after, but in a incredibly revealing article from the New York Times we see that they were operational in the United States during the 2005 Bush inauguration in direct violation of Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 as stated in the article.
“These commandos, operating under a secret counter-terrorism program code-named Power Geyser, were mentioned publicly for the first time this week on a Web site for a new book, “Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operation in the 9/11 World,” (Steerforth Press). The book was written by William M. Arkin, a former intelligence analyst for the Army.
…
The precise number of these Special Operations forces in Washington this week is highly classified, but military officials say the number is very small. The special-missions units belong to the Joint Special Operations Command, a secretive command based at Fort Bragg, N.C., whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force.”
If you count Blackwaters apperance in Katrina, they are used to training and operating on American soil and conducting training exercises that run into unfortunate deaths like what happened on a Colorado Mountain topin August
The Blackwater story is the actualized realization of Gary Hart’s book, and it all happened in 2009 just like the title suggested.
So if Al-Qaeda is Gone, Who is the New Enemy?
The answer to that question is simply you, by expanding the definition of terrorist over the last decade DHS has increasingly been issuing report after report that middle America is potentially terrorists. According to the MIAC report, property rights activist, tax evaders, gun owners, home schoolers, Christians, and people angry about the economy are all potential terrorists.
You can be sure that things will not stay the same, an economic collapse that could degrade into a full blown civil war is currently being planned for by the Obama administration as reported by the EU Times, and expanded upon by Chuck Baldwin in his latest column.
The simple fact is while America has been sleeping, the groundwork to totally and finally break the American people into accepting global government as a solution to war, climate change, food, pandemics, and natural disasters is in place.
Think about how many drills you have heard about in the past months of American soldiers training with foreign forces, and with the overly hyped swine flu being declared a level six pandemic recently we have the perfect cover to train and deploy multinational peace keeping forces all over America and the World, as shown in the NLE 2009 massive training drills conducted over the summer.
Those who choose to fight against it in an armed resistance, whether a nation state or an individual will be targeted by multinational private mercenary squads who have cut their teeth in the lawless deserts of Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan and will have the full backing of both the military and intelligence apparatus of these United States when it comes to tracking down and killing those it deems enemies of the state.
They want a Global Government and the United States middle class won’t stand for it unless major panic ensues. The security state is ready to take the velvet gloves off in everything from…
Now if you want a real ugly glance at just how bad things have gotten with the use of mercs, look into Hardin, Montana and how a foreigner and felon with 17 aliases bought out the city, took over the jail and staffed it with foreign mercenaries.
Choices
With the planned collapse of our Economy by the Fed, the war on the Mexican border that is quickly spilling over into American cities nationwide, and the increasing militarized security grid that has invaded every aspect of American life we are faced with a choice as red blooded Americans as we come to the end of 2009. We either stand up and fight for the values of our constitutional republic by outing every criminal in government and reclaiming or nations capital and military, or we allow them to be integrated into the New World Order system that will violently suppress all opposition via Blackwater type hit teams.
Your call America will you heed the warning signs all around you or will you drown out your conscience with football, and Friday night movies? As a final thought we have the newly announced Air force’s Global Strike Brigade being assembled for rapid deployment of nuclear munitions anywhere in the world the architects of this global society are ruthless killers and deadly serious and will utilize any means necessary to assure success. Those of us who are awake are desperately praying the public can wake up in time, because this reality is being forced on us like it or not.
First, as Harvey Wasserman notes, continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will more than wipe out any reduction in carbon from the government’s proposed climate measures. Writing about the escalation in the Afghanistan war, Wasserman says:
The war would also come with a carbon burst. How will the massive emissions created by 100,000-plus soldiers in wartime be counted in the 17% reduction rubric? Will the HumVees be converted to hybrids? What is the carbon impact of Predator bombs that destroy Afghan families and villages?
The continuance of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars completely and thoroughly undermines the government’s claims that there is a global warming emergency and that reducing carbon output through cap and trade is needed to save the planet.
I can’t take anything the government says about carbon footprints seriously until the government ends the unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For evidence that the Iraq war is unnecessary, see this. Read this for evidence that the U.S. could have taken Bin Laden out years ago and avoided a decades long war in Afghanistan. And for proof that the entire war on Muslim extremists is unnecessary for our national security, see this.
War is also very harmful to the economy. See this, this and this.
Carbon Trading
Second, the proposed solution to global warming – cap and trade – is a scam. Specifically:
The economists who invented cap-and-trade say that it won’t work for global warming
Many environmentalists say that carbon trading won’t effectively reduce carbon emissions
Our bailout buddies over at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and the other Wall Street behemoths are buying heavily into carbon trading (see this, this, this, this, this and this). As University of Maryland professor economics professor and former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission Peter Morici writes:
Obama must ensure that the banks use the trillions of dollars in federal bailout assistance to renegotiate mortgages and make new loans to worthy homebuyers and businesses. Obama must make certain that banks do not continue to squander federal largess bypadding executive bonuses, acquiring other banks and pursuing new high-return, high-risk lines of businesses in merger activity, carbon trading and complex derivatives. Industry leaders like Citigroup have announced plans to move in those directions. Many of these bankers enjoyed influence in and contributed generously to the Obama campaign. Now it remains to be seen if a President Obama can stand up to these same bankers and persuade or compel them to act responsibly.
In other words, the same companies that made billions off of derivatives and other scams and are now getting bailed out on your dime are going to make billions from carbon trading.
Consensus
Everyone should read the leaked emails and rationally think through what they mean. But whatever one believes about climategate (the leaked emails showing that “tricks” were used to “hide the decline” in the climate data and the destruction of the original source data), we should all be able to agree that:
(1) We should end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and
(2) We should not let the financial giants who caused the financial crisis to profit off of cap and trade schemes.
Blackwater is and has been from the on set a private army or 
They are a compartmentalized group of elite operatives which have been tasked with finding and killing Al-Qaeda militants is what we are being told, but what we really see here is a covert, 
The answer is given to us through the suspiciously precognitive writing of former 
You can be sure that things will not stay the same, an economic collapse that could degrade into a full blown civil war is currently being planned for by the Obama administration as reported by the