Being average is not so bad

She's Alive

2012-01-26T22:51:00.000-08:00

From Elliott M.

There's an elephant in the room?

2012-01-23T15:27:00.000-08:00

In these entertaining Presidential debates, all Republicans candidates (and those who parrot them) condemn vast government spending as being the great evil in our society, but they conveniently ignore the elephant in the room: the wealth gap in our society, and the monied interests that run the country...and the government...and their campaigns.

With the Citizens United decision, and the advent of SuperPACs, there's not even an attempt to hide the truth now.

Occupy Everywhere

2012-01-23T15:19:00.000-08:00

The Keystone XL proves Republicans represent the 1%

2011-12-16T22:53:00.000-08:00

Republicans' latest effort to fast-track approval for the construction of the Keystone XL "Tar Sands" Pipeline, prove without a shadow of a doubt that Republican leaders in Congress are working for corporate interests, that is, "the 1%".

Most Americans are not up in arms demanding the construction of this 1,600-mile pipeline, from the open pits of Northern Alberta's tar sands mines to the U.S. Gulf Coast. In fact, most Americans expressing an opinion are outraged that this expensive and risky infrastructure may be built upon our soil to support and encourage the dirtiest oil production on the planet. TransCanada, the company building it, has already experienced many oil spills. (It's no wonder Canada has now bowed out of the Kyoto Protocol. Along with Australia and the U.S., they have one of the World's highest per capita CO2 emissions rates.)

Nebraskans have spoken out about potential contamination of the critical Ogallala Aquifer. But this merely focuses on the Midwest. The potential for destruction is far greater, and in fact is advancing across Northern Alberta (as seen above.)

The ones who are vocal are the oil industry lobbyists, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican legislators who represent oil industry interests.

Neanderthal in Congress

2011-12-09T16:50:00.000-08:00

There is absolutely NO connection between Senator Inhofe's conclusions about climate change, his decade-long personal campaign of climate change denial, and Oklahoma's powerful fossil fuel industry.

As former Chairman and current ranking member on the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works, you can be assured Senator Inhofe sees protecting the health of our planet as one of his foremost responsibilities. Inhofe refers to the great work Marc Morano and CFACT are doing in Durban to assure that no progress is made toward a global climate treaty. He cites the CFACT "Special Report: The A to Z Climate Reality Check". (CFACT has been largely funded by Exxon-Mobil to counter environmental efforts. Marc Morano, former producer for Rush Limbaugh, famed "Swift Boater", and spokesperson for Inhofe's Senate Committee, also authors the Climate Depot Project for CFACT.)

I'm certain Senator Inhofe is fighting hard to reduce Big Government, the largest employer in his state. Here are a few more Neanderthals the Occupy Movement should be targeting.

From Wikipedia:

Oklahoma is the nation's third-largest producer of natural gas, fifth-largest producer of crude oil, and has the second-greatest number of active drilling rigs,and ranks fifth in crude oil reserves. While the state ranked eighth for installed wind energy capacity in 2011, it is at the bottom of states in usage of renewable energy, with 94 percent of its electricity being generated by non-renewable sources in 2009, including 25 percent from coal and 46 percent from natural gas. Ranking 13th for total energy consumption per capita in 2009, Oklahoma's energy costs were 8th lowest in the nation. As a whole, the oil energy industry contributes $35 billion to Oklahoma's gross domestic product, and employees of Oklahoma oil-related companies earn an average of twice the state's typical yearly income. In 2009, the state had 83,700 commercial oil wells churning 65.374 million barrels (10,393,600 m³) of crude oil. Eight and a half percent of the nation's natural gas supply is held in Oklahoma, with 1.673 trillion cubic feet (47.4 km³) being produced in 2009.

According to Forbes Magazine, Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy Corporation, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, and SandRidge Energy Corporation are the largest private oil-related companies in the nation, and all of Oklahoma's Fortune 500 companies are energy-related. Tulsa's ONEOK and Williams Companies are the state's largest and second-largest companies respectively, also ranking as the nation's second and third-largest companies in the field of energy, according to Fortune Magazine. The magazine also placed Devon Energy as the second-largest company in the mining and crude oil-producing industry in the nation, while Chesapeake Energy ranks seventh respectively in that sector and Oklahoma Gas & Electric ranks as the 25th-largest gas and electric utility company.

And half a world away, in Hawaii...

2011-12-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

Brother Drew presents SURFER Poll's Lifetime Achievement Award to John Severson.

Farewell Cousin Becky

2011-12-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

On the left, our dear cousin Rebecca Pfohl (aka Becky, Rebecky, Beckles, Becca). 1951 - 2011

More remembrances of Becky in this blog.

In Memory of Rebecca M. Pfohl website.

American Censorship Day

2011-11-16T21:12:00.000-08:00

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Finding Freedom in Handcuffs

2011-11-12T18:43:00.000-08:00

Published on Monday, November 7, 2011 by TruthDig.com

by Chris Hedges

TruthDig Editor’s note: Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, an activist, an author and a member of a reporting team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize, wrote this article after he was released from custody following his arrest last Thursday. He and about 15 other participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement were detained as they protested outside the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.

Police arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters as they staged a sit-down at Goldman Sachs headquarters on Thursday in New York. (AP / Bebeto Matthews)

Faces appeared to me moments before the New York City police arrested us Thursday in front of Goldman Sachs. They were not the faces of the smug Goldman Sachs employees, who peered at us through the revolving glass doors and lobby windows, a pathetic collection of middle-aged fraternity and sorority members. They were not the faces of the blue-uniformed police with their dangling cords of white and black plastic handcuffs, or the thuggish Goldman Sachs security personnel, whose buzz cuts and dead eyes reminded me of the East German secret police, the Stasi. They were not the faces of the demonstrators around me, the ones with massive student debts and no jobs, the ones whose broken dreams weigh them down like a cross, the ones whose anger and betrayal triggered the street demonstrations and occupations for justice. They were not the faces of the onlookers—the construction workers, who seemed cheered by the march on Goldman Sachs, or the suited businessmen who did not. They were faraway faces. They were the faces of children dying. They were tiny, confused, bewildered faces I had seen in the southern Sudan, Gaza and the slums of Brazzaville, Nairobi, Cairo and Delhi and the wars I covered. They were faces with large, glassy eyes, above bloated bellies. They were the small faces of children convulsed by the ravages of starvation and disease.

I carry these faces. They do not leave me. I look at my own children and cannot forget them, these other children who never had a chance. War brings with it a host of horrors, including famine, but the worst is always the human detritus that war and famine leave behind, the small, frail bodies whose tangled limbs and vacant eyes condemn us all. The wealthy and the powerful, the ones behind the glass at Goldman Sachs, laughed and snapped pictures of us as if we were a brief and odd lunchtime diversion from commodities trading, from hoarding and profit, from this collective sickness of money worship, as if we were creatures in a cage, which in fact we soon were.

A glass tower filled with people carefully selected for the polish and self-assurance that come with having been formed in institutions of privilege, whose primary attributes are a lack of consciousness, a penchant for deception and an incapacity for empathy or remorse. The curious onlookers behind the windows and we, arms locked in a circle on the concrete outside, did not speak the same language. Profit. Globalization. War. National security. These are the words they use to justify the snuffing out of tiny lives, acts of radical evil. Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. Those who trade it have, by buying up and hoarding commodities futures, doubled and tripled the costs of wheat, rice and corn. Hundreds of millions of poor across the globe are going hungry to feed this mania for profit. The technical jargon, learned in business schools and on trading floors, effectively mask the reality of what is happening—murder. These are words designed to make systems operate, even systems of death, with a cold neutrality. Peace, love and all sane affirmative speech in temples like Goldman Sachs are, as W.H. Auden understood, “soiled, profaned, debased to a horrid mechanical screech.”

We seemed to have lost, at least until the advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, not only all personal responsibility but all capacity for personal judgment. Corporate culture absolves all of responsibility. This is part of its appeal. It relieves all from moral choice. There is an unequivocal acceptance of ruling principles such as unregulated capitalism and globalization as a kind of natural law. The steady march of corporate capitalism requires a passive acceptance of new laws and demolished regulations, of bailouts in the trillions of dollars and the systematic looting of public funds, of lies and deceit. The corporate culture, epitomized by Goldman Sachs, has seeped into our classrooms, our newsrooms, our entertainment systems and our consciousness. This corporate culture has stripped us of the right to express ourselves outside of the narrowly accepted confines of the established political order. It has turned us into compliant consumers. We are forced to surrender our voice. These corporate machines, like fraternities and sororities, also haze new recruits in company rituals, force them to adopt an unrelenting cheerfulness, a childish optimism and obsequiousness to authority. These corporate rituals, bolstered by retreats and training seminars, by grueling days that sometimes end with initiates curled up under their desks to sleep, ensure that only the most morally supine remain. The strong and independent are weeded out early so only the unquestioning advance upward. Corporate culture serves a faceless system. It is, as Hannah Arendt writes, “the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership.”

Our political class, and its courtiers on the airwaves, insists that if we refuse to comply, if we step outside of the Democratic Party, if we rebel, we will make things worse. This game of accepting the lesser evil enables the steady erosion of justice and corporate plundering. It enables corporations to harvest the nation and finally the global economy, reconfiguring the world into neofeudalism, one of masters and serfs. This game goes on until there is hardly any action carried out by the power elite that is not a crime. It goes on until corporate predators, who long ago decided the nation and the planet were not worth salvaging, seize the last drops of wealth. It goes on until moral acts, such as calling for those inside the corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs to be tried, see you jailed, and the crimes of financial fraud and perjury are upheld as lawful and rewarded by the courts, the U.S. Treasury and the Congress. And all this is done so a handful of rapacious, immoral plutocrats like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs who sucks down about $250,000 a day and who lied to the U.S. Congress as well as his investors and the public, can use their dirty money to retreat into their own Forbidden City or Versailles while their underlings, basking in the arrogance of power, snap amusing photos of the rabble outside their gates being hauled away by the police and company goons.

It is vital that the occupation movements direct attention away from their encampments and tent cities, beset with the usual problems of hastily formed open societies where no one is turned away. Attention must be directed through street protests, civil disobedience and occupations toward the institutions that are carrying out the assaults against the 99 percent. Banks, insurance companies, courts where families are being foreclosed from their homes, city offices that put these homes up for auction, schools, libraries and firehouses that are being closed, and corporations such as General Electric that funnel taxpayer dollars into useless weapons systems and do not pay taxes, as well as propaganda outlets such as the New York Post and its evil twin, Fox News, which have unleashed a vicious propaganda war against us, all need to be targeted, shut down and occupied. Goldman Sachs is the poster child of all that is wrong with global capitalism, but there are many other companies whose degradation and destruction of human life are no less egregious.

It is always the respectable classes, the polished Ivy League graduates, the prep school boys and girls who grew up in Greenwich, Conn., or Short Hills, N.J., who are the most susceptible to evil. To be intelligent, as many are at least in a narrow, analytical way, is morally neutral. These respectable citizens are inculcated in their elitist enclaves with “values” and “norms,” including pious acts of charity used to justify their privilege, and a belief in the innate goodness of American power. They are trained to pay deference to systems of authority. They are taught to believe in their own goodness, unable to see or comprehend—and are perhaps indifferent to—the cruelty inflicted on others by the exclusive systems they serve. And as norms mutate and change, as the world is steadily transformed by corporate forces into one of a small cabal of predators and a vast herd of human prey, these elites seamlessly replace one set of “values” with another. These elites obey the rules. They make the system work. And they are rewarded for this. In return, they do not question.

Those who resist—the doubters, outcasts, renegades, skeptics and rebels—rarely come from the elite. They ask different questions. They seek something else—a life of meaning. They have grasped Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.” And in their search they come to the conclusion that, as Socrates said, it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. This conclusion is rational, yet cannot be rationally defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It refuses to place a monetary value on human life. It acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why, as Arendt points out, the only morally reliable people when the chips are down are not those who say “this is wrong,” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t."

There are streaks in my lungs, traces of the tuberculosis that I picked up around hundreds of dying Sudanese during the famine I covered as a foreign correspondent. I was strong and privileged and fought off the disease. They were not and did not. The bodies, most of them children, were dumped into hastily dug mass graves. The scars I carry within me are the whispers of these dead. They are the faint marks of those who never had a chance to become men or women, to fall in love and have children of their own. I carried these scars to the doors of Goldman Sachs. I had returned to living. Those whose last breaths had marked my lungs had not. I placed myself at the feet of these commodity traders to call for justice because the dead, and those who are dying in slums and refugee camps across the planet, could not make this journey. I see their faces. They haunt me in the day and come to me in the dark. They force me to remember. They make me choose sides. As the metal handcuffs were fastened around my wrists I thought of them, as I often think of them, and I said to myself: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty I am free at last.”

Occupy Wall Street says "Move Your Money" November 4th

2011-11-02T14:08:00.000-07:00

For more information, go to http://moveyourmoneyproject.org/

Closure

2011-10-21T15:57:00.001-07:00

Tax the poor

2011-09-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

This past week it was announced that, to compensate for the loss of State funding, the University of California Regents will consider a proposal to increase University tuition 80% over the next three to four years.

In a country that holds sacred the profits of the wealthy, that refuses to even consider asking them to pay their fair share, this outrageous tax on those who are struggling to become financially responsible adults is a pure manifestation of the greed of the few controlling the welfare of the many. The same scenario is playing out in public education institutions across this nation, condemning our young to a life of debt and powerlessness before they've even begun.

This is something that should fill every American with shame.

It is legitimate cause for revolution.

Dennis Kucinich on the Economics of the American Oligarchy

2011-07-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

Article printed from CommonDreams.org
Published on Friday, July 15, 2011

Debt Political Theater Diverts Attention While Americans' Wealth Is Stolen

by Dennis Kucinich

The rancorous debate over the debt belies a fundamental truth of our economy -- that it is run for the few at the expense of the many, that our entire government has been turned into a machine which takes the wealth of a mass of Americans and accelerates it into the hands of the few. Let me give you some examples.

Take war. War takes the money from the American people and puts it into the hands of arms manufacturers, war profiteers, and private armies. The war in Iraq, based on lies: $3 trillion will be the cost of that war. The war in Afghanistan; based on a misreading of history; half a trillion dollars in expenses already. The war against Libya will be $1 billion by September.

Fifty percent of our discretionary spending goes for the Pentagon. A massive transfer of wealth into the hands of a few while the American people lack sufficient jobs, health care, housing, retirement security.

Our energy policies take the wealth from the American people and put it into the hands of the oil companies. We could be looking at $150 a barrel for oil in the near future.

Our environmental policy takes the wealth of the people -- clean air, clean water -- and puts it in the hands of the polluters. It's a transfer of wealth, not only from the present but from future generations as our environment is ruined.

Insurance companies, what do they do? They take the wealth from the American people in terms of what they charge people for health insurance and they put it into the hands of the few.

We have to realize what this country's economy has become. Our monetary policy, through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, privatized the money supply, gathers the wealth, puts it in the hands of the few while the Federal Reserve can create money out of nothing, give it to banks to park at the Fed while our small businesses are starving for capital.

Mark my words -- Wall Street cashes in whether we have a default or not. And the same type of thinking that created billions in bailouts for Wall Street and more than $1 trillion in giveaways by the Federal Reserve today leaves 26 million Americans either underemployed or unemployed. And nine out of ten Americans over the age of 65 are facing cuts in their Social Security in order to pay for a debt which grew from tax cuts for the rich and for endless wars.

There is a massive transfer of wealth from the American people to the hands of a few and it's going on right now as America's eyes are misdirected to the political theater of these histrionic debt negotiations, threats to shut down the government, and willingness to make the most Americans pay dearly for debts they did not create.

These are symptoms of a government which has lost its way, and they are a challenge to the legitimacy of the two-party system.

Dennis Kucinich is US Congressman from Ohio and a former presidential candidate in the United States.

Washington needs its compass corrected, and its clock cleaned

2011-07-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

This October, let's all celebrate our successful War in Afghanistan's Tenth Birthday! It's our gift that keeps on giving (to those who profit from such enterprises.)

If Washington's "business as usual" suits you just fine, stay home and chill.

Or, click on the photo to join the fun!

As a warm-up, watch George Carlin's lesson on "The American Dream".

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address - January 17, 1961

2011-07-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

The address is memorable for Eisenhower's warning about the threat of the burgeoning military-industrial complex (a term he introduced). That portion of the speech begins at the 8:20 mark. His sentiments seem sincere and heartfelt, in contrast to the cynicism pervading today's political landscape. (I know, I know, the 50s and early 60s were not such rosy times either!)

(Thanks to Tim S. for the link.)

I always look to "Russia Today" for the latest in local news...

2011-07-05T22:13:00.000-07:00

The "haboob" or dust storm that struck Phoenix today. This is the type of weather event I was caught in on my motorcycle in Northeastern Arizona a few years ago. Today's was much more substantial!

(Links to the original videos: HD time lapse video by Mike Olbinski and YouTube video by Blaine Coury.)

Now a word from our sponsors...

2011-07-03T23:22:00.000-07:00

I really don't like promoting businesses, products or services I haven't tried, but these folks have the right concept and I'd sure like to see their ideas catch fire.

To the Last Drop

2011-06-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

Syncrude oil sands mining operations. Photo: David Dodge, The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society

This story about Alberta's tar sands produced by Al Jazeera, will introduce Americans to their largest source of imported oil - Canadian tar, or oil sands.

Watch "To the Last Drop" (two parts)

The Circumference of Home

2011-06-26T11:30:00.000-07:00

Coincidentally, soon after beginning walking tours of my Santa Rosa hometown, I heard a story on Wisconsin Public Radio's "To the Best of Our Knowledge". It was an interview with Kurt Hoelting, author of The Circumference of Home. After learning the magnitude of his personal "carbon footprint", Hoelting drew a 100-kilometer radius circle around his home on Whidbey Island near Seattle, and vowed that, for a full year, he would abandon his car and, under his own power "live locally", exploring and rediscovering his immediate environment. After hearing the story, and recognizing a kindred spirit, I immediately ordered the book from the library.

When I asked Drew (who, of course, lives on Whidbey Island) if he knew Hoelting, he said he certainly did and even offered some assistance on Hoelting's book. Drew reminded me of an article he had written back in 1997. At the time, Drew joined Hoelting on a kayak adventure in Alaska's Inside Passage and wrote about it in the New Age Journal.

Late in the book, I see Hoelting quotes Drew in a chapter epigraph, and pays further tribute to him in the book's Acknowledgments.

Anyway, this is a fascinating journey, both internal and external, as the author struggles to reconcile his membership in modern American society with ancient traditions of respect and reverence for the natural world. With just the slightest shift in consciousness, Hoelting's discoveries and revelations during this year "in circumference" are accessible to each of us.

Chile court suspends Patagonian HidroAysen dam project

2011-06-20T16:58:00.000-07:00

The confluence of the rivers Neff and Baker in awesome Patagonia. Photo taken during my Americas Trip in 2006.

At roughly the same time as my visit to Rancho Chacabuco, Lisa Pike of Patagonia (the company) dispatched A Letter From Chacabuco, which spoke of the threat of development in the region. Then, I was unaware of plans for hydroelectric projects here. Had I known of intentions to dam these rivers, I would indeed have been sickened.

***

BBC News Latin America & Caribbean

20 June 2011

A court in Chile has ordered the suspension of a multi-billion-dollar dam project in the south of the country, following objections by legislators and environmentalists.

The five dams are to be built on two rivers in the sparsely-populated Aysen area of Chilean Patagonia.

The project was approved in May, after heavy backing from President Sebastian Pinera.

But the court has now ruled it needs to review the approval process.

It is not clear how long the court will take to decide on the matter.

The project has sparked a number of protests, some of which have seen violent clashes between demonstrators and the security forces.

The government says the dams are needed to meet the country's increasing demand for electricity.

But environmentalists say they will damage the area's fragile ecology and its tourist potential.

They also say the energy produced will be used mainly for the country's mining industry.

Rugged beauty

The five dams will be built on two fast flowing rivers that run into the Pacific - two on the river Baker, and three on the river Pascua.

They drain lakes in a region that is famous for its rugged beauty - a landscape of glaciers, ice-fields, mountains and fjords.

The dam project, which is a joint venture between a Chilean company and a Spanish-owed one, will cost some $3bn (£1.85bn) and is designed to generate 2,750MW of power.

The company, HidroAysen, says the project "represents a cost-effective, sustainable, reliable, and ecologically viable source of energy".

It says it involves flooding nearly 60 sq km (23 sq miles) of land, but will provide 4,000 jobs at its peak.

But other potential sticking points lie ahead for the company.

Correspondents say one of these could be approval to build the more than 2,000km (1,240 miles) of power lines needed to carry the electricity generated from the dams to the capital, Santiago.

America is not at war in Libya?

2011-06-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

Wreckage of U.S. Air Force F-15E lost March 21, 2011 in Libya. Source: REUTERS / Suhaib Salem

It is outrageous that the Obama Administration, as the Bush Administration before it (and all Administrations have since World War II), is using nuanced legal interpretations to consolidate power in the Executive and erode the balance of powers prescribed in the U.S. Constitution.

Under guidance from Executive Branch legal counsel, President Obama has declared that, in ordering military operations in Libya, he has not violated The War Powers Act of 1973 (let alone the United States Constitution!)

The War Powers Act Serves to permit the President, as Commander in Chief, to act expeditiously to defend against a threat to our nation or our armed forces. It requires that the President seek the approval of Congress within a specified period following the commencement of hostilities.

The Act was the People's response to the illegal actions of the Nixon Administration which, without the support of Congress or the American People, escalated combat operations in Vietnam, secretly expanding them into Laos and Cambodia, in clear violation of national and international law.

But debate about the intent of the War Powers Act is merely a sideshow here. The President is clearly in violation of the United States Constitution, an impeachable offense. As Commander in Chief, he unilaterally (without Congressional authorization) decided to attack a nation that was not threatening the United States.

According to the Constitution, only Congress can "declare war". (The War Powers Act, attempted to address the ambiguities between "declared" and increasingly common "undeclared" wars. Under the Act, the Executive Branch would be allowed to initiate military action when our nation or our armed forces were subject to imminent threat, but it required The President obtain Congressional approval within 60 days following the onset of hostilities, or terminate operations. Upon request, an extension to 90 days might be granted.)

Since 1973, galled by this blatant attempt to restrain the President, the ever-more-monarchical Executive has defied Congressional attempts to challenge or reign in its power.

Among the current justifications the White House is testing: the duration of American air "combat operations" were of insufficient duration to require the mandated Congressional approval. (A nuclear attack and retaliation could be finished within an hour. Is that also subject to the "duration test"?)

Now, it is claimed that NATO is leading the assault on Libya and that the U.S. is merely providing intelligence (from CIA "boots on the ground", it's suspected), logistical support and, no doubt, materiel. (Iran-Contra or Bay of Pigs revisited?) Again, a distraction from the crime of waging war without authorization. (It should be noted that the U.S. provides 75% of NATO's funding.)

In the present examples of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan (incredible!) we see the "Unitary Executive", (the idealized vision of an omnipotent Executive Branch promoted by Neoconservatives) consolidating its grip on the Nation's "command and control apparatus." Unchecked, this concentration of power threatens the freedom not only of all Americans, but of all nations.

This is not Obama's doing. It is the office and the "Fortress America" culture he has stepped into. The collapse of democracy in this country began decades ago. But, contrary to his campaign (and current) rhetoric, he submits to the precedent of making decisions that lead to further consolidation of power and, inevitably, the violent scenes we are witnessing in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

As I watch citizens rise up against dictators in the "Arab Spring", I have to ask: would Americans ever have the courage to stand up to their government? I am afraid we are a nation of cowards, preferring comfort, convenience and entertainment to confronting the powers that are increasingly stealing our freedoms, our fortunes and our future.

I suggest the citizens of Libya start collecting the scrap metals, plastics and electronics from ordinance falling upon their land. These remnants will provide positive identification of those nations who are "at war".

For once I agree with John Boehner: Obama's statement "doesn't pass the straight-face test." More importantly, President Obama's unconstitutional war and, further, declaration of immunity from accountability under the War Powers Act is an impeachable offense.

Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

2011-06-14T22:58:00.000-07:00

(Click above to hear the author on "Fresh Air")

"But it wasn't clear to me just how plastic my world had become until I decided to go an entire day without touching anything plastic. The absurdity of this experiment became apparent about ten seconds into the appointed morning when I shuffled bleary-eyed into the bathroom: the toilet seat was plastic. I quickly revised my plan. I would spend the day writing down everything I touched that was plastic.

Within forty-five minutes, I had filled an entire page in my Penway Composition Book...

By the end of the day...the list included 196 entries..."

This fascinating look at the everyday encounters with plastics in our environment traces the history, development and our tortured love affair with plastics. Freinkel takes us to the refineries that produce the building blocks, the laboratories that develop the complex polymer chains, to manufacturing plants, wholesale and retail operations, municipal waste treatment facilities, recycling operations and also explores the unintended consequences of our "one-way waste stream".

The account is a fairly balanced look at both the immense value and convenience and even environmental benefits plastics have brought to our lives, and the serious challenges such an abundant material has created in terms of health (with a thorough discussion of phthalates and other plasticizers), the environment and promotion of a "disposable world".

She gives considerable coverage to the search for solutions to plastic's "persistence" in the environment and development of alternatives to petroleum-based resins, weighing the merits of each line of research and development.

It's an entertaining and very educational work of investigative journalism.

"Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style"

2011-06-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

U.S. Embassy, Baghdad (one of 21 buildings in the 104-acre compound)

A Frat House With Guns in Baghdad
By Peter Van Buren
Published on TomDispatch.com

Way out on the edge of Forward Operating Base Hammer, where I lived for much of my year in Iraq as a Provincial Reconstruction Team leader for the U.S. Department of State, there were several small hills, lumps of raised dirt on the otherwise frying-pan-flat desert. These were “tells,” ancient garbage dumps and fallen buildings.

Thousands of years ago, people in the region used sun-dried bricks to build homes and walls. Those bricks had a lifespan of about 20 years before they began to crumble, at which point locals just built anew atop the old foundation. Do that for a while, and soon enough your buildings are sitting on a small hill.

At night, the tell area was very dark, as we avoided artificial light in order not to give passing insurgents easy targets. In that darkness, you could imagine the earliest inhabitants of what was now our base looking at the night sky and be reminded that we were not the first to move into Iraq from afar. It was also a promise across time that someday someone would undoubtedly sit atop our own ruins and wonder whatever happened to the Americans.

From that ancient debris field, recall the almost forgotten run-up to the American invasion, the now-ridiculous threats about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Colin Powell lying away his own and America’s prestige at the U.N., those "Mission-Accomplished" days when the Marines tore down Saddam’s statue and conquered Baghdad, the darker times as civil society imploded and Iraq devolved into civil war, the endless rounds of purple fingers for stage-managed elections that meant little, the Surge and the ugly stalemate that followed, fading to gray as President George W. Bush negotiated a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011 and the seeming end of his dreams of a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.

Now, with less than seven months left until that withdrawal moment, Washington debates whether to honor the agreement, or -- if only we can get the Iraqi government to ask us to stay -- to leave a decent-sized contingent of soldiers occupying some of the massive bases the Pentagon built hoping for permanent occupancy.

To the extent that any attention is paid to Iraq here in Snooki’s America, the debate over whether eight years of war entitles the U.S. military to some kind of Iraqi squatter’s rights is the story that will undoubtedly get most of the press in the coming months.

How This Won’t End

Even if the troops do finally leave, the question is: Will that actually bring the U.S. occupation of Iraq to a close? During the invasion of 2003, a younger David Petraeus famously asked a reporter: “Tell me how this ends.”

Dave, it may not actually end. After all, as of October 1, 2011, full responsibility for the U.S. presence in Iraq will officially be transferred from the military to the Department of State. In other words, as Washington imagines it, the occupation won’t really end at all, even if the landlords are switched.

And the State Department hasn’t exactly been thinking small when it comes to its future “footprint” on Iraqi soil. The U.S. mission in Baghdad remains the world’s largest embassy, built on a tract of land about the size of the Vatican and visible from space. It cost just $736 million to build -- or was it $1 billion, depending on how you count the post-construction upgrades and fixes?

In its post-“withdrawal” plans, the State Department expects to have 17,000 personnel in Iraq at some 15 sites. If those plans go as expected, 5,500 of them will be mercenaries, hired to shoot-to-kill Iraqis as needed, to maintain security. Of the remaining 11,500, most will be in support roles of one sort or another, with only a couple of hundred in traditional diplomatic jobs. This is not unusual in wartime situations. The military, for example, typically fields about seven support soldiers for every “shooter.” In other words, the occupation run by a heavily militarized State Department will simply continue in a new, truncated form -- unless Congress refuses to pay for it.

It would better serve America’s interests to have an embassy sized to the message we now need to send to the Middle East, and it shouldn’t be one of boastful conquest.

A Place to Call Home

After initially setting up shop in a selection of Saddam Hussein’s Disneyesque palaces (in one of the dumbest PR moves of all time), plans were made to build an embassy worthy of the over-the-top optimism and bravado that characterized the invasion itself. Though officially photos of the inside of the Embassy compound are not allowed for “security” reasons, a quick Google search under “U.S. Embassy Baghdad” turns up plenty, including some of the early architectural renderings of the future gargantuan compound. (Historical minifact: back in 2007, TomDispatch first broke the story that the architect’s version of the embassy’s secret interior was displayed all pink and naked online.)

The blind optimism of that moment was best embodied in the international school building stuck in one corner of the embassy compound. Though a fierce civil-war-cum-insurgency was then raging in Iraq, the idea was that, soon enough, diplomatic families would be assigned to Baghdad, just as they were to Paris or Seoul, and naturally the kids would need a school. It may seem silly now, but few doubted it then.

Apartments were built, each with a full set of the usual American appliances, including dishwashers, in expectation that those families would be shopping for food at a near-future Sadr City Safeway and that diplo-tots Timmy and Sally would need their dinners after a long day at school. Wide walkways, shaded by trees and dotted with stone benches -- ultimately never implemented -- were part of the overall design for success, and in memory now serve as comic rim-shots for our past hubris.

In la-la land they may have been, but even the embassy planners couldn’t help but leave some room for the creeping realities of an Iraq in chaos. The compound would purify its own water, generate its own power, and process its own sewage, ensuring that it could outlast any siege and, at the same time, getting the U.S. off the hook for repairing such basic services in Baghdad proper.

High walls went up rimmed with razor wire, and an ever-more complex set of gates and security checkpoints kept creeping into the design. Eventually, the architects just gave up, built a cafeteria, filled the school building with work cubicles, and installed inches-thick bulletproof glass on every window. The embassy’s housing for 4,000 is, at present, packed, while the electrical generators run at capacity 24/7. They need to be upgraded and new units added very soon simply to keep the lights on.

And now, the embassy staff in Baghdad is about to double. One plan to accommodate extra personnel involves hot-bunking -- sharing beds on day-and-night shifts as happens on submarines.

The embassy will also soon need a hospital on its grounds, if the U.S. Army truly departs and takes its facilities with it. Iraqi medical care is considered too substandard and Iraqi hospitals too dangerous for use by white folks.

You and Whose Army?

A fortress needs guards, and an occupier needs shock troops. The State Department's army will be divided into two parts: those who guard fixed facilities like the embassy and those who protect diplomats as they scurry about trying to corral the mad Iraqis running the country.

For static security, a company named SOC will guard the embassy facilities for up to $973 million over five years. That deflowered old warhorse Blackwater (now Xe), under yet another dummy corporate name, will also get a piece of action, and of the money pie.

SOC will undoubtedly follow the current security company’s lead and employ almost exclusively Ugandans and Peruvians transported to Iraq for that purpose. For the same reasons Mexicans cut American lawns and Hondurans clean American hotel rooms, embassy guards come from poverty-stricken countries and get paid accordingly -- about $600 a month. Their U.S. supervisors, on the other hand, pull down $20,000 of your tax dollars monthly. Many of the Ugandan and Peruvian guards got their jobs through nasty intermediaries (“pimps,” “slavers”), who take back most of their meager salaries to repay “recruitment costs,” leaving many guards as little more than indentured servants.

Long-time merc group Triple Canopy will provide protection outside the embassy fortress, reputedly for $1.5 billion over a five-year span. The overall goal is for State to have its own private army in Iraq: those 5,500 hired guns, almost two full brigades worth of them. The Army guards Fort Knox with fewer soldiers; my Forward Operating Base made due with less then 400 troops and I slept comfortably.

The past mayhem caused by contracted security is well known, with massacres in public squares, drunken murders in the Green Zone, and the like. Think of the mercs as what the Army might be like without its NCOs and officers: a frat house with guns.

Most of them are Americans, though with a few exotic Brits and shady South Africans thrown in. They love 5.11 clothing and favor fingerless leather gloves. Think biker gang or Insane Clown Posse fan boys.

Popular is a clean-shaven head, no moustache but a spiky goatee teased straight out. You know the look from late-night convenience store beer runs. They walk around like Yosemite Sam, arms out as if their very biceps prevented them from standing straight. They’re bullies of course, flirting inappropriately with women and posturing around men. Count on them to wear the most expensive Oakley sunglasses and the most unnecessary gear (gold man-bracelets, tactical hair gel). Think: Jersey Shore rejects.

Aggressive tattoos on all exposed skin seem a prerequisite for membership in Club Merc, especially wavy inked patterns around the biceps and on the neck. They all let on that they were once SEALS, Green Berets, SAS, or Legion of Doom members, but of course they “can’t talk about it.” They’re not likely to disclose last names and tend to go by nicknames like Bulldog, Spider, Red Bull, Wolverine, or Smitty.

If arrogance was contagious they’d all be sneezing. All Aryan, all dudely, and now all that stands between those thousands of State Department personnel and Iraq. Oh yes: the seersuckered and bow-tied diplomats are supposed to supervise the mercs and keep them on the right diplomatic path, kind of like expecting the chess club to run herd on the football team.

Air America

With the U.S Army departing in whole or in part by year’s end, most of the array of Army air assets State used will need to be replaced. A recently released State Department Office of the Inspector General’s (OIG) “Report on Department of State Planning for the Transition to a Civilian-led Mission in Iraq Performance Evaluation” explains that our diplomats will, in the future, have their own little Air America in Iraq, a fleet of 46 aircraft, including:

* 20 medium lift S-61 helicopters (essentially Black Hawks, possibly armed)

* 18 light lift UH-1N helicopters (new models of ‘Nam era Hueys, possibly armed)

* Three light observation MD-530 helicopters (Little Birds, armed, for quick response strike teams… er, um, observation duties)

* Five Dash 8 fixed-wing aircraft (50-passenger capacity to move personnel into the “theater” from Jordan)

The OIG report also notes that State will need to construct landing zones, maintenance hangars, operation buildings, and air traffic control towers, along with an independent aviation logistics system for maintenance and fueling. And yes, the diplomats are supposed to supervise this, too, the goal being to prevent an Iraqi from being gunned down from an attack helo with diplomatic license plates. What could go wrong?

How Much?

At this point, has cost started to cross your mind? Well, some 74% of embassy Baghdad’s operating costs will be going to “security.” State requested $2.7 billion from Congress for its Iraq operations in FY 2011, but got only $2.3 billion from a budget-minded Capitol Hill. Facing the possibility of being all alone in a dangerous universe in FY 2012, the Department has requested $6.3 billion for Iraq. Congress has yet to decide what to do. To put these figures in perspective, the State Department total operating budget for this year is only about $14 billion (the cost of running the place, absent the foreign aid money), so $6.3 billion for one more year in Iraq is a genuine chunk of change.

How Does It End?

Which only leaves the question of why.

Pick your forum -- TomDispatch readers at a kegger, Fox news pundits following the Palin bus, high school students preparing to take SATs, unemployed factory workers in a food-stamp line -- and ask if any group of Americans (not living in official Washington) would conclude that Iraq was our most important foreign policy priority, and so deserving of our largest embassy with the largest staff and largest budget on the planet.

Does Iraq threaten U.S. security? Does it control a resource we demand? (Yes, it’s got lots of oil underground, but produces remarkably little of the stuff.) Is Iraq enmeshed in some international coalition we need to butter up? Any evil dictators or WMDs around? Does Iraq hold trillions in U.S. debt? Anything? Anyone? Bueller?

Eight disastrous years after we invaded, it is sad but altogether true that Iraq does not matter much in the end. It is a terrible thing that we poured 4,459 American lives and trillions of dollars into the war, and without irony oversaw the deaths of at least a hundred thousand, and probably hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis in the name of freedom. Yet we are left with only one argument for transferring our occupation duties from the Department of Defense to the Department of State: something vague about our “investment in blood and treasure.”

Think of this as the Vegas model of foreign policy: keep the suckers at the table throwing good money after bad. Leaving aside the idea that “blood and treasure” sounds like a line from Pirates of the Caribbean, one must ask: What accomplishment are we protecting?

The war’s initial aim was to stop those weapons of mass destruction from being used against us. There were none, so check that off the list. Then it was to get rid of Saddam. He was hanged in 2006, so cross off that one. A little late in the game we became preoccupied with ensuring an Iraq that was “free.” And we’ve had a bunch of elections and there is a government of sorts in place to prove it, so that one’s gotta go, too.

What follows won’t be “investment,” just more waste. The occupation of Iraq, centered around that engorged embassy, is now the equivalent of a self-licking ice cream cone, useful only to itself.

Changing the occupying force from an exhausted U.S. Army that labored away for years at a low-grade version of diplomacy (drinking endless cups of Iraqi tea) to a newly militarized Department of State will not free us from the cul-de-sac we find ourselves in. While nothing will erase the stain of the invasion, were we to really leave when we promised to leave, the U.S. might have a passing shot at launching a new narrative in a Middle East already on edge over the Arab Spring.

Embassies are, at the end of the day, symbols. Sustaining our massive one in Iraq, with its ever-lengthening logistics and security train, simply emphasizes our failure there and our stubborn inability to admit that we were wrong. When a country becomes too dangerous for diplomacy, like Libya, we temporarily close our embassy. When a country becomes dangerous, but U.S. interests are still at stake, as in Yemen, we withdraw all but essential personnel. Similarly, in Baghdad, what’s needed is a modest-sized embassy staffed not by thousands but by scores -- that is, only the limited number of people necessary to make the point that it is no longer an extension of a failed occupation.

Nothing can change the past in the Middle East, but withdrawing the troops on schedule and downsizing our embassy radically to emphasize that we are no longer in the business of claiming more space for the American empire might very well help change the future.

Peter Van Buren spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well. His book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), will be published this September and can be preordered by clicking here. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s two-part TomCast audio interview in which Van Buren discusses Washington going through withdrawal over Iraq and the mercenaries it’s leaving behind, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

[Source Note: The full text of the OIG Report on the transition from military to State Department control of the Iraq mission can be read as a .pdf file by clicking here. The OIG site is chock full of interesting documents under its “Reports and Publications” tab, including many items previously surfaced via FOIA requests. Though not cited in this article, another excellent source of primary documents about the US mission in Iraq can be found at the website of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.]

[Note: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, or any other entity of the U.S. Government. The Department of State has not approved, endorsed, or authorized this post.]

Copyright 2011 Peter Van Buren

Priceless U.S. History Lesson

2011-06-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Unusual June weather

2011-06-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

A low pressure system parked 200 miles of so west of San Francisco this morning, bringing a good soaking to the area.

Gayngs and White Hinterland at The Independent, San Francisco

2011-06-02T19:39:00.000-07:00

The Minneapolis-based rock group Gayngs performed at The Independent in San Francisco Wednesday night. It was their first visit to San Francisco. I became aware of Gayngs during the past year, after hearing a track by the Rosebuds in the film Easier with Practice. That led, via Ivan Howard's connection with both bands, to my stumbling upon Gayngs. It's a remarkably tight ensemble of talented musicians who display a high level of sophistication and precision. A year ago they released their acclaimed debut album "Relayted". (Apparently all the tracks were recorded at a tempo of 69 beats per minute, 69BPM, adagio to classical musicians.) Wednesday's playlist was entirely from the album.

Though I arranged with the band's manager to get a "photo pass", at the door I learned that photography with SLRs is limited to the first three songs "then you have to move away from the stage". (Except for flash use, cellphones and small point-and-shoot cameras are not restricted.) I knew that it was a sold-out show, but when I saw the crowd swell to capacity just as Gayngs was about to come out, I decided it wasn't worth jostling just for a blog photo. So I parked myself in the balcony and (under the influence of a couple beers and an atmosphere laced with marijuana smoke,) took some long, slow shots. Next time, I'm simply going to enjoy the music (and maybe jump into the crowd and get jostled!)

Gayngs open with "The Gaudy Side of Town". Ryan Olsen, co-founder, with the Mac.

From the Gayngs Website:

Relayted CD / 2XLP (JAG165, released: 05/11/10)

When Ryan Olson decided to make a record with Solid Gold members Zack Coulter and Adam Hurlburt, it was clear to them what the result would be: a collection of drugged-up keyboards and slick bedroom production almost exclusively inspired by 10cc's "I'm Not In Love." To be fair, they weren't entirely off. What they didn't know was that it would spiral into a project of epic proportions, enlisting the talents of over 25 musicians from various scenes around the country, relocating the base of operations from Olson's Minneapolis bedroom/studio to the Wisconsin-based studio April Base, and the genesis of a musical family, GAYNGS.

From the moment anyone heard Olson, Coulter, and Hurlburt's rough version of their first composition "The Gaudy Side of Town," they wanted in on it. To most of the players involved, this genre of music was quite foreign yet entirely familiar. Olson knew this, and began calling upon an eclectic cast of contributors whom he thought would share his vision, and relish in the idea of exploring uncharted musical territory within them. The first people to join the cause were North Carolina's Megafaun (Joe Westerlund, Brad Cook, Phil Cook), and with them came Ivan Howard (The Rosebuds), and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and Mike Noyce. By mid-2009 the studio sessions were becoming more and more frequent, bouncing back and forth between April Base and Olson's bedroom. In Minneapolis, Olson brought in Rhymesayers rapper P.O.S and his fellow Doomtree artist Dessa, psych-rockers Jake Luck and Nick Ryan (Leisure Birds), song-birds Channy Moon-Casselle and Katy Morley, jazz-saxophonist Michael Lewis (Happy Apple, Andrew Bird), retro-pop duo Maggie Morrison and Grant Cutler (Lookbook), and slide-guitarist Shön Troth (Solid Gold).

Vocally, GAYNGS is a triumph. Zack Coulter (Solid Gold) shines from the jump, floating over the record with his airy, haunting melodies. Fans of Bon Iver will recognize Vernon's familiar falsetto, but will flip when they hear his Bone Thug's-style R&B. Ivan Howard sounds right at home with his sensual and breathy leads, while P.O.S. abandons his genre entirely for a soul inspired tenor. With over a dozen people contributing vocals, its incredible how cohesive the album sounds.

After a year of tracking and mixing, GAYNGS is officially ready to release the album, entitled "Relayted." The initial goal was achieved perfectly, yet "Relayted" sounds refreshing and modern. With each song written at 69 BPM's, and tripped-out transitions from song to song, it is truly an audio experience from start to finish.

Speaking of walking, the second song in the set was "The Walker", one of my favorites from this group. Ivan Howard sings lead.

For the show at The Independent, the ensemble numbered ten (of the up to twenty-three musicians who contribute to the Gayngs artistic enterprise.) I missed two of my favorite guitarists and vocalists of the bunch, Justin Vernon (with his notable falsetto) and Mike Noyce (both of Bon Iver) and felt it was a little bit like having the Beatles perform without Lennon. That's part of the difficulty with large ensembles (and perhaps small stages.) How do you coordinate schedules for twenty-three independent artists so that you can build a tour?

The third song this evening, their remake of Godley and Creme's "Cry".

Michael Lewis sax solo

Har Mar Superstar (his stage name) has a fine voice, but his comedic antics, I thought, detracted from the overall performance. And sadly, his falsetto doesn't come near that of Justin Vernon's.

Gayngs in-studio performance of "Faded High"

Ivan Howard in white, and on guitar in the below video

The following wasn't performed last night, but I enjoy the simplicity of the video:

Solo by Channy Moon Casselle, the lone female voice in tonight's line-up

Finale: The Last Prom

Below, White Hinterland was the opening act for Gayngs. The duo is comprised of Casey Dienel and Shawn Creeden. They recently released the album Icarus.

Earlier in the day, I had listened to some recordings of their music, but tonight, because of the heavy layering of loops, effects and a general imbalance between voice and electronica, I was completely unable to discern the lyrics - not a single word. I thought it was perhaps the venue acoustics, but when Gayngs came on, their lyrics strong and clear, I realized it was more an "engineering" issue for White Hinterland, something that shouldn't be difficult to remedy.

One of the more striking revelations this evening happened well before the show began. A DJ was spinning records, the music amped up so that the floor and walls (and my entire body) shook. The gathering crowd milled about, drinks in hand, noisily chattering over the music. Suddenly, a particular song came on and I looked around to see people, unconsciously it seemed, suddenly moving to the contagious rhythm. I went over to the DJ and asked what he was playing. He pulled out the album. The song was Fleet Foxes', "Grown Ocean". Some of the other stuff he had played was painful to my ear, but this was a joyous celebration.

Walking

2011-05-31T21:02:00.000-07:00

For many months, I've wondered what the next adventure might be. In recent years, with each successive crossing of the U.S., I felt the urge to slow down. Even eschewing the Interstate Highway System and taking to secondary roads, often with stops every five or ten minutes to have a closer look at something, it still felt I was missing so much.

I figured my next journey might well be on foot. Indeed, after buying the motorcycle, I imagined that the next "vehicle", after the bike, would likely be my feet. And I started to imagine walking across the United States, retracing some of the paths I've been down. (If "Granny D" could do it at the age of 90, I should be able to!)

But why wait until I'm forced to walk? And why look to far-off, exotic destinations to feed my curiosity? Why not start by more closely exploring the place I've lived on and off for more than twenty years?

Sticker shock at the local gas station. Above each of the station's gas pumps are rather odd signs: "Bathrooms are for everyone, but the driver should get to go first." Are oil companies now teaching etiquette? (We know from their marketing campaigns that they're already greening the environment.)

In the past year, I substantially reduced motorcycle usage, taking pleasure in seeing a smaller portion of my money go to the oil companies. (I had contributed quite generously during the "Americas Trip".) I was now driving less than at any time since first being licensed. But being nearly five miles from downtown and most of the places I frequent, the thought of walking was daunting.

A major milestone was achieved last year when I overcame my inertia and actually walked to a shopping plaza less than three-quarters of a mile from my house. The inner chatter: "walking just isn't 'cool'. Losers walk." My life-long suburban attitude told me this. What might be normal, indeed sensible in small towns like Langley, Washington or Waterbury, Vermont, here in Suburbia seems to be regarded as a bizarre, even unsound behavior. "Why would you walk?" (If it's clearly part of your exercise regimen - as demonstrated by a wild, frenetic energy - or, if you're walking a dog, that's obviously necessary. Then we understand and approve.)

I often walk, but it usually involves driving somewhere - typically to one of several local parks - in order to walk. (We gladly drive and many pay for the privilege of exercising.)

I've often driven to coffee shops and libraries. Couldn't I walk? Granted, the distances are typically four or fives miles each way, but so what? On other days, I'll devote considerable time to exercising. Why not incorporate exercise into my regular excursions? A revelatory concept for me, it's hardly a novel idea. As many have long realized (and I was slow to comprehend,) one can get one's exercise in the course of daily activity, if one chooses not to avoid it, as we are conditioned to do.

I'm also tired of financing corporate green-washing campaigns with BP, Shell and Chevron touting their environmental leadership, all while fighting tooth and nail to avoid full responsibility for environmental devastation in (respectively) the Gulf of Mexico, Nigeria and the Amazon Basin in Ecuador. All this while they announce record profits.

Bennett Valley Road, the shortest route from my apartment to downtown Santa Rosa, is one of the more treacherous roads for pedestrians. Not "foot-friendly" at all.

With the recent publicity surrounding Bike to Work Week, I felt the focus on bicycles was fine, but why not encourage an even simpler, more environmentally-benign activity, walking? Some well-intentioned friends and relatives have suggested I "need" to get a bicycle, but why? I really don't want to buy another thing (and a fairly sophisticated thing at that), including all the specialized gear the activity seems to "require" (just looking at riders here in Sonoma County.) Bicycles are one way to deal with suburban sprawl, but clearly not the only alternative to the automobile.

Early in May, I overcame my inertia and started getting out on foot, exploring my "hometown" and testing the notion of walking long distances. The first day out, I walked about ten miles. I thought this experience could lead to a blog post: "Stranger in My Own Town". By day's end, my feet were raw and body aching. The concept of walking across the country seemed absolutely ludicrous, another hair-brained scheme.

And the argument that walking would save money was also quickly undermined. After a few miles, I was already hungry and dreaming about the restaurant that soon became my destination. I spent $18 on food and beverage during that first walk.

During the second walk, swelling in my lower legs developed into vasculitis, a new malady to consider.

By the third time out, ten miles felt like "no big deal". (I might feel differently in the heat of summer.) There were still blisters and discomfort from footwear. (I have alternated between hiking boots, running shoes and sports sandals, trying to determine which serves me best.)

Now at the end of May, I have made eleven walking-tours of the community and chalked up over a hundred and ten miles on foot. It is likely the first time in my life where, over the course of a month, the distance traveled on foot exceeded the distance traveled by motor vehicle. A pattern seemed to emerge: one day walking, followed by one day riding, followed by one or two days remaining at home. (Having no job to go to makes this experiment quite simple.) In May, I put $20 worth of gasoline in the motorcycle. Most of it is still there.

It has been a revelation how easy it is to meet and talk with people when you're on foot. Regardless of social or economic status, conversations erupt spontaneously with people on the street. I'm much more inclined to step into a business that piques my interest and though I'm on foot, I really don't find much hesitation to deviate a few blocks to follow my curiosity. And on foot you can ignore all those newly-installed pay-point parking systems.

You know, there is a certain pleasure in walking (or bicycling) past these annoying places.

And finally, earlier this month, a notice arrived from my insurance company, Safeco, advising me of a 29% increase in the premium for the coming year. (This despite a perfectly clean record, and the fact that I'm driving less than 20% of my historic rates.) It would be nice to free myself of insurance abuse.

That major corporations can treat us customers with such indifference, and with impunity, makes it all the more pleasing when we realize there is always the option to simply turn our backs on them.

At close quarters, it's interesting to observe an "instinctive phenomena". When drivers first spot me along the shoulder of the road, there is often a slight swerve of the vehicle in my direction, followed by a correction to avoid me. In motorcycle training, we taught riders to avoid looking at obstacles. "If you look at the obstacle, you're likely to hit it. Look where you want to go."

Example of how a "technological solution" causes us to consume fifty times the resources to achieve marginal benefit. Suddenly I'm seeing these discarded floss holders. I don't think I'd ever notice a piece of floss on the ground. These things however...

The walk downtown is a journey back in time. From the small eight-home subdivision where I presently reside in a "granny" apartment, with its custom homes built in the early 2000s, I first pass by apartment complexes constructed in the 80s and 90s. Twenty minutes from my house, I have reached the early-1960s and easily recognize the style of home from my childhood and early teen years, the same construction used in our new family homes purchased in the Santa Clara Valley circa 1959 and 1963, with two-car garages then the prominent feature. (Most now have at least one vehicle parked outside, that won't fit in the garage.)

I'm surprised in these housing tracts how many of the street-facing windows are blinded, or obscured by vegetation allowed to grow up in front. The owners turn to the back yards for their refuge. After an hour, I'm in the 1940s and 50s - simple, austere and uninspired box houses. Some residents make up for the dreary architecture with lush and varied gardens. Half-way downtown and I'm back to my birth year.

On foot, you're much more likely to appreciate the flowers in bloom. Right now, the air is perfumed with rose and jasmine.

After 75 minutes, I'm among homes that would remind my parents and even grandparents of their childhood. Most have generous front porches. It seems we were more social creatures in earlier times. Some have lost considerable portions of their front yards to street-widening projects. Their add-on garages are tucked in the rear, and are barely large enough for a full-size car. So mostly, in these neighborhoods, cars are parked in driveways or at the curb. Roughly 150 years spanned in this 90-minute walk to the Flying Goat coffee shop in Old Railroad Square, itself housed in an old stone hotel from the 1800s.

For the most part, I would not term walking in Santa Rosa "pleasant". It's extremely difficult to escape the roar of traffic. And the ubiquitous two-cycle engines of lawnmowers, weed whips, blowers and chainsaws are almost always in earshot. It's kind of like cell-phone towers: you leave one behind and immediately pick up the next. Same with the "auditory barrage" from these annoying engines. I joke about it, but it seems pretty clear that the noise from engines is a real stresser, something the human body is not inured to. I'll experiment with walking early to see if the noise level is significantly lower.

Lucy! Santa Rosa was home to "Peanuts" creator Charles M. Schulz. His characters are a common sight throughout Santa Rosa.

The Flying Goat coffee shop. Probably my favorite hang-out these days. It's just under a five-mile walk from the house (and worth the effort!)

Less than two hundred yards east of this spot, Santa Rosa Creek flows beneath U.S. Highway 101. Here, it provides a calming influence for walkers and bicyclists on the Prince Memorial Greenway. To the west, as the setting becomes slightly more rural, it might be possible to conjure a sense of the Santa Rosa Plain before humans.

Luther Burbank home and gardens, downtown Santa Rosa

I remember (long ago!) there was serious debate about the aesthetics of power lines over our neighborhoods. With the advent of internet and cable home service, the overhead "rat's nest" threatens to block out the sun. Between these wires and jet contrails above, I fear there will be Global Cooling in these neighborhoods! (And just how much weight can those poles take???)

This looks like someone's idea of a Bonzai Redwood, except this one stands 60 to 80 feet tall!

As I paused while waiting to cross Farmer's Lane, one of the busier thoroughfares in Santa Rosa, it struck me that the level of traffic noise is astounding. And to make matters worse, so many vehicles are engineered or modified to make them even louder than necessary. There is something quite sociopathic about this. (Here in Santa Rosa, we like our big, beefy pick-up trucks.)(I also thought about the oft-heard Harley justification “the noise lets people know we're coming.” It’s all about safety, right? That’s why many Harley riders go without helmets any chance they get.)

The more I "learn" about walking this city, the more I become aware that its a "normal" activity, a way of life for many and that the Santa Rosa has made serious efforts to encourage walking. (I just wasn't hearing the message.)

Napa Valley is currently constructing a 44-mile "Vine Trail" multi-use path from the ferry terminal in Vallejo, northward to the base of Mount St. Helena. It will be designed for bicyclists, walkers, strollers, senior citizens - everyone. A great idea.

Walking through Montgomery Village, an open air shopping center, attractively landscaped with beds of roses. I passed close by the front doors of the shops, often breathing the air coming out of the store. It can tell you a lot. The air from Ross Dress for Less was particularly interesting - an overwhelming smell of plastics and those sizing chemicals used in clothing manufacturing.

In Santa Rosa, many subdivisions contain cul-de-sacs. Seeking to flee the noise of large thoroughfares, I have walked into some, to explore potential alternative walking routes. Since virtually every suburban California yard is fenced, pedestrians are generally prevented from moving between subdivisions, except via the main boulevards. In this way, we engineer communities to discourage walking (and bicycling.) We force pedestrians and bicyclists into the same corridors as motor vehicles, with their noise, and emissions and dust from brakes, tires, oil, and whatever additional detritus they kick up from the pavement.

In many parts of the United States, property is not demarcated with fences and people are able to cross yards, passing between neighboring streets. Where I have seen this, it seems so refreshing and free. We have a certain "tyranny of fences" here in California. (I know the old expression "good fences make good neighbors", but I don't necessarily believe it. Good neighbors make good neighbors.)

Obviously, walking brings out the self-righteousness in me (as if I've not been polluting with the best of them all these years.) One more thing to observe and rein in...as I walk.

The AfPak Swamp

2011-05-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

A few hours before President Obama addressed the nation announcing the "successful" operation to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, I had just finished reading Bob Woodward's excellent book Obama's Wars.

Much of the book focuses on Obama's struggle to find the right exit strategy in Afghanistan. From page 281, this insight:

Obama said he wanted his final decision to be based upon consultation with the military and not something that was forced upon him. He had to get himself and the country out of that box. War could not suck the oxygen out of everything else. Some of it had to do with the nature of wars that had the U.S. fight local insurgencies. There were going to be no victory dances in the end zone. One of his problems with Bush had been the constant talk of a victory that was not attainable.

Obama had campaigned against Bush's ideas and approaches. But (Deputy National Security Adviser Tom) Donilon, for one, thought that Obama had perhaps underestimated the extent to which he had inherited George W. Bush's presidency - the apparatus, personnel and mind-set of war making.

I came away with a very troubling picture of the role Pakistan was playing in the region, essentially working all sides, variously cooperating with (or tolerating) the Americans and our allies, the Afghani and Pakistani Taliban, Al Qaeda and various other "terrorist" groups.

It was revealed that India, Pakistan's mortal enemy, is sending $1.2 Billion in aid to Afghanistan. (Why is this not headline news?) This is certainly threatening to Pakistan and lends credibility to the argument that Pakistan is in indeed supporting anti-government operations in Afghanistan.

According to Woodward's account (p. 215):

...Pakistan would view a strong Afghan national government as aligned with their archenemy, India, thereby basically surrounding and isolating Pakistan.

The following testimony gives a fairly complete summary of the issues the United States is presently confronting in the "AfPak" region.

Prepared statement by Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations

Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate
1 Session, 112th Congress

Hearing on Afghanistan: What is an Acceptable End-State, and How Do We Get
There?

Mr. Chairman:

Thank you for asking me to appear before this Committee, in this instance to discuss U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and, more specifically, what constitutes an acceptable end-state in that country and how the United States can best work to bring it about. As has been the case over the past eight years, my statement and testimony today reflect my personal views and not those of the Council on Foreign Relations, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

The questions that inform this hearing are at one and the same time critical yet difficult to answer. Indeed, I have come to think that just about anything associated with Afghanistan is difficult. I first visited that country as a researcher in the late 1970s in the months preceding the Soviet-engineered coup. Just over a decade later, Afghanistan was part of my portfolio of responsibility when I served as the senior director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council staff of President George H.W. Bush. It was in the first weeks of that administration – in February, 1989, to be precise – that the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan came to an end. And, more recently, in the aftermath of 9/11, I served as U.S. coordinator for the future of Afghanistan under President George W. Bush.

Much of the debate about Afghanistan has focused on whether U.S. policy is likely to succeed, with “success” loosely defined as bringing about an Afghan government that in several years’ time can hold off the Taliban with only a modest amount of continuing American help. In theory, several more years of intense U.S. military effort will provide the time and space required to train up the Afghan army and police and weaken the Taliban so that they no longer constitute an overwhelming threat or, better yet, decide to negotiate an end to the conflict.

I am deeply skeptical that this policy will work given the nature of Afghanistan (above all, the weakness of central institutions) and the reality that Pakistan will continue to provide a sanctuary for the Taliban. Yes, U.S. forces will succeed at clearing and holding, but successful building by the end of 2014 is a long shot at best. Some Taliban may give up but many and probably most will not. Afghan military and police forces will increase in number and improve in performance but not nearly as much as is needed.

Of course, I may well be proven wrong here, and sincerely hope I will be if the decision is made to keep U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan relatively high until the end of 2014 or even longer, as is possible if the United States bases any withdrawal decision on conditions that will be difficult to bring about. But the bigger question hovering over current U.S. Afghan policy is whether it is worth it even if it were to succeed. I would argue it is not, both on the micro (local) level and the macro (global) level.

Some perspective is required. American troops have been fighting in one form or another in Afghanistan for nearly a decade. But it is essential to note that today’s Afghan war is fundamentally different than the one waged after the 9/11 attacks. That war was a war of necessity: the most important national interest (self-defense) was involved, and there were no promising, timely alternatives to the use of military force once it became clear diplomacy would not bring about an end to Afghan government, i.e., Taliban, support for global terrorism.

Over time, however, Afghanistan evolved into a war of choice. What made it so were two developments. First, U.S. interests had become less than vital with the near-elimination of al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Afghanistan no longer represented a significant global terrorist threat, and certainly no more of one than several other countries (most notably, Pakistan) in the region and in Africa. Second, there were other viable policy options available to the United States in Afghanistan, in particular a more narrow and limited counter-terrorism strategy coupled with a degree of nation, i.e., capacity, building. The situation did not warrant our becoming a protagonist in Afghanistan’s civil war, the adoption of a counter-insurgency strategy, or the tripling of U.S. force levels to near 100,000.

Just to be clear, wars of choice are not wrong per se. But before undertaking one, it is essential to demonstrate that the likely benefits of using military force will outweigh the costs and produce better results at less cost than other policies.

Afghanistan does not meet these tests. It is not a major terrorist haven, and it should not be assumed it will again become one even if the Taliban make inroads. It was and is an error to equate Taliban return with al-Qaida’s return. If there is some renewed terrorist presence and activity in Afghanistan, we can and should respond to it much as we have been doing in other countries such as Yemen and Somalia.

The Afghan-Pakistan tie is at the heart of U.S. policy and its limits. There is no way the United States will be able to persuade Pakistan to become a full partner in Afghanistan (and stop providing sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban) given Islamabad’s obsession with India and its view of Afghanistan as a critical source of strategic depth in its struggle with India. Even a solution to the Kashmir conflict would not change this – and there is no solution to Kashmir in the offing, certainly not in a time frame that would prove relevant to U.S. decision-making for Afghanistan.

At the macro or global level, Afghanistan is simply absorbing more economic, military, human, diplomatic, and political resources of every sort than it warrants. The $110-$120 billion annual price tag – one out of every six to seven dollars this country spends on defense – is unjustifiable given the budget crisis we face and the need for military (especially air and naval) modernization. The history of the 21st century is far more likely to be determined in the land areas and waters of Asia and the Pacific than it is on the plains and in the mountains of Afghanistan. We had also better be prepared for a number of future counterterrorist interventions (along the lines of Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen) in Libya and elsewhere in the Greater Middle East and Africa. We also need to make sure we have adequate forces for possible contingencies on the Korean Peninsula and conceivably with Iran. Afghanistan is a strategic distraction, pure and simple. Secretary of Defense Gates’s recent West Point speech makes a case for avoiding sending a large American land force into places like Afghanistan. I agree. But less clear is why we should continue to deploy a large number of soldiers there for the present and near future.

All this is an argument for doing considerably less than what we are doing, by transitioning rapidly (by mid- or late 2012) to a relatively small, sustainable, strategically-warranted deployment, one I would estimate to be on a scale of 10,000-25,000 troops. The precise number of U.S. troops would be determined by the terrorist threat, training goals, the role assigned to civilians and contractors, and what the Afghans were willing to accept. The future U.S. troop presence should allow for continued counter-terrorist operations (along the lines of what was just carried out by Special Forces in Pakistan) and for training of Afghan forces at both the national and local level.

Such a strategy would be consistent with existing policy, i.e., the president all along has said the United States would begin troop reductions as of mid-2011. At issue is the pace or glide slope of U.S. troop reductions. The president did not commit to any particular pace or end point.

Reductions of the scale being advocated here and the phasing out of combat operations against the Taliban have a number of advantages. It would save upwards of $75 billion a year and sharply reduce American casualties. Doing so takes into account Afghan nationalism and the understandable popular desire to limit foreign forces in number and role. Doing less with less avoids a large footprint that would be costly and risks wearing out our welcome. A more modest strategy is a more sustainable strategy in every way.

Continuing to do what we are doing on the scale we are doing it will not necessarily achieve more than what is being suggested here given Afghanistan’s history, leadership, demography, culture, geography, and neighborhood, in particular Pakistan. And even if substantial progress is achieved in the near-term, there is nothing to suggest those gains will endure. Strategy is about balancing means and ends, resources and interests, and the time has come to restore strategic perspective to what the United States is doing in Afghanistan.

At the same time, to say that current policy in Afghanistan is not warranted by either the stakes or the prospects is not to say the United States has no interests or can achieve nothing. There is a need for continued counter-terror and counter-drug operations. There is also a case for continued training of government and local forces. The United States has an interest in seeing human rights respected in Afghanistan. A continued U.S. military presence would provide a backdrop for efforts to persuade individual Taliban troops and commanders to give up the fight and negotiate a modus vivendi with the Afghan government. The intention of keeping some troops after 2012 takes away the argument that we are leaving Afghanistan, something that should reassure many Afghans in and out of government, those Pakistanis who want to know the U.S. commitment is continuing beyond 2014, and those in this country who do not want to do anything that could be interpreted as losing and thereby handing a victory to extremists.

An additional argument against withdrawing is that great powers need to be careful about making dramatic policy changes. Revising a policy is one thing; reversing it quite another. A reputation for reliability is important. This line of thinking, however, should not be employed to justify a continued commitment of large numbers of lives, dollars, and time on behalf of questionable goals.

Consistent with the desirability of maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan, I support talks taking place between the U.S. and Afghan governments on a long-term security relationship, one that would include U.S. forces remaining in the country for some time to come. There is obviously a significant degree of internal Afghan and regional resistance to this notion. To help allay some of these concerns, there should be no U.S. permanent bases and no permanent U.S. troop presence. The arrangement could be for an initial period of five to ten years and could be cancelled by either side with one year’s notice.

I understand that this hearing is about Afghanistan, but for any number of reasons it is impossible to discuss it without also discussing Pakistan. Pakistan is widely acknowledged to be more important than Afghanistan given its population, its arsenal of nuclear weapons, the presence of large numbers of terrorists on its territory, and the reality that developments in Pakistan can have a profound impact on the trajectory of India, sure to be one of the most important countries in the world.

More specifically, there is the widespread view that the United States has to do a great deal to stabilize Afghanistan lest it become a staging ground for groups that would undermine Pakistan. But it is Pakistan that is providing the sanctuary and support to the Afghan Taliban who are the greatest threat to Afghanistan’s stability. The Pakistanis are doing so because they want to retain influence in their neighbor and to limit Indian inroads.

Why the United States should be more concerned than Pakistanis that Afghanistan could one day endanger Pakistan is not clear. More important, this view exaggerates Afghanistan’s actual and potential influence over developments in Pakistan. To be sure, Pakistan is a weak state. But this weakness results more than anything from internal divisions and poor governance. If Pakistan ever fails, it will be less because of insurgents coming across its borders than from decay within them.

It is hard to imagine a more complicated bilateral relationship than the one between Washington and Islamabad. Pakistan is at most a limited partner; it is not an ally, and at times it is not even a partner. There are many reasons for the mutual mistrust; what matters for our purposes here is that it is pervasive and deep. The United States should be generous in providing military and economic assistance only so long as it is made conditional on how it is used; U.S. markets should be more open to Pakistani exports. But we must accept that there will always be clear differences to how we see the world and sharp differences over what is to be done. Under these circumstances, U.S. foreign policy should follow a simple guide: we should cooperate with Pakistan where and when we can, but we should act
independently where and when we must. The recent successful operation that killed Osama Bin Laden is a case in point.

Interest is growing in the possibility of diplomacy to contribute to U.S. policy. Three potential paths are receiving considerable attention. One involves the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban. There is talk of moving toward some sort of a new “shura” that would attempt to integrate the Taliban into the formal ruling structure of Afghanistan. The second involves India and Pakistan. The third involves neighboring and regional states, including Pakistan as well as Iran, India, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others. This would resemble the “6 plus 2” forum that facilitated Afghan-related diplomacy in the past.

I judge prospects for a major breakthrough on either the Afghan/Taliban or India/Pakistan fronts to be poor. There is a weak and divided Afghan government that enjoys at best uneven support around the country. The Taliban are themselves divided. Pakistan has its own agenda. It is far from clear that the situation is ripe for a power-sharing accord that would meaningfully reduce much less end the fighting. India and Pakistan are far apart and again it is not clear the leadership in either government is in a position to undertake significant negotiations involving meaningful compromise. None of this is reason not to explore these possibilities, but expectations should be kept firmly in check. Prospects might be somewhat better for reviving a regional forum, though, and this possibility should be pursued.

I should add that I endorse talks between the United States and those Taliban leaders willing to engage. Direct communication is much preferable to either the Pakistan or Afghan governments acting as an intermediary. Consistent with this perspective, the decision announced by Secretary of State Clinton in February to drop preconditions for talking to the Taliban was a step in the right direction. The same logic holds for our rejecting any Taliban preconditions. What matters in a dialogue is less where it begins than where it ends. The Taliban should understand we will attack them if they associate with terrorists and we will only favor their participation in the political process if they forego violence. The Taliban should also know that we will continue to provide military training and support to the Afghan central government and to local groups of our choosing.

We should not kid ourselves, though: there is unlikely to be a rosy future for Afghanistan any time soon. The most likely future for the next few years and possibly beyond is some form of a messy stalemate, an Afghanistan characterized by a mix of a weak central government, strong local officials, and a Taliban presence (supported out of Pakistan) that is extensive in much of the Pashtun-dominated south and east of the country. Resolution of the ongoing conflict by either military or diplomatic means is highly unlikely and not a realistic basis for U.S. policy. Walking away from Afghanistan, however, is not the answer. Instead, this country should sharply scale back what it is doing and what it seeks to accomplish, and aim for an Afghanistan that is “good enough” in light of local realities, limited interests, and the broad range of both domestic and global challenges facing the United States.

Thank you for this opportunity to appear before this committee. I look forward to your questions.

A selection of music

2011-05-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

Fleet Foxes, "Grown Ocean"

Band of Horses, "Infinite Arms"

An older tune: St. Augustine

January 10, 2010: A couple days ago, I heard this refreshing voice on NPR. A light for these gray winter days.

For a limited time, you can hear her new album "July Flame" on NPR's Music page. I recommend a listen!

Jim James of "My Morning Jacket" provides backing vocals on "I Can See Your Tracks":

Another beautiful song, poetic and wonderfully phrased, "Little Deschutes"

Also, see OPB Music's In Studio Performances.

(Sanitized version, for NPR audiences.)

Radiohead's original "Creep"

Sigur Ros "Olsen Olsen"

Father and son, Tim and Jeff Buckley. Two of their most recognized songs. Here is Tim Buckley singing "Knight Errant"

Jeff Buckley sings "Hallelujah"

I recently watched Peter Gabriel's "Secret World Live Tour" video. This particular song stayed with me. The above video is from a more recent tour. The 1993 tour can be viewed here. The 1993 performance has a combination of physical and emotional intensity somewhat lacking in the later performance.

The opening sequence of that memorable concert.

Cat Power. Also see this performance of "Lived in Bars" from Jools Holland.

"Song to Bobby (Dylan)" (I particularly enjoy Jim White's drumming here.)

Calexico playing "Quattro (World Drifts In)", one of my favorite songs from this band.

Mark Knopfler is one of the most distinctive guitarists in the world. With his finger-picking style, he almost makes it look easy.

Here, you'll find a memorable performance of his "Brothers in Arms".

After a 53-year run, the Beaux Arts Trio will officially disband following their final concert in Lucerne, Switzerland later this summer.

See NPR's coverage of last night's farewell concert at Tanglewood, and engaging interviews with Menahem Pressler and Bernard Greenhouse. Greenhouse, now 92, still practices daily on his 300-year-old Stradivarius cello: link

Over the years, I have attended many performances by the Beaux Arts Trio. On a number of occasions in the late 70s and early 80s, I had the distinct pleasure of chaufering the Trio, then comprised of Menahem Pressler, Bernard Greenhouse and Isidore Cohen (pictured above). Their passion for music is like Robert Mondavi's famed passion for wine.

Attending a Beaux Arts Trio concert on our wedding day, Menahem Pressler dedicated one of the encores, the Finale from Haydn's Piano Trio in A Major, to Cathie and me. Here is a recording of the Finale from that era. I was always amazed by Pressler, whose hands seemed too small to generate the power we often heard. Watch them here as they dance over the piano keys:

(Apparently this video has been taken down. But another trio gives a sampling here.)

In April, the trio (now comprising Pressler, Daniel Hope and Antonio Meneses) performed the popular "Dumky Trio" by Dvorak in San Francisco. To view the first movement, click on this link. (All six movements are available on YouTube.)

May 13, 2011 Update

Bernard Greenhouse passed away today, at the age of 93. Until just a few weeks ago, he practiced with his cello daily.

Early solo performance by Jim James of "Golden".

Feist is obviously very comfortable on stage. See also: "1234 and Mushaboom"

More Canadians: The band Arcade Fire performs "Wake up"

Arcade Fire, "My Body is a Cage"

Some 280 years on, I still regard Johann Sebastian Bach's "St. Matthew's Passion" the crowning achievement of "western music". The excellent version I originally found on "YouTube" has been removed, but this circa-1970 performance conducted by Karl Richter, at a slower tempo, was one of the more popular recordings of that era. Here is the opening chorus of this monumental 3-1/2 hour musical odyssey.

A well-known aria from the Passion, "Erbarme Dich", is performed brilliantly by soprano Julia Hamari.

This wonderful Australian film from director and animator Sarah Watt features a delightful new actor, Justine Clarke. It's powerful and emotional, it had me fighting back tears. (Why fight them?)

I particularly enjoyed the soundtrack, which introduced me to some memorable music. Jotted down songs as I watched. Gene Clark’s “Dark of my Moon”, The Arlenes’ “Loneliness Won’t Leave Me Alone” and Gersey’s “Crashing”.

Gene Clark seems a tragic figure. Here he performs "Gypsy Rider" (allusion to motorcycling) with Carla Olson:

And here they sing John Fogarty's Almost Saturday Night.

Making music together for over twenty years, these guys have released their 7th Radiohead album. "In Rainbows" is a tour de force by this wonderfully tight, fascinating band.

The video "Scotch Mist" features studio performances of each song on "In Rainbows", mixed with some bizarre zombie-inspired stuff. Radiohead will be touring North America during May and August this year.

Also from Radiohead, "House of Cards"

Neko Case and her band perform on David Letterman

Earth Day

2011-04-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

Americas Trip Afterword - Five Years Later

2011-04-10T22:13:00.000-07:00

Five years have elapsed since The Americas Trip concluded on April 10, 2006. Of course, in a very real sense, such experiences never end, and to this day, I continue to digest the lessons of that journey. In recent weeks, I’ve taken the opportunity, really for the first time, to read the story from beginning to end.

(I also took considerable pains to integrate text and photographs, which hopefully results in a more intelligible narrative. It’s baffling why it didn’t occur to me to do this sooner.)

Naturally, through this process, a myriad images, thoughts and emotions come flooding back, accompanied in many instances by regrets. Regrets that a sense of urgency, momentum, or more likely some habitual response in my nature prevented my stopping to appreciate opportunities never to be repeated.

Occasionally, however, the world just forces us to stop and experience the present moment. How often the most powerful and memorable experiences seemed to occur when things went “terribly wrong” or failed to adhere to my plans and expectations.

Many memories stand out, often the result of an unexpected gesture or kindness. A child carrying coffee to my muddy roadside shelter early in the morning. A driver stopping to ask if I’m lost and then telling me to just follow him. A hotelier gently and patiently correcting my Spanish. School children offering their meek salutation "caballero, buenas tardes." The smiles freely given along the way. The earnest efforts of so many to really help. Heartbreakingly beautiful and humble people. Everywhere. Without exception.

I often find myself recalling particular moments and regretting that I don’t have the means to return to some of these places, or simply keep the journey going, without end. It’s unlike me to wish to be counted among the wealthy, but at such moments I think “it certainly would be nice…”

Ultimately, I emerged from this retrospective troubled by a frank observation: that for all the expense and effort, all the investment of time and energy, nothing noble or heroic was achieved.

In fact, one might argue the contrary. Rather than celebrate my “accomplishment” I’m more inclined to feel a trace of shame or embarrassment. It was not something remarkable that I did. It was an expensive excursion made possible solely by my membership in a very affluent segment of the population.

Tourism need not be wasteful and self-indulgent, but looking at my case, it seems an apt characterization. Wasteful, in that I spent roughly $45,000 on specialized equipment, lavish meals, expensive hotels, costly repairs to my “ultimate driving (riding) machine”, and a very sizable contribution to the petroleum industry I so love to demonize.

Selfish in the pursuit of this “dream” through my imposition upon others, not behaving as their guest, but as one entitled to attention, service, satisfaction, and respect, often displacing or inconveniencing others equally deserving. The pursuit was too often marred by my unreasonable demands and expectations, and sometimes impetuous behavior, as if my undertaking were more important than any other.

At the time, I certainly recognized the symptoms of this all-consuming obsession (and witnessed the same in fellow “adventurers”): checking off the famous destinations, accumulating impressive statistics such as miles traveled, borders crossed, countries visited, passports stamped, hours at a stretch in the saddle. Sometimes I simply moved ghost-like across the land without really touching or being touched. More often than not, I would seek out my own kind, gathering whenever possible to exchange tales of the road and compare notes. Later I would look back in wonder at my own isolation from the very places and people I chose to “visit”.

At times it felt like I regarded local inhabitants merely as a “supporting cast of characters.” Did I ever consider the question “how am I enriching the lives of those I encounter?” In retrospect my behavior was shameful, especially when people and lands failed to “measure up to my standards”, as if hapless individuals were in a position to influence or control mankind's systemic failures.

I cannot with a clear conscience endorse the “adventure lifestyle”. I see travelers who have invested their lives and identity in sharing and encouraging this type of activity, but I cannot dispel the notion that rather than some breed of modern heroes, we are more likely to be insufferably ignorant and inconsiderate "rich bastards", indulging in luxuries most can only dream of.

And so, with this little rant duly recorded (it's something I had to get off my chest), where do we go from here? “How do you make it right?” What is a noble pursuit (if indeed there is any part of me that could actually commit and follow through on such an undertaking?)

I know there is another way to travel, one much gentler on the planet and more respectful of the people along the way. A way that involves giving as much as receiving. I have heard of other travelers who immersed themselves in the cultures, learning the languages, and even teaching in schools. In some cases, they abandoned their original personal goals and gave themselves to more urgent, humanitarian pursuits.

If I return to the road, I hope I will be able to follow such examples.

Gasland and the fracking debate

2011-02-25T13:44:00.000-08:00

Trailer

Hydrofracked? One Man’s Mystery Leads to a Backlash Against Natural Gas Drilling

by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, Feb. 25, 2011, 6 a.m

There are few things a family needs to survive more than fresh drinking water. And Louis Meeks, a burly, jowled Vietnam War hero who had long ago planted his roots on these sparse eastern Wyoming grasslands, was drilling a new well in search of it.
The drill bit spun, whining against the alluvial mud and rock that folds beneath the Wind River Range foothills. It ploughed to 160 feet, but the water that spurted to the surface smelled foul, like a parking lot puddle drenched in motor oil. It was no better — yet — than the water Meeks needed to replace.

Meeks used to have abundant water on his small alfalfa ranch, a 40-acre plot speckled with apple and plum trees northeast of the Wind River Mountains and about five miles outside the town of Pavillion. For 35 years he drew it clear and sweet from a well just steps from the front door of the plain, eight-room ranch house that he owns with his wife, Donna. Neighbors would stop off the rural dirt road on their way to or from work in the gas fields to fill plastic jugs; the water was better than at their own homes.

But in the spring of 2005, Meeks’ water had turned fetid. His tap ran cloudy, and the water shimmered with rainbow swirls across a filmy top. The scent was sharp, like gasoline. And after 20 minutes — scarcely longer than you’d need to fill a bathtub — the pipes shuttered and popped and ran dry.

Meeks suspected that environmental factors were to blame. He focused on the fact that Pavillion, home of a single four-way stop sign and 174 people, lies smack in the middle of Wyoming’s gas patch. Since the mid 1990’s, more than 1,000 gas wells had been drilled in the region — some 200 of them right around Pavillion — thousands of feet through layers of drinking water and into rock that yields tiny rivulets of trapped gas. The drilling has left abandoned toxic waste pits scattered across the landscape.It has also disturbed the earth itself. One step in the drilling cracks and explodes the earth in a physical assault that breaks up the crust and shakes the gas loose. In that process, called hydraulic fracturing, a brew of chemicals is injected deep into the earth to lubricate the fracturing and work its way into the rock. How far it goes and where it ends up, no one really knows. Meeks wondered if that wasn’t what ruined his well.

Meeks couldn’t have foreseen it when he began raising questions about his water, but hydraulic fracturing was about to revolutionize the global energy industry and herald one of the biggest expansions in U.S. energy exploration in a century. Although the basic technique was developed decades ago, technological advances had made it possible to frack deeply buried rock formations long thought to be inaccessible. That meant a vast stockpile of domestic energy was suddenly available to help loosen the grip of foreign oil on the U.S. economy. It also meant that gas — which burns cleaner than coal — would become a pillar of the government’s campaign to address climate change.

As a result, drilling was about to happen in states not typically known for oil and gas exploration, including Michigan, New York and even Maryland. It would go from rural, sparsely populated outposts like Pavillion to urban areas outside Dallas, Denver and Pittsburgh. Along the way, a string of calamitous accidents and suspicious environmental problems would eventually make hydraulic fracturing so controversial that it would monopolize congressional hearings, draw hundreds in protests and inspire an Academy-Award-nominated documentary produced for Hollywood.

Louis Meeks, unintentionally, would be a part of that fight from the very beginning. His personal fight began with something simple: the energy industry’s insistence that fracturing couldn’t contaminate water.

Continue reading at ProPublica.

May 9, 2011 Update: Scientific Study Links Flammable Drinking Water to Fracking

The United States at a crossroad

2011-01-13T19:40:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul Defends Wikileaks and Julian Assange in House Floor Speech

2010-12-10T15:06:00.000-08:00

(Thanks to Glenn Beck's website "The Blaze" for this link!)

Justice, American-style

2010-12-07T15:48:00.000-08:00

I think of Julian Assange in jail (no doubt a result of considerable arm-twisting by the U.S. State Department), while real criminals with the blood of many on their hands - George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Ashcroft, John Bolton, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, John Yoo, and so many others - enjoy freedom and prosperity. The misplaced outrage is shameful. The emperor is exposed. A child in the crowd is speaking out, the "adults" all around telling him to "hush!"

Against an Imperial Presidency

2010-12-03T15:17:00.000-08:00

I was reading this from James Madison last night. (Tea Party boosters are no doubt familiar with these passages). Here Madison addresses the dangers of what has become a popular notion of the Unitary Executive:

The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the legislature the power of declaring a state of war; it was proposed that the executive might, in the recess of the legislature, declare the United States to be in a state of war.

The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the legislature the power of raising armies: it was proposed, that in the recess of the legislature, the executive might, at its pleasure, raise or not raise an army of ten, fifteen, or twenty-five thousand men.

The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the legislature the power of creating offices; it was proposed that the executive, in the recess of the legislature, might create offices, as well as appoint officers, for an army of ten, fifteen, or twenty-five thousand men.

A delegation of such powers would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments.

The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted.

The separation of the power of raising armies from the power of commanding them is intended to prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them.

The separation of the power of creating offices from that of filling them is an essential guard against the temptation to create offices for the sake of gratifying favorites or multiplying dependents.

Where would be the difference between the blending of these incompatible powers, by surrendering the legislative part of them into the hands of the executive, and by assuming the executive part of them into the hands of the legislature? In either case the principle would be equally destroyed, and the consequences equally dangerous.

WikiLeaks "Cablegate"

2010-11-29T14:01:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend, WikiLeaks released the first installment of an archive of over 250,000 State Department "cables". The Obama Administration is condemning the dangerous and irresponsible action, while security establishment insiders are claiming there is "nothing new" in the cables.

The cable below, a fascinating example of the political treasure trove awaiting discovery at Cablegate, summarizes a January 4, 2010 meeting between General Petraeus and Yemeni President Saleh (see #10SANAA4).

The meeting discusses efforts to conceal American involvement in a Yemeni civil war while also pursuing "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" (AQAP). For Western media consumption, this war has been packaged as simply the continued rooting out of AQAP.

But since 2009, American aircraft have bombed Shia rebel positions both in Yemen and in Saudi Arabia. In the cable, President Saleh "promises" (with a wink, it appears) to use the advanced American helicopters he has requested (in short supply to our own military) to combat only AQAP and not the local Yemeni rebels.

To Petraeus's proposal to use American aircraft, rather than "inaccurate" cruise missiles, in over-the-horizon attacks within Yemen, Saleh responds:

"We'll continue saying the
bombs are ours, not yours," Saleh said, prompting Deputy
Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just "lied" by
telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa
were American-made but deployed by the ROYG.

(President Obama also lied when he told the American people these strikes were against AQAP.)

Petraeus informs the President that he has requested "USD 150 million in security assistance for 2010", more than double the 2009 level, and requests that U.S. forces be permitted to operate on the ground in Yemen to help direct attacks, but Saleh dismisses this proposal.

And this rich discussion comes from just a single cable!

From the WikiLeaks website Q&A:

What are your motives for releasing these documents?

As US founding father James Madison famously said: "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." This basic philosophy of the American revolution inspires all our work.

The cables appear to be the single most significant historical archive every released and affects basic and heartfelt issues all over the world; geopolitics and democracy; human rights and the rule of law; national resources and global trade.

***

S E C R E T SANAA 000004

NOFORN

DEPT FOR NEA/FO AND NEA/ARP
NSC FOR DPNSA BRENNAN
HQ USCENTCOM/CCCC-CIG FOR JSEATON

E.O. 12958: DECL: 01/04/2019
TAGS: PREL PGOV PTER PINR PINS MOPS MASS MCAP SA
AE, UK, ER, DJ, QA, YM
SUBJECT: GENERAL PETRAEUS' MEETING WITH SALEH ON SECURITY
ASSISTANCE, AQAP STRIKES

REF: 2009 SANAA 1430

Classified By: Ambassador Stephen A. Seche for reasons 1.4(b) and (d).

¶1. (S/NF) SUMMARY: Commander of the U.S. Central Command
General David Petraeus congratulated President Saleh on
recent successful operations against AQAP, and informed him
that U.S. security assistance to the ROYG would increase to
USD 150 million in 2010, including USD 45 million to equip
and train a CT-focused aviation regiment under the Yemeni
Special Operations Forces. Saleh requested that the U.S.
provide 12 armed helicopters and train and equip three new
Republican Guard brigades. Saleh rejected the General's
proposal to have USG personnel armed with direct-feed
intelligence present inside the area of CT operations, but
agreed to a have U.S. fixed-wing bombers circle outside
Yemeni territory ready to engage AQAP targets should
actionable intelligence become available. END SUMMARY.

SALEH: HELICOPTERS, HELICOPTERS, HELICOPTERS
--------------------------------------------

¶2. (S/NF) CENTCOM Commander General David Petraeus,
accompanied by the Ambassador, CENTCOM aides, the Embassy
DATT, and EconOff note taker, congratulated President Saleh
on successful operations against AQAP during a January 2
meeting. The General told Saleh that he had requested USD
150 million in security assistance for 2010, a substantial
increase over the 2009 amount of USD 67 million. Also
present were Minister of Defense MG Muhammed Nasser Ahmad Ali
and Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Affairs
Rashad al-Alimi. Raising a topic that he would manage to
insert into almost every item of discussion during the hour
and half-long meeting, Saleh requested that the U.S. provide
the ROYG with 12 armed helicopters. Possessing such
helicopters would allow the ROYG to take the lead in future
CT operations, "ease" the use of fighter jets and cruise
missiles against terrorist targets, and allow Yemeni Special
Operations Forces to capture terrorist suspects and identify
victims following strikes, according to Saleh. The U.S.
could convince Saudi Arabia and the UAE to supply six
helicopters each if the American "bureaucracy" prevented
quick approval, Saleh suggested. The General responded that
he had already considered the ROYG's request for helicopters
and was in discussions with Saudi Arabia on the matter. "We
won't use the helicopters in Sa'ada, I promise. Only against
al-Qaeda," Saleh told General Petraeus.

¶3. (S/NF) Saleh agreed to General Patraeus' proposal to
dedicate USD 45 million of 2010 security assistance funds to
help establish and train a YSOF aviation regiment, allowing
YSOF to focus on al-Qaeda targets and leaving Sa'ada air
operations to the Yemeni Air Force. Without giving much
detail, Saleh also requested that the U.S. equip and train
three new Republican Guard brigades, totaling 9,000 soldiers.
"Equipping these brigades would reflect upon our true
partnership," Saleh said. The General urged Saleh to focus
first on the YSOF aviation regiment.

AQAP STRIKES: CONCERN FOR CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
---------------------------------------------

¶4. (S/NF) Saleh praised the December 17 and 24 strikes
against AQAP but said that "mistakes were made" in the
killing of civilians in Abyan. The General responded that
the only civilians killed were the wife and two children of
an AQAP operative at the site, prompting Saleh to plunge into
a lengthy and confusing aside with Deputy Prime Minister
Alimi and Minister of Defense Ali regarding the number of
terrorists versus civilians killed in the strike. (Comment:
Saleh's conversation on the civilian casualties suggests he
has not been well briefed by his advisors on the strike in
Abyan, a site that the ROYG has been unable to access to
determine with any certainty the level of collateral damage.
End Comment.) AQAP leader Nassr al-Wahishi and extremist
cleric Anwar al-Awlaki may still be alive, Saleh said, but
the December strikes had already caused al-Qaeda operatives
to turn themselves in to authorities and residents in
affected areas to deny refuge to al-Qaeda. Saleh raised the
issue of the Saudi Government and Jawf governorate tribal
sheikh Amin al-Okimi, a subject that is being reported
through other channels.

SHIFTING AIRSTRIKE STRATEGIES
-----------------------------

¶5. (S/NF) President Obama has approved providing U.S.
intelligence in support of ROYG ground operations against
AQAP targets, General Petraeus informed Saleh. Saleh reacted
coolly, however, to the General's proposal to place USG
personnel inside the area of operations armed with real-time,
direct feed intelligence from U.S. ISR platforms overhead.
"You cannot enter the operations area and you must stay in
the joint operations center," Saleh responded. Any U.S.
casualties in strikes against AQAP would harm future efforts,
Saleh asserted. Saleh did not have any objection, however,
to General Petraeus' proposal to move away from the use of
cruise missiles and instead have U.S. fixed-wing bombers
circle outside Yemeni territory, "out of sight," and engage
AQAP targets when actionable intelligence became available.
Saleh lamented the use of cruise missiles that are "not very
accurate" and welcomed the use of aircraft-deployed
precision-guided bombs instead. "We'll continue saying the
bombs are ours, not yours," Saleh said, prompting Deputy
Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just "lied" by
telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa
were American-made but deployed by the ROYG.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT IN MIL-MIL RELATIONS
-----------------------------------------

¶6. (S/NF) General Petraeus praised cooperation between the
Embassy and the NSB, YSOF, Yemeni Coast Guard (YCG), and
Counterterrorism Unit (CTU), but singled out relations with
the Yemeni Air Force as problematic. Only four out of 50
planned U.S. Special Operations Forces Command training
missions with the Yemeni Air Force had actually been executed
in the past year, he said. Saleh said he would personally
instruct Minister of Defense to improve the situation. The
General also urged Saleh to stop Yemeni Customs' habit of
holding up Embassy cargo at the airport, including shipments
destined for the ROYG itself, such as equipment for the CTU.
Saleh laughed and made a vague pledge to have the customs
issue "taken care of." Saleh complained that the ROYG had
not yet received the necessary training to operate 17 Iraqi
Light Armored Vehicle (ILAVs) provided by the USG in 2008,
saying that YSOF needed the training in order to use the
ILAVs for CT operations. The General said he would look into
having U.S. Special Operations Forces personnel conduct the
training.

¶7. (S/NF) Pointing to the ROYG's problems in combating
rampant drug and arms smuggling, Saleh told General Petraeus
that U.S. maritime security assistance was insufficient to
cover Yemen's nearly 2,000 km of coastline. "Why not have
Italy, Germany, Holland, Japan, Saudi, and the UAE each
provide two patrol boats?" Saleh suggested. The General told
Saleh that two fully-equipped 87-foot patrol boats destined
for the Yemeni Coast Guard were under construction and would
arrive in Yemen within a year. Saleh singled out smuggling
from Djibouti as particularly troublesome, claiming that the
ROYG had recently intercepted four containers of
Djibouti-origin TNT. "Tell (Djiboutian President) Ismail
Guelleh that I don't care if he smuggles whiskey into Yemen
-- provided it's good whiskey ) but not drugs or weapons,"
Saleh joked. Saleh said that smugglers of all stripes are
bribing both Saudi and Yemeni border officials.

SALEH WELCOMES LONDON CONFERENCE
--------------------------------

¶8. (S/NF) Saleh told the General that he welcomed PM Gordon
Brown's announcement of the London conference and said that
the cooperation on Yemen between the U.S., EU, Saudi Arabia,
and the UAE would be benefitial. Qatar should not be
involved, however, because "they work with Iran." In this
regard, Saleh also identified Qatar as one of those nations
working "against Yemen," along with Iran, Libya, and Eritrea.

¶9. (U) General Petraeus did not have an opportunity to clear
on this cable.

SECHE

Health Insurance Industry Insider Wendell Potter on Health Care Reform

2010-11-16T12:59:00.000-08:00

Click here for Part 2 of interview.

Ralph Nader: Ten Questions for Tea Partiers

2010-11-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

Published October 22, 2010 on Nader.org

Here are ten questions for Tea Partiers that they want or do not want to answer. I say it this way because people who call themselves Tea Partiers do not have the same view of politics, government, Big Business or the Constitution. Their opinions range from pure Libertarian to actively furthering the privileges of plutocracy. Their income and occupational background vary as well, though most seem to be middle-income and up.

My guess is that most Tea Partiers come from the conservative wing of the Republican Party who are fed up with both the corporate Republicans like Bush and Cheney, as well as the Democrats like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.

With the above in mind, the following questions can serve to go beyond abstractions and generalizations of indignation and get to some more specific responses.

1. Can you be against Big Government and not press for reductions in the vast military budgets, fraught with bureaucratic and large contractors’ waste, fraud and abuse? Military spending now takes up half of the federal government’s operating budgets. The libertarian Cato Institute believes that to cut deficits, we have to also cut the defense budget.

2. Can you believe in the free market and not condemn hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare-bailouts, subsidies, handouts, and giveaways?

3. Can you want to preserve the legitimate sovereignty of our country and not reject the trade agreements known as NAFTA and GATT (The World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland) that scholars have described as the greatest surrender of local, state and national sovereignty in our history?

4. Can you be for law and order and not support a bigger and faster crackdown on the corporate crime wave, that needs more prosecutors and larger enforcement budgets to stop the stealing of taxpayers and consumer dollars so widely reported in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week? Law enforcement officials estimate that for every dollar for prosecution, seventeen to twenty dollars are returned.

5. Can you be against invasions of privacy by government and business without rejecting the provisions of the Patriot Act that leave you defenseless to constant unlawful snooping, appropriation of personal information and even search of your home without notification until 72 hours later?

6. Can you be against regulation of serious medical malpractice (over 100,000 lives lost a year, according to a study by Harvard physicians), unsafe drugs that have serious side effects or cause the very injury/illness they were sold to prevent, motor vehicles with defective brakes, tires and throttles, contaminated food from China, Mexico and domestic processors?

7. Can you keep calling for Freedom and yet tolerate control of your credit and other economic rights by hidden and arbitrary credit ratings and credit scores? What Freedom do you have when you have to sign industry-wide fine print one-sided “contracts” with your banks, insurance companies, car dealers, and credit card companies? Many of these contracts even block your Constitutional access to the courthouse.

8. Can you be for a new, clean system of politics and elections and still accept the Republican and Democratic Two Party dictatorship that is propped up by complex state laws, frivolous litigation and harassment to exclude from the ballot third parties and independent candidates who want reform, accountability, and stronger voices for the voters?

9. If you want a return to our Constitution—its principles of limited and separation of power and its emphasis on “We the People” in its preamble—can you still support Washington’s wars that have not been declared by Congress (Article I Section 8) or giving corporations equal rights with humans plus special privileges and immunities. The word “corporation” or “company” never appears in the Constitution. How can you support eminent domain powers given by governments to corporations over homeowners, or massive week-end bailouts by the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department of businesses, even reckless foreign banks, without receiving the authority and the appropriations from the Congress, as the Constitution requires?

10. You want less taxation and lower deficits. How can you succeed unless you stop big corporations from escaping their fair share of taxes by manipulating foreign jurisdictions against our tax laws, for example, or by letting trillions of dollars of speculation on Wall Street go without any sales tax, while you pay six, seven or eight percent sales tax on the necessities you buy in stores?

Let’s hear from you Tea Partiers. Meanwhile, see the work of video-journalist, Steve Ference, who has interviewed and given voice to those among you in his new paperback “Voices of the Tea Party” published by Lulu.com on July 4, 2010. Contact VoicesoftheTeaParty@gmail.com.

Bill Moyers: "Welcome to the Plutocracy!"

2010-11-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

Published by truthout, Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Bill Moyers speech at Boston University on October 29, 2010, as a part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series.

I was honored when you asked me to join in celebrating Howard Zinn’s life and legacy. I was also surprised. I am a journalist, not a historian. The difference between a journalist and an historian is that the historian knows the difference. George Bernard Shaw once complained that journalists are seemingly unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. In fact, some epic history can start out as a minor incident. A young man named Paris ran off with a beautiful woman who was married to someone else, and the civilization of Troy began to unwind. A middle-aged black seamstress, riding in a Montgomery bus, had tired feet, and an ugly social order began to collapse. A night guard at an office complex in Washington D.C. found masking tape on a doorjamb, and the presidency of Richard Nixon began to unwind. What journalist, writing on deadline, could have imagined the walloping kick that Rosa Park’s tired feet would give to Jim Crow? What pundit could have fantasized that a third-rate burglary on a dark night could change the course of politics? The historian’s work is to help us disentangle the wreck of the Schwinn from cataclysm. Howard famously helped us see how big change can start with small acts.

We honor his memory. We honor him, for Howard championed grassroots social change and famously chronicled its story as played out over the course of our nation’s history. More, those stirring sagas have inspired and continue to inspire countless people to go out and make a difference. The last time we met, I told him that the stories in A People’s History of the United States remind me of the fellow who turned the corner just as a big fight broke out down the block. Rushing up to an onlooker he shouted, “Is this a private fight, or can anyone get in it?” For Howard, democracy was one big public fight and everyone should plunge into it. That’s the only way, he said, for everyday folks to get justice – by fighting for it.

I have in my desk at home a copy of the commencement address Howard gave at Spelman College in 2005. He was chairman of the history department there when he was fired in 1963 over his involvement in civil rights. He had not been back for 43 years, and he seemed delighted to return for commencement. He spoke poignantly of his friendship with one of his former students, Alice Walker, the daughter of tenant farmers in Georgia who made her way to Spelman and went on to become the famous writer. Howard delighted in quoting one of her first published poems that had touched his own life:

It is true
I’ve always loved
the daring ones
like the black young man
who tried to crash
all barriers
at once,
wanted to swim
at a white beach (in Alabama)
Nude.

That was Howard Zinn; he loved the daring ones, and was daring himself.

One month before his death he finished his last book, The Bomb. Once again he was wrestling with his experience as a B-17 bombardier during World War II, especially his last mission in 1945 on a raid to take out German garrisons in the French town of Royan. For the first time the Eighth Air Force used napalm, which burst into liquid fire on the ground, killing hundreds of civilians. He wrote, “I remember distinctly seeing the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches struck in the fog. I was completely unaware of the human chaos below.” Twenty years later he returned to Royan to study the effects of the raid and concluded there had been no military necessity for the bombing; everyone knew the war was almost over (it ended three weeks later) and this attack did nothing to affect the outcome. His grief over having been a cog in a deadly machine no doubt confirmed his belief in small acts of rebellion, which mean, as Howard writes in the final words of the book, “acting on what we feel and think, here, now, for human flesh and sense, against the abstractions of duty and obedience.”

His friend and long-time colleague writes in the foreword that “Shifting historical focus from the wealthy and powerful to the ordinary person was perhaps his greatest act of rebellion and incitement.” It seems he never forget the experience of growing up in a working class neighborhood in New York. In that spirit, let’s begin with some everyday people.

***

When she heard the news, Connie Brasel cried like a baby.

For years she had worked at minimum-wage jobs, until 17 years ago, when she was hired by the Whirlpool refrigerator factory in Evansville, Indiana. She was making $ 18.44 an hour when Whirlpool announced earlier this year that it was closing the operation and moving it to Mexico. She wept. I’m sure many of the other eleven hundred workers who lost their jobs wept too; they had seen their ticket to the middle class snatched from their hands. The company defended its decision by claiming high costs, underused capacity, and the need to stay competitive. Those excuses didn’t console Connie Brasel. “I was becoming part of something bigger than me,” she told Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times. “Whirlpool was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

She was not only sad, she was mad. “They didn’t get world-class quality because they had the best managers. They got world-class quality because of the United States and because of their workers.”

Among those workers were Natalie Ford, her husband and her son; all three lost their jobs. “It’s devastating,” she told the Times. Her father had worked at Whirlpool before them. Now, “There aren’t any jobs here. How is this community going to survive?”

And what about the country? Between 2001 and 2008, about 40,000 US manufacturing plants closed. Six million factory jobs have disappeared over the past dozen years, representing one in three manufacturing jobs. Natalie Ford said to the Times what many of us are wondering: “I don’t know how without any good-paying jobs here in the United States people are going to pay for their health care, put their children through school.”

Now, if Connie Brasel and Natalie Ford lived in South Carolina, they might have been lucky enough to get a job with the new BMW plant that recently opened there and advertised that the company would hire one thousand workers. Among the applicants? According to the Washington Post; “a former manager of a major distribution center for Target; a consultant who oversaw construction projects in four western states; a supervisor at a plastics recycling firm. Some held college degrees and resumes in other fields where they made more money.” They will be paid $15 an hour – about half of what BMW workers earn in Germany

In polite circles, among our political and financial classes, this is known as “the free market at work.” No, it’s “wage repression,” and it’s been happening in our country since around 1980. I must invoke some statistics here, knowing that statistics can glaze the eyes; but if indeed it’s the mark of a truly educated person to be deeply moved by statistics, as I once read, surely this truly educated audience will be moved by the recent analysis of tax data by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. They found that from 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to everyone but the rich increased from 64 percent to 65 percent. Because the nation’s economy was growing handsomely, the average income for 9 out of l0 Americans was growing, too – from $17,719 to $30,941. That’s a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars.

But then it stopped. Since 1980 the economy has also continued to grow handsomely, but only a fraction at the top have benefitted. The line flattens for the bottom 90% of Americans. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years.

That’s wage repression.

Another story in the Times caught my eye a few weeks after the one about Connie Brasel and Natalie Ford. The headline read: “Industries Find Surging Profits in Deeper Cuts.” Nelson Schwartz reported that despite falling motorcycle sales, Harley-Davidson profits are soaring – with a second quarter profit of $71 million, more than triple what it earned the previous year. Yet Harley-Davidson has announced plans to cut fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred more jobs by the end of next year; this on top of the 2000 job cut last year.

The story note: “This seeming contradiction – falling sales and rising profits – is one reason the mood on Wall Street is so much more buoyant than in households, where pessimism runs deep and unemployment shows few signs of easing.”

There you see the two Americas. A buoyant Wall Street; a doleful Main Street. The Connie Brasels and Natalie Fords – left to sink or swim on their own. There were no bailouts for them.

Meanwhile, Matt Krantz reports in USA TODAY that “Cash is gushing into company’s coffers as they report what’s shaping up to be a third-consecutive quarter of sharp earning increases. But instead of spending on the typical things, such as expanding and hiring people, companies are mostly pocketing the money or stuffing it under their mattresses.” And what are their plans for this money? Again, the Washington Post:

“…. Sitting on these unprecedented levels of cash, U.S. companies are buying back their own stock in droves. So far this year, firms have announced they will purchase $273 billion of their own shares, more than five times as much compared with this time last year… But the rise in buybacks signals that many companies are still hesitant to spend their cash on the job-generating activities that could produce economic growth.”

That’s how financial capitalism works today: Conserving cash rather than bolstering hiring and production; investing in their own shares to prop up their share prices and make their stock more attractive to Wall Street. To hell with everyone else.

Hear the chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Ethan Harris, who told the Times: “There’s no question that there is an income shift going on in the economy. Companies are squeezing their labor costs to build profits.”

Or the chief economist for Credit Suisse in New York, Neal Soss: As companies have wrung more savings out of their work forces, causing wages and salaries barely to budge from recession lows, “profits have staged a vigorous recovery, jumping 40 percent between late 2008 and the first quarter of 2010.”

Just this morning the New York Times reports that the private equity business is roaring back: “While it remains difficult to get a mortgage to buy a home or to get a loan to fund a small business, yield-starved investors are creating a robust market for corporate bonds and loans.”

If this were a functioning democracy, our financial institutions would be helping everyday Americans and businesses get the mortgages and loans – the capital – they need to keep going; they’re not, even as the financiers are reaping robust awards.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But he’s run off with all the toys.

Late in August I clipped another story from the Wall Street Journal. Above an op-ed piece by Robert Frank the headline asked: “Do the Rich Need the Rest of America?” The author didn’t seem ambivalent about the answer. He wrote that as stocks have boomed, “the wealthy bounced back. And while the Main Street economy” [where the Connie Brasels and Natalie Fords and most Americans live] “was wracked by high unemployment and the real-estate crash, the wealthy – whose financial fates were more tied to capital markets than jobs and houses – picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and started buying luxury goods again.”

Citing the work of Michael Lind, at the Economic Growth Program of the New American Foundation, the article went on to describe how the super-rich earn their fortunes with overseas labor, selling to overseas consumers and managing financial transactions that have little to do with the rest of America, “while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country.”

Right at that point I remembered another story that I had filed away three years ago, also from the Wall Street Journal. The reporter Ianthe Jeanne Dugan described how the private equity firm Blackstone Group swooped down on a travel reservation company in Colorado, bought it, laid off 841 employees, and recouped its entire investment in just seven months, one of the quickest returns on capital ever for such a deal. Blackstone made a killing while those workers were left to sift through the debris. They sold their homes, took part-time jobs making sandwiches and coffee, and lost their health insurance.

That fall, Blackstone’s chief executive, Stephen Schwarzman, reportedly worth over $5 billion, rented a luxurious resort in Jamaica to celebrate the marriage of his son. According to the Guardian News, the Montego Bay facility alone cost $50,000, plus thousands more to sleep 130 guests. There were drinks on the beach, dancers and a steel band, marshmallows around the fire, and then, the following day, an opulent wedding banquet with champagne and a jazz band and fireworks display that alone cost $12,500. Earlier in the year Schwarzman had rented out the Park Avenue Armory in New York (near his 35-room apartment) to celebrate his 60th birthday at a cost of $3 million. So? It’s his money, isn’t it? Yes, but consider this: The stratospheric income of private-equity partners is taxed at only 15 percent – less than the rate paid, say, by a middle class family. When Congress considered raising the rate on their Midas-like compensation, the financial titans flooded Washington with armed mercenaries – armed, that is, with hard, cold cash – and brought the “debate” to an end faster than it had taken Schwartzman to fire 841 workers. The financial class had won another round in the exploitation of working people who, if they are lucky enough to have jobs, are paying a higher tax rate than the super-rich.

So the answer to the question: “Do the Rich Need the Rest of America?” is as stark as it is ominous: Many don’t. As they form their own financial culture increasingly separated from the fate of everyone else, it is “hardly surprising,” Frank and Lind concluded, “ that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people.”

You would think the rich might care, if not from empathy, then from reading history. Ultimately gross inequality can be fatal to civilization. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Jared Diamond writes about how governing elites throughout history isolate and delude themselves until it is too late. He reminds us that the change people inflict on their environment is one of the main factors in the decline of earlier societies. For example: the Mayan natives on the Yucatan peninsula who suffered as their forest disappeared, their soil eroded, and their water supply deteriorated. Chronic warfare further exhausted dwindling resources. Although Mayan kings could see their forests vanishing and their hills eroding, they were able to insulate themselves from the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well-fed while everyone else was slowly starving. Realizing too late that they could not reverse their deteriorating environment, they became casualties of their own privilege. Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, Diamond warns, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions, separated from the common life of the country.

Yet the isolation continues – and is celebrated. When Howard came down to New York last December for what would be my last interview with him, I showed him this document published in the spring of 2005 by the Wall Street giant Citigroup, setting forth an “Equity Strategy” under the title (I’m not making this up) “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer.”

Now, most people know what plutocracy is: the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy. Plutocracy is not an American word and wasn’t meant to become an American phenomenon – some of our founders deplored what they called “the veneration of wealth.” But plutocracy is here, and a pumped up Citigroup even boasted of coining a variation on the word— “plutonomy”, which describes an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer and that government helps them do it. Five years ago Citigroup decided the time had come to “bang the drum on plutonomy.”

And bang they did. Here are some excerpts from the document “Revisiting Plutonomy;”

“Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by
market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper… [and] take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years.”

“…the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the United States –
the plutonomists in our parlance – have benefitted disproportionately from the recent productivity surged in the US… [and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor.”

“… [and they] are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. Because the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact.”

I’ll repeat that: “The dynamics of plutonomy are still intact.” That was the case before the Great Collapse of 2008, and it’s the case today, two years after the catastrophe. But the plutonomists are doing just fine. Even better in some cases, thanks to our bailout of the big banks.

As for the rest of the country: Listen to this summary in The Economist – no Marxist journal – of a study by Pew Research:

More than half of all workers today have experienced a spell of
unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours or been forced
to go part-time. The typical unemployed worker has been
jobless for nearly six months. Collapsing share and house
prices have destroyed a fifth of the wealth of the average
household. Nearly six in ten Americans have canceled or
cut back on holidays. About a fifth say their mortgages are
underwater. One in four of those between 18 and 29 have
moved back in with their parents. Fewer than half of all adults
expect their children to have a higher standard of living than
theirs, and more than a quarter say it will be lower. For many
Americans the great recession has been the sharpest trauma since
The Second World War, wiping out jobs, wealth and hope itself.

Let that sink in: For millions of garden-variety Americans, the audacity of hope has been replaced by a paucity of hope.

Time for a confession. The legendary correspondent Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists that bias is okay as long as you don’t try to hide it. Here is mine: Plutocracy and democracy don’t mix. Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder.

Socrates said to understand a thing, you must first name it. The name for what’s happening to our political system is corruption – a deep, systemic corruption. I urge you to seek out the recent edition of Harper’s Magazine. The former editor Roger D. Hodge brilliantly dissects how democracy has gone on sale in America. Ideally, he writes, our ballots purport to be expressions of political will, which we hope and pray will be translated into legislative and executive action by our pretended representatives. But voting is the beginning of civil virtue, not its end, and the focus of real power is elsewhere. Voters still “matter” of course, but only as raw material to be shaped by the actual form of political influence – money.

The article is excerpted from Hodge’s new book, The Mendacity of Hope. In it he describes how America’s founding generation especially feared the kind of corruption that occurs when the private ends of a narrow faction succeed in capturing the engines of government. James Madison and many of his contemporaries knew this kind of corruption could consume the republic. Looking at history a tragic lens, they thought the life cycle of republics – their degeneration into anarchy, monarchy, or oligarchy – was inescapable. And they attempted to erect safeguards against it, hoping to prevent private and narrow personal interests from overriding those of the general public.

They failed. Hardly a century passed after the ringing propositions of 1776 than America was engulfed in the gross materialism and political corruption of the First Gilded Age, when Big Money bought the government right out from under the voters. In their magisterial work on The Growth of the American Republic, the historians Morrison, Commager, and Leuchtenberg describe how in that era “privilege controlled politics,” and “the purchase of votes, the corruption of election officials, the bribing of legislatures, the lobbying of special bills, and the flagrant disregard of laws” threatened the very foundations of the country.”

I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that this “degenerate and unlovely age” – as one historian described it – served to inspire Karl Rove, the man said to be George W. Bush’s brain and now a mover and shaker of the money tree for the corporate-conservative complex (more on that later.) The extraordinary coupling of private and political power toward the close of the 19th century – the First Gilded Age – captured Rove’s interest, especially the role of Mark Hanna, the Ohio operative who became the first modern political fund-raiser. (David von Drehle wrote (“Washington Post, July 24, 1999) that “as a tenacious student of political history, Rove had dug so deeply into the McKinley era that he had become “the swami of McKinley mania.” Rove denied it to the writer Ron Susskind, who then went on to talk to old colleagues of Rove “dating back 25 years, one of whom said: “Some kids want to grow up to be president, Karl wanted to grow up to be Mark Hanna. We’d talk about it all the time. We’d say, ‘Jesus,Karl, what kind of kid wants to grow up to be Mark Hanna?”

“There are two things that are important in politics,” Hanna said. “The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.” He had become rich as a business man in Ohio, “the characteristic American capitalist of the Gilded Age” (Columbia Encyclopedia). He was famously depicted by one cartoonist as “Dollar Mark,” the prototype of plutocracy. Hanna tapped the banks, the insurance companies, the railroads and the other industrial trusts of the late 1800s for all the money it took to make William McKinley governor of Ohio and then President of the United States. McKinley was the perfect conduit for Hanna’s connivance and their largesse – one of those politicians with a talent for emitting banalities as though they were recently discovered truth. Hanna raised “an unprecedented amount of money (the biggest check came from the oil baron John Rockefeller) and ran a sophisticated, hardball campaign that got McKinley to the White House, “where he governed negligently in the interests of big business,” wrote Jacob Weisberg in “Slate” (November 2, 2005) His opponent in the l896 election was the Democrat-Populist candidate, William Jennings Bryan, whose base consisted of aroused populists – the remnant of the People’s Party – who were outraged at the rapacity and shenanigans of the monopolies, trusts, and corporations that were running roughshod over ordinary Americans. Because Bryan threatened those big economic interests he was able to raise only one-tenth the money that Mark Hanna raised for McKinley, and he lost: Money in politics is an old story.

Karl Rove would have learned from his study of Hanna the principles of plutonomy. For Hanna believed “the state of Ohio existed for property. It had no other function…Great wealth was to be gained through monopoly, through using the State for private ends; it was axiomatic therefore that businessmen should run the government and run it for personal profit.”

He and McKinley therefore saw to it that first Ohio and then Washington were “ruled by business…by bankers, railroads, and public utility corporations.” The United States Senate was infamous as “a millionaire’s club.” City halls, state houses and even courtrooms were bought and sold like baubles. Instead of enforcing the rules of fair play, government served as valet to the plutocrats. The young journalist Henry George had written that “an immense wedge” was being forced through American society by “the maldistribution of wealth, status, and opportunity.” Now inequality exploded into what the historian Clinton Rossiter described as “the great train robbery of American intellectual history.” Conservatives of the day – pro-corporate apologists – hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like “progress,” “opportunity,” and “individualism” into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right. Laissez faire ideologues and neo-cons of the day – lovers of empire even then – hijacked Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and so distorted it that politicians, judges, and publicists gleefully embraced the notion that progress emerges from the elimination of the weak and the “survival of the fittest.” As one of the plutocrats crowed: “We are rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it.”

And they have never given up. The Gilded Age returned with a vengeance in our time. It slipped in quietly at first, back in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began a “massive decades-long transfer of national wealth to the rich.” As Roger Hodge makes clear, under Bill Clinton the transfer was even more dramatic, as the top 10 percent captured an ever-growing share of national income. The trend continued under George W. Bush – those huge tax cuts for the rich, remember, which are now about to be extended because both parties have been bought off by the wealthy – and by 2007 the wealthiest 10% of Americans were taking in 50% of the national income. Today, a fraction of people at the top today earn more than the bottom 120 million Americans.

You will hear it said, “Come on, this is the way the world works.” No, it’s the way the world is made to work. This vast inequality is not the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand; it did not just happen; it was no accident. As Hodge drives home, it is the result of a long series of policy decisions “about industry and trade, taxation and military spending, by flesh-and-blood humans sitting in concrete-and-steel buildings.” And those policy decisions were paid for by the less than one percent who participate in our capitalist democracy political contributions. Over the past 30 years, with the complicity of Republicans and Democrats alike, the plutocrats, or plutonomists (choose your own poison) have used their vastly increased wealth to assure that government does their bidding. Remember that grateful Citigroup reference to “market-friendly governments” on the side of plutonomy? We had a story down in Texas for that sort of thing; the dealer in a poker game says to the dealer, Now play the cards fairly, Reuben; I know what I dealt you.” (To see just how our system was rigged by the financial, political, and university elites, run, don’t walk, to the theatre nearest you showing Charles Ferguson’s new film, “Inside Job.” Take a handkerchief because you’ll weep for the republic.)

Looking back, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. One of the few journalists who did see it coming – Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post – reported that “business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favour of joint, cooperative action in the legislative arena.” Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. They funded think tanks that churned out study after study with results skewed to their ideology and interests. And their political allies in the conservative movement cleverly built alliances with the religious right – Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition – who zealously waged a cultural holy war that camouflaged the economic assault on working people and the middle class.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan also tried to warn us. He said President Reagan’s real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. Senator Moynihan was gone before the financial catastrophe on George W. Bush’s watch that could paradoxically yet fulfill Reagan’s dream. The plutocrats who soaked up all the money now say the deficits require putting Social Security and other public services on the chopping block. You might think that Mr. Bush today would regret having invaded Iraq on false pretences at a cost of more than a trillion dollars and counting, but no, just last week he said that his biggest regret was his failure to privatize Social Security. With over l00 Republicans of the House having signed a pledge to do just that when the new Congress convenes, Mr. Bush’s vision may yet be realized.

Daniel Altman also saw what was coming. In his book Neoconomy he described a place without taxes or a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds. “It’s coming to America,” he wrote. Most likely he would not have been surprised recently when firefighters in rural Tennessee would let a home burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee.
That’s what is coming to America.

***

Here we are now, on the verge of the biggest commercial transaction in the history of American elections. Once again the plutocracy is buying off the system. Nearly $4 billion is being spent on the congressional races that will be decided next week, including multi millions coming from independent tax-exempt organizations that can collect unlimited amounts without revealing the sources. The organization Public Citizen reports that just 10 groups are responsible for the bulk of the spending by independent groups: “A tiny number of organizations, relying on a tiny number of corporate and fat cat contributors, are spending most of the money on the vicious attack ads dominating the airwaves” – those are the words of Public Citizen’s president, Robert Wiessman. The Federal Election Commission says that two years ago 97% of groups paying for election ads disclosed the names of their donors. This year it’s only 32%.

Socrates again: To remember a thing, you must first name it. We’re talking about slush funds. Donors are laundering their cash through front groups with high-falutin’ names like American Crossroads. That’s one of the two slush funds controlled by Karl Rove in his ambition to revive the era of the robber barons. Promise me you won’t laugh when I tell you that although Rove and the powerful Washington lobbyist who is his accomplice described the first organization as “grassroots”, 97% of its initial contributions came from four billionaires. Yes: The grass grows mighty high when the roots are fertilized with gold.

Rove, other conservative groups and the Chamber of Commerce have in fact created a “shadow party” determined to be the real power in Washington just like Rome’s Opus Dei in Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code.” In this shadow party the plutocrats reign. We have reached what the new chairman of Common Cause and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls “the perfect storm that threatens American democracy: an unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money, flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work. We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.”

That word again. But Reich is right. That fraction of one percent of Americans who now earn as much as the bottom 120 million Americans includes the top executives of giant corporations and those Wall Street hedge funds and private equity managers who constitute Citigroup’s “plutonomy” are buying our democracy and they’re doing it in secret.

That’s because early this year the five reactionary members of the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons” with the right to speak during elections by funding ads like those now flooding the airwaves. It was the work of legal fabulists. Corporations are not people; they are legal fictions, creatures of the state, born not of the womb, not of flesh and blood. They’re not permitted to vote. They don’t bear arms (except for the nuclear bombs they can now drop on a congressional race without anyone knowing where it came from.) Yet thanks to five activist conservative judges they have the privilege of “personhood” to “speak” – and not in their own voice, mind you, but as ventriloquists, through hired puppets.

Does anyone really think that’s what the authors of the First Amendment had in mind? Horrified by such a profound perversion, the editor of the spunky Texas Observer, Bob Moser, got it right with his headline: “So long, Democracy, it’s been good to know you.”

You’ll recall that soon after the Court’s decision President Obama raised the matter during his State of the Union speech in January. He said the decision would unleash a torrent of corrupting corporate money into our political system. Sitting a few feet in front of the president, Associate Justice Samuel Alito defiantly mouthed the words: “Not true.”

Not true? Terry Forcht knew otherwise. He’s the wealthy nursing home executive in Kentucky whose establishments is being prosecuted by Attorney General Jack Conway for allegedly covering up sexual abuse. Conway is running for the Senate. Forcht has spent more than $l million to defeat him. Would you believe that Forcht is the banker for one of Karl Rove’s two slush funds, American Crossroads, which has spent nearly $30 million to defeat Democrats?

What’s that, Justice Alito? Not true?

Ask Alan Grayson. He’s a member of Congress. Here’s what he says: “We’re now in a situation where a lobbyist can walk into my office…and say, ‘I’ve got five million dollars to spend and I can spend it for you or against it.’”
Alito was either disingenuous, naïve, or deluded. He can’t be in this world without knowing he and his four fellow corporatists were giving big donors the one thing they most want in their campaign against working people: an unfair advantage.

My friend and colleague, the writer Michael Winship, told a story this week that illuminates the Court’s coup de grace against democracy. It seems the incorrigible George Bernard Shaw once propositioned a fellow dinner guest, asking if she would go to bed with him for a million pounds (today around $1,580,178 US dollars). She agreed. Shaw then asked if she would do the same for ten shillings. “What do you take me for?” she asked angrily. “A prostitute?” Shaw responded: “We’ve established the principle, Madam. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

With this one decision, the Supreme Court established once and for all that Shaw’s is the only principle left in politics, as long as the price is right.

Come now and let’s visit Washington’s red light district, headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the front group for the plutocracy’s prostitution of politics. The Chamber boasts it represents more than three million businesses and approximately 300,000 members. But in reality it has almost nothing to do with the shops and stores along your local streets. The Chamber’s branding, as the economics journalist Zach Carter recently wrote, “allows them to disguise their political agenda as a coalition of local businesses while it does dirty work for corporate titans.” Carter reported that when the Supreme Court came down with its infamous ruling earlier this year, the Chamber responded by announcing a 40% boost in its political spending operations. After the money started flowing in, the Chamber boosted its budget again by 50%.

After digging into corporate foundation tax filings and other public records, the New York Times found that the Chamber of Commerce has “increasingly relied on a relatively small collection of big corporate donors” – the plutocracy’s senior ranks – “to finance much of its legislative and political agenda.” Furthermore, the chamber “makes no apologies for its policy of not identifying its donors.” Indeed, “It has vigorously opposed legislation in Congress that would require groups like it to identify their biggest contributors when they spend money on campaign ads.”

Now let’s connect some dots. While knocking down nearly all limits on corporate spending in campaigns, the Supreme Court did allow for disclosure, which would at least tell us who’s buying off the government. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell even claimed that “sunshine” laws would make everything okay. But after the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed, McConnell lined up every Republican in the Senate to oppose it. Hardly had the public begun to sing “Let the Sunshine In” than McConnell & Company went tone deaf. And when the chief lobbyist for the Chamber of Commerce was asked by an interviewer, “Are you guys eventually going to disclose?” the answer was a brisk: “No.” Why? Because those corporations are afraid of a public backlash. Like bank robbers pulling a heist, they prefer to hide their “personhood” behind sock masks. Surely that tells us something about the nature of what they’re doing. In the words of one of the characters in Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day:: “People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in places where everything is kept in the dark.”

That’s true in politics, too. Thus it turns out that many of the ads being paid for secretly by anonymous donors are “false, grossly misleading, or marred with distortions,” as Greg Sargent reports in his website “The Plum Line.” Go to Sargent’s site and you’ll see a partial list of ads that illustrate the scope of the intellectual and political fraud being perpetrated in front of our eyes. Money from secret sources is poisoning the public mind with toxic information in order to dupe voters into giving even more power to the powerful.

On another site –“thinkprogress.com” – you can find out how the multibillionaire Koch brothers – also big oil polluters and Tea Party supporters – are recruiting “captains of industry” to fund the right-wing infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks and media outlets. Now, hold on to your seats, because this can blow away the faint-hearted: Among the right-wing luminaries who showed up among Koch’s ‘secretive network of Republican donors’ were two Supreme Court Justices: Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. That’s right: 2 of the 5 votes to enable the final corporate takeover of government came from justices who were present as members of the plutocracy hatched their schemes for doing so.

Something else is going on here, too. The Koch brothers have contributed significantly to efforts to stop the Affordable Care Act – the health care reforms – from taking effect. Justice Clarence Thomas has obviously been doing some home schooling, because his wife Virginia claims those reforms are “unconstitutional,” and has founded an organization that is fighting to repeal them. Her own husband on the Supreme Court may one day be ruling on whether she’s right or not (“Play the cards fair, Reuben; I know what I dealt you.”) There’s more: The organization Virginia Thomas founded to kill those health care reforms – also a goal of the Koch brothers, remember – got its start with a gift of half a million dollars from an unnamed source, and is still being funded by donors who can’t be traced. You have to wonder if some of them are corporations that stand to benefit from favorable decisions by the Supreme Court. Now guess the name of the one Supreme Court justice who voted against the disclosure provision. I’m not telling, but Mrs. Thomas can tell you – if, that is, she’s willing to share the pillow talk.

This truly puzzles me. It’s what I can’t figure out about the conservative mindset. The Kochs I can understand: messianic Daddy Warbucks who can’t imagine what life is like for people who aren’t worth 21 billion dollars. But whatever happened to “compassionate conservatism?” The Affordable Care Act – whatever its flaws – extends health care coverage to over 40 million deprived Americans who would otherwise be uncovered. What is it about these people – the Thomases, the secret donors, the privileged plutocrats on their side – that they can’t embrace a little social justice where it counts – among everyday people struggling to get by in a dog-eat-dog world? Health care coverage could mean the difference between life and death for them. Mrs. Thomas is obviously doing okay; she no doubts takes at least a modest salary from that private slush fund working to undermine the health care reforms; her own husband is a government employee covered by a federal plan. Why wouldn’t she want people less fortunate than her to have a little security, too? She headquarters her organization at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, a reportedly Christian school aligned with the Moral Majority. How is it she’s only about “Live and Let Live?” Have they never heard there the Old Time Religion of “Live and help live?” Why would this cushioned, comfortable crowd, pious crowd, resort to such despicable tactics as using secret money to try to turn public policy against their less fortunate neighbors, and in the process compromise the already tattered integrity of the United States Supreme Court?

I don’t get it.

You be the judge (Because if you don’t, Justice Thomas will.)

Time to close the circle: Everyone knows millions of Americans are in trouble. As Robert Reich recently summed it the state of working people: They’ve lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings. Their grown children have moved back in with them. Their state and local taxes are rising. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.

Why isn’t government working for them? Because it’s been bought off. It’s as simple as that. And until we get clean money we’re not going to get clean elections, and until we get clean elections, you can kiss goodbye government of, by, and for the people. Welcome to the plutocracy.

***

Obviously Howard Zinn would not have us leave it there. Defeat was never his counsel. Look at this headline above one of his essays published posthumously this fall by the Progressive magazine: DON’T DESPAIR ABOUT THE SUPREME COURT. The Court was lost long ago, he said – don’t go there looking for justice. “The Constitution gave no rights to working people; no right to work less than 12 hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance….Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel and violate the law in order to uphold justice.”

So what are we to do about Big Money in politics buying off democracy? I can almost hear him throwing that question back at us: “What are we to do? ORGANIZE! Yes, organize—and don’t count the costs.” Some people already are. They’re mobilizing. There’s a rumbling in the land. All across the spectrum people oppose the escalating power of money in politics. Fed-up Democrats. Disillusioned Republicans. Independents. Greens. Even Tea Partiers, once they wake up to realize they have been sucker-punched by their bankrollers who have no intention of sharing the wealth.

Veteran public interest groups like Common Cause and Public Citizen are aroused. There are the rising voices, from web-based initiatives such as “freespeechforpeople.org” to grassroots initiatives such as “Democracy Matters” on campuses across the country, including a chapter here at Boston University. “Moveon.org” is looking for a million people to fight back in a many-pronged strategy to counter the Supreme Court decision.

What’s promising in all this is that in taking on Big Money we’re talking about something more than a single issue. We’re talking about a broad-based coalition to restore American democracy – one that is trying to be smart about the nuts-and-bolts of building a coalition, remembering that it has a lot to do with human nature. Some will want to march. Some will want to petition. Some will want to engage through the web. Some will want to go door-to-door: many gifts, but the same spirit. A fighting spirit. As Howard Zinn would tell us: No fight, no fun, no results.

But here’s the key: If you’re fighting for a living wage, or peace, or immigration reform, or gender equality, or the environment, or a safe neighborhood, you are, of necessity, strongly opposed to a handful of moneyed-interests controlling how decisions get made and policy set. Because most Americans are attuned to principle of fair play, of not favoring Big Money at the expense of the little guy – at the expense of the country they love. The legendary community organizer Ernesto Cortes talks about the “power to preserve what we value.” That’s what we want for Americans – the power to preserve what we value, both for ourselves and on behalf of our democracy.

But let’s be clear: Even with most Americans on our side, the odds are long. We learned long ago that power and privilege never give up anything without a struggle. Money fights hard, and it fights dirty. Think Rove. The Chamber. The Kochs. We may lose. It all may be impossible. But it’s OK if it’s impossible. Hear the former farmworker and labor organizer Baldemar Velasquez on this. The members of his Farm Labor Organizing Committee are a long way from the world of K Street lobbyists. But they took on the Campbell Soup Company – and won. They took on North Carolina growers – and won, using transnational organizing tacts that helped win Velasquez a “genius” award from the MacArthur Foundation. And now they’re taking on no less than R. J. Reynolds Tobacco and one of its principle financial sponsors, JPMorgan-Chase. Some people question the wisdom of taking on such powerful interests, but here’s what Velasquez says: “It’s OK if it’s impossible; it’s OK! Now I’m going to speak to you as organizers. Listen carefully. The object is not to win. That’s not the objective. The object is to do the right and good thing. If you decide not to do anything, because it’s too hard or too impossible, then nothing will be done, and when you’re on your death bed, you’re gonna say, “I wish I had done something. But if you go and do the right thing NOW, and you do it long enough “good things will happen—something’s gonna happen.”

Shades of Howard Zinn!

Watch a video of the full speech and the question and answer session here.

Hermann Scheer

2010-10-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

The German author, economist, renewable energy champion and parliamentarian passed away yesterday. Here is a quote from a Democracy Now interview:

The big mistake in the energy debate is that most people think, because they believe that there is a monopoly and the expertise for all energy activities in the hand of the existing energy players. Many people, including governments, including many scientists, who get their orders for studies from them, they believe and think that the present energy suppliers, the present energy trusts, the companies, they should organize the transformation. And this is a big mistake—a big mistake—because this part of the society is the only one who has an interest to postpone it. The only one. All others, all the others, have an interest to speed it up. But as long government think that it should be left to the energy companies, we will lose the race against time.

It is a fight. This is a structural fight. It is a fight between centralization and decentralization, between energy dictatorship and energy participation in the energy democracy. And because nothing works without energy, it’s a fight between democratic value and technocratical values. And therefore, the mobilization of the society is the most important thing. And as soon as the society, most people, have recognized that the alternative are renewable energies and we must not wait for others, we can do it by our own, in our own sphere, together in cooperatives or in the cities or individually. As soon as they recognize this, they will become supporters. Other—this is the reason why we have now a 90 percent support against all the disinformation campaigns. They have much more money and possibilities to influence the public opinion, but they lost this. They lost this conflict. In the eyes of the people, they lost the conflict. They are the losers already.

In California, we are currently witnessing the environmental obstructionism financed by the fossil fuel industry as Texas oil refiners Valero and Tesoro and oil billionaires Charles and David Koch underwrite California Proposition 23, with the goal of reversing the state's landmark Global Warming legislation.

Prisoners of War

2010-09-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

Bob Woodward and All the President’s Men (2010 Edition)
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Once a serious journalist, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward now makes a very fine living as chief gossip-monger of the governing class. Early on in his career, along with Carl Bernstein, his partner at the time, Woodward confronted power. Today, by relentlessly exalting Washington trivia, he flatters power. His reporting does not inform. It titillates.

A new Woodward book, Obama’s Wars, is a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s out this week, already causing a stir, and guaranteed to be forgotten the week after dropping off the bestseller lists. For good reason: when it comes to substance, any book written by Woodward has about as much heft as the latest potboiler penned by the likes of James Patterson or Tom Clancy.

Back in 2002, for example, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Woodward treated us to Bush at War. Based on interviews with unidentified officials close to President George W. Bush, the book offered a portrait of the president-as-resolute-war-leader that put him in a league with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But the book’s real juice came from what it revealed about events behind the scenes. “Bush’s war cabinet is riven with feuding,” reported the Times of London, which credited Woodward with revealing “the furious arguments and personal animosity” that divided Bush’s lieutenants.

Of course, the problem with the Bush administration wasn’t that folks on the inside didn’t play nice with one another. No, the problem was that the president and his inner circle committed a long series of catastrophic errors that produced an unnecessary and grotesquely mismanaged war. That war has cost the country dearly -- although the people who engineered that catastrophe, many of them having pocketed handsome advances on their forthcoming memoirs, continue to manage quite well, thank you.

To judge by the publicity blitzkrieg announcing the arrival of Obama’s Wars in your local bookstore, the big news out of Washington is that, even today, politics there remains an intensely competitive sport, with the participants, whether in anger or frustration, sometimes speaking ill of one another.

Essentially, news reports indicate, Woodward has updated his script from 2002. The characters have different names, but the plot remains the same. Talk about jumping the shark.

So we learn that Obama political adviser David Axelrod doesn’t fully trust Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. National security adviser James Jones, a retired Marine general, doesn’t much care for the likes of Axelrod, and will say so behind his back. Almost everyone thinks Richard Holbrooke, chief State Department impresario of the AfPak portfolio, is a jerk. And -- stop the presses -- when under the influence of alcohol, General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, is alleged to use the word “f**ked.” These are the sort of shocking revelations that make you a headliner on the Sunday morning talk shows.

Based on what we have learned so far from those select few provided with advance copies of the book -- mostly reporters for the Post and The New York Times who, for whatever reason, seem happy to serve as its shills -- Obama’s Wars contains hints of another story, the significance of which seems to have eluded Woodward.

Continue reading at TomDispatch.

Robert Fisk: Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead – and nothing learnt

2010-09-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" – as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West.

But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived – or lives still – in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah – not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all – utterly – on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be ready to take his place.

Continue reading at The Independent.

***

Related story: The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond.

Wild time in the North Atlantic

2010-08-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Danielle (top center), Hurricane Earl (bottom center) and "97L" (bottom right). The image reminds me of those from the Hubble Space Telescope showing galaxy clusters.

Goldberg’s Bogus ‘Ticking Clock’ on Iran

2010-08-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

The following response to Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic Monthly campaign to stoke anxiety over Iran's "nuclear aspirations" is posted at Rootless Cosmopolitan.

By Tony Karon

America’s march to a disastrous war in Iraq began in the media, where an unprovoked U.S. invasion of an Arab country was introduced as a legitimate policy option, then debated as a prudent and necessary one. Now, a similarly flawed media conversation on Iran is gaining momentum.

Last month, TIME’s Joe Klein warned that Obama administration sources had told him bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities was “back on the table.” In an interview with CNN, former CIA director Admiral Mike Hayden next spoke of an “inexorable” dynamic toward confrontation, claiming that bombing was a more viable option for the Obama administration than it had been for George W. Bush. The pièce de résistance in the most recent drum roll of bomb-Iran alerts, however, came from Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic Monthly. A journalist influential in U.S. pro-Israeli circles, he also has access to Israel’s corridors of power. Because sanctions were unlikely to force Iran to back down on its uranium enrichment project, Goldberg invited readers to believe that there was a more than even chance Israel would launch a military strike on the country by next summer.

His piece, which sparked considerable debate in both the blogosphere and the traditional media, was certainly an odd one. After all, despite the dramatics he deployed, including vivid descriptions of the Israeli battle plan, and his tendency to paint Iran as a new Auschwitz, he also made clear that many of his top Israeli sources simply didn’t believe Iran would launch nuclear weapons against Israel, even if it acquired them.

Nonetheless, Goldberg warned, absent an Iranian white flag soon, Israel would indeed launch that war in summer 2011, and it, in turn, was guaranteed to plunge the region into chaos. The message: the Obama administration better do more to confront Iran or Israel will act crazy.

Continue reading at Rootless Cosmopolitan

Washington Rules

2010-08-27T14:02:00.000-07:00

The following excerpt comes from TomDispatch.com

The Unmaking of a Company Man
An Education Begun in the Shadow of the Brandenburg Gate
By Andrew Bacevich

Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.

My own education did not commence until I had reached middle age. I can fix its start date with precision: for me, education began in Berlin, on a winter’s evening, at the Brandenburg Gate, not long after the Berlin Wall had fallen.

As an officer in the U.S. Army I had spent considerable time in Germany. Until that moment, however, my family and I had never had occasion to visit this most famous of German cities, still littered with artifacts of a deeply repellent history. At the end of a long day of exploration, we found ourselves in what had, until just months before, been the communist East. It was late and we were hungry, but I insisted on walking the length of the Unter den Linden, from the River Spree to the gate itself. A cold rain was falling and the pavement glistened. The buildings lining the avenue, dating from the era of Prussian kings, were dark, dirty, and pitted. Few people were about. It was hardly a night for sightseeing.

For as long as I could remember, the Brandenburg Gate had been the preeminent symbol of the age and Berlin the epicenter of contemporary history. Yet by the time I made it to the once and future German capital, history was already moving on. The Cold War had abruptly ended. A divided city and a divided nation had reunited.

For Americans who had known Berlin only from a distance, the city existed primarily as a metaphor. Pick a date -- 1933, 1942, 1945, 1948, 1961, 1989 -- and Berlin becomes an instructive symbol of power, depravity, tragedy, defiance, endurance, or vindication. For those inclined to view the past as a chronicle of parables, the modern history of Berlin offered an abundance of material. The greatest of those parables emerged from the events of 1933 to 1945, an epic tale of evil ascendant, belatedly confronted, then heroically overthrown. A second narrative, woven from events during the intense period immediately following World War II, saw hopes for peace dashed, yielding bitter antagonism but also great resolve. The ensuing stand-off -- the “long twilight struggle,” in John Kennedy’s memorable phrase -- formed the centerpiece of the third parable, its central theme stubborn courage in the face of looming peril. Finally came the exhilarating events of 1989, with freedom ultimately prevailing, not only in Berlin, but throughout Eastern Europe.

What exactly was I looking for at the Brandenburg Gate? Perhaps confirmation that those parables, which I had absorbed and accepted as true, were just that. Whatever I expected, what I actually found was a cluster of shabby-looking young men, not German, hawking badges, medallions, hats, bits of uniforms, and other artifacts of the mighty Red Army. It was all junk, cheaply made and shoddy. For a handful of deutsche marks, I bought a wristwatch emblazoned with the symbol of the Soviet armored corps. Within days, it ceased to work.

Huddling among the scarred columns, those peddlers -- almost certainly off-duty Russian soldiers awaiting redeployment home -- constituted a subversive presence. They were loose ends of a story that was supposed to have ended neatly when the Berlin Wall came down. As we hurried off to find warmth and a meal, this disconcerting encounter stuck with me, and I began to entertain this possibility: that the truths I had accumulated over the previous twenty years as a professional soldier -- especially truths about the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy -- might not be entirely true.

By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in orthodoxy. In a life spent subject to authority, deference had become a deeply ingrained habit. I found assurance in conventional wisdom. Now, I started, however hesitantly, to suspect that orthodoxy might be a sham. I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high -- whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops -- is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor.

I came to these obvious points embarrassingly late in life. “Nothing is so astonishing in education,” the historian Henry Adams once wrote, “as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Until that moment I had too often confused education with accumulating and cataloging facts. In Berlin, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, I began to realize that I had been a naïf. And so, at age 41, I set out, in a halting and haphazard fashion, to acquire a genuine education.

Twenty years later I’ve made only modest progress. What follows is an accounting of what I have learned thus far.

Visiting a Third-World Version of Germany

In October 1990, I’d gotten a preliminary hint that something might be amiss in my prior education. On October 3rd, communist East Germany -- formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR) -- ceased to exist and German reunification was officially secured. That very week I accompanied a group of American military officers to the city of Jena in what had been the GDR. Our purpose was self-consciously educational -- to study the famous battle of Jena-Auerstädt in which Napoleon Bonaparte and his marshals had inflicted an epic defeat on Prussian forces commanded by the Duke of Brunswick. (The outcome of that 1806 battle inspired the philosopher Hegel, then residing in Jena, to declare that the “end of history” was at hand. The conclusion of the Cold War had only recently elicited a similarly exuberant judgment from the American scholar Francis Fukuyama.)

On this trip we did learn a lot about the conduct of that battle, although mainly inert facts possessing little real educational value. Inadvertently, we also gained insight into the reality of life on the far side of what Americans had habitually called the Iron Curtain, known in U.S. military vernacular as “the trace.” In this regard, the trip proved nothing less than revelatory. The educational content of this excursion would -- for me -- be difficult to exaggerate.

As soon as our bus crossed the old Inner German Border, we entered a time warp. For U.S. troops garrisoned throughout Bavaria and Hesse, West Germany had for decades served as a sort of theme park -- a giant Epcot filled with quaint villages, stunning scenery, and superb highways, along with ample supplies of quite decent food, excellent beer, and accommodating women. Now, we found ourselves face-to-face with an altogether different Germany. Although commonly depicted as the most advanced and successful component of the Soviet Empire, East Germany more closely resembled part of the undeveloped world.

The roads -- even the main highways -- were narrow and visibly crumbling. Traffic posed little problem. Apart from a few sluggish Trabants and Wartburgs -- East German automobiles that tended to a retro primitivism -- and an occasional exhaust-spewing truck, the way was clear. The villages through which we passed were forlorn and the small farms down at the heels. For lunch we stopped at a roadside stand. The proprietor happily accepted our D-marks, offering us inedible sausages in exchange. Although the signs assured us that we remained in a land of German speakers, it was a country that had not yet recovered from World War II.

Upon arrival in Jena, we checked into the Hotel Schwarzer Bär, identified by our advance party as the best hostelry in town. It turned out to be a rundown fleabag. As the senior officer present, I was privileged to have a room in which the plumbing functioned. Others were not so lucky.

Jena itself was a midsized university city, with its main academic complex immediately opposite our hotel. A very large bust of Karl Marx, mounted on a granite pedestal and badly in need of cleaning, stood on the edge of the campus. Briquettes of soft coal used for home heating made the air all but unbreathable and coated everything with soot. In the German cities we knew, pastels predominated -- houses and apartment blocks painted pale green, muted salmon, and soft yellow. Here everything was brown and gray.

That evening we set out in search of dinner. The restaurants within walking distance were few and unattractive. We chose badly, a drab establishment in which fresh vegetables were unavailable and the wurst inferior. The adequacy of the local beer provided the sole consolation.

The following morning, on the way to the battlefield, we noted a significant Soviet military presence, mostly in the form of trucks passing by -- to judge by their appearance, designs that dated from the 1950s. To our surprise, we discovered that the Soviets had established a small training area adjacent to where Napoleon had vanquished the Prussians. Although we had orders to avoid contact with any Russians, the presence of their armored troops going through their paces riveted us. Here was something of far greater immediacy than Bonaparte and the Duke of Brunswick: “the other,” about which we had for so long heard so much but knew so little. Through binoculars, we watched a column of Russian armored vehicles -- BMPs, in NATO parlance -- traversing what appeared to be a drivers’ training course. Suddenly, one of them began spewing smoke. Soon thereafter, it burst into flames.

Here was education, although at the time I had only the vaguest sense of its significance.

An Ambitious Team Player Assailed by Doubts

These visits to Jena and Berlin offered glimpses of a reality radically at odds with my most fundamental assumptions. Uninvited and unexpected, subversive forces had begun to infiltrate my consciousness. Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble.

That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and affirmed the nation’s enduring devotion to its founding ideals. That American power, policies, and purpose were bound together in a neat, internally consistent package, each element drawing strength from and reinforcing the others, was something I took as a given. That, during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a signature of U.S. policy did not -- to me, at least -- in any way contradict America’s aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness of those aspirations. That, during this same period, the United States had amassed an arsenal of over 31,000 nuclear weapons, some small number of them assigned to units in which I had served, was not at odds with our belief in the inalienable right to life and liberty; rather, threats to life and liberty had compelled the United States to acquire such an arsenal and maintain it in readiness for instant use.

I was not so naïve as to believe that the American record had been without flaws. Yet I assured myself that any errors or misjudgments had been committed in good faith. Furthermore, circumstances permitted little real choice. In Southeast Asia as in Western Europe, in the Persian Gulf as in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had simply done what needed doing. Viable alternatives did not exist. To consent to any dilution of American power would be to forfeit global leadership, thereby putting at risk safety, prosperity, and freedom, not only our own but also that of our friends and allies.

The choices seemed clear enough. On one side was the status quo: the commitments, customs, and habits that defined American globalism, implemented by the national security apparatus within which I functioned as a small cog. On the other side was the prospect of appeasement, isolationism, and catastrophe. The only responsible course was the one to which every president since Harry Truman had adhered.

For me, the Cold War had played a crucial role in sustaining that worldview. Given my age, upbringing, and professional background, it could hardly have been otherwise. Although the great rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union had contained moments of considerable anxiety -- I remember my father, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, stocking our basement with water and canned goods -- it served primarily to clarify, not to frighten. The Cold War provided a framework that organized and made sense of contemporary history. It offered a lineup and a scorecard. That there existed bad Germans and good Germans, their Germans and our Germans, totalitarian Germans and Germans who, like Americans, passionately loved freedom was, for example, a proposition I accepted as dogma. Seeing the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil answered many questions, consigned others to the periphery, and rendered still others irrelevant.

Back in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, more than a few members of my generation had rejected the conception of the Cold War as a Manichean struggle. Here too, I was admittedly a slow learner. Yet having kept the faith long after others had lost theirs, the doubts that eventually assailed me were all the more disorienting.

Granted, occasional suspicions had appeared long before Jena and Berlin. My own Vietnam experience had generated its share, which I had done my best to suppress. I was, after all, a serving soldier. Except in the narrowest of terms, the military profession, in those days at least, did not look kindly on nonconformity. Climbing the ladder of career success required curbing maverick tendencies. To get ahead, you needed to be a team player. Later, when studying the history of U.S. foreign relations in graduate school, I was pelted with challenges to orthodoxy, which I vigorously deflected. When it came to education, graduate school proved a complete waste of time -- a period of intense study devoted to the further accumulation of facts, while I exerted myself to ensuring that they remained inert.

Now, however, my personal circumstances were changing. Shortly after the passing of the Cold War, my military career ended. Education thereby became not only a possibility, but also a necessity.

In measured doses, mortification cleanses the soul. It’s the perfect antidote for excessive self-regard. After 23 years spent inside the U.S. Army seemingly going somewhere, I now found myself on the outside going nowhere in particular. In the self-contained and cloistered universe of regimental life, I had briefly risen to the status of minor spear carrier. The instant I took off my uniform, that status vanished. I soon came to a proper appreciation of my own insignificance, a salutary lesson that I ought to have absorbed many years earlier.

As I set out on what eventually became a crablike journey toward a new calling as a teacher and writer -- a pilgrimage of sorts -- ambition in the commonly accepted meaning of the term ebbed. This did not happen all at once. Yet gradually, trying to grab one of life’s shiny brass rings ceased being a major preoccupation. Wealth, power, and celebrity became not aspirations but subjects for critical analysis. History -- especially the familiar narrative of the Cold War -- no longer offered answers; instead, it posed perplexing riddles. Easily the most nagging was this one: How could I have so profoundly misjudged the reality of what lay on the far side of the Iron Curtain?

Had I been insufficiently attentive? Or was it possible that I had been snookered all along? Contemplating such questions, while simultaneously witnessing the unfolding of the “long 1990s” -- the period bookended by two wars with Iraq when American vainglory reached impressive new heights -- prompted the realization that I had grossly misinterpreted the threat posed by America’s adversaries. Yet that was the lesser half of the problem. Far worse than misperceiving “them” was the fact that I had misperceived “us.” What I thought I knew best I actually understood least. Here, the need for education appeared especially acute.

George W. Bush’s decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 pushed me fully into opposition. Claims that once seemed elementary -- above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power -- now appeared preposterous. The contradictions that found an ostensibly peace-loving nation committing itself to a doctrine of preventive war became too great to ignore. The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended “global war on terror” without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords. During the era of containment, the United States had at least maintained the pretense of a principled strategy; now, the last vestiges of principle gave way to fantasy and opportunism. With that, the worldview to which I had adhered as a young adult and carried into middle age dissolved completely.

Credo and Trinity

What should stand in the place of such discarded convictions? Simply inverting the conventional wisdom, substituting a new Manichean paradigm for the old discredited version -- the United States taking the place of the Soviet Union as the source of the world’s evil -- would not suffice. Yet arriving at even an approximation of truth would entail subjecting conventional wisdom, both present and past, to sustained and searching scrutiny. Cautiously at first but with growing confidence, this I vowed to do.

Doing so meant shedding habits of conformity acquired over decades. All of my adult life I had been a company man, only dimly aware of the extent to which institutional loyalties induce myopia. Asserting independence required first recognizing the extent to which I had been socialized to accept certain things as unimpeachable. Here then were the preliminary steps essential to making education accessible. Over a period of years, a considerable store of debris had piled up. Now, it all had to go. Belatedly, I learned that more often than not what passes for conventional wisdom is simply wrong. Adopting fashionable attitudes to demonstrate one’s trustworthiness -- the world of politics is flush with such people hoping thereby to qualify for inclusion in some inner circle -- is akin to engaging in prostitution in exchange for promissory notes. It’s not only demeaning but downright foolhardy.

Washington Rules aims to take stock of conventional wisdom in its most influential and enduring form, namely the package of assumptions, habits, and precepts that have defined the tradition of statecraft to which the United States has adhered since the end of World War II -- the era of global dominance now drawing to a close. This postwar tradition combines two components, each one so deeply embedded in the American collective consciousness as to have all but disappeared from view.

The first component specifies norms according to which the international order ought to work and charges the United States with responsibility for enforcing those norms. Call this the American credo. In the simplest terms, the credo summons the United States -- and the United States alone -- to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world. In a celebrated manifesto issued at the dawn of what he termed “The American Century,” Henry R. Luce made the case for this spacious conception of global leadership. Writing in Life magazine in early 1941, the influential publisher exhorted his fellow citizens to “accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” Luce thereby captured what remains even today the credo’s essence.

Luce’s concept of an American Century, an age of unquestioned American global primacy, resonated, especially in Washington. His evocative phrase found a permanent place in the lexicon of national politics. (Recall that the neoconservatives who, in the 1990s, lobbied for more militant U.S. policies named their enterprise the Project for a New American Century.) So, too, did Luce’s expansive claim of prerogatives to be exercised by the United States. Even today, whenever public figures allude to America’s responsibility to lead, they signal their fidelity to this creed. Along with respectful allusions to God and “the troops,” adherence to Luce’s credo has become a de facto prerequisite for high office. Question its claims and your prospects of being heard in the hubbub of national politics become nil.

Note, however, that the duty Luce ascribed to Americans has two components. It is not only up to Americans, he wrote, to choose the purposes for which they would bring their influence to bear, but to choose the means as well. Here we confront the second component of the postwar tradition of American statecraft.

With regard to means, that tradition has emphasized activism over example, hard power over soft, and coercion (often styled “negotiating from a position of strength”) over suasion. Above all, the exercise of global leadership as prescribed by the credo obliges the United States to maintain military capabilities staggeringly in excess of those required for self-defense. Prior to World War II, Americans by and large viewed military power and institutions with skepticism, if not outright hostility. In the wake of World War II, that changed. An affinity for military might emerged as central to the American identity.

By the midpoint of the twentieth century, “the Pentagon” had ceased to be merely a gigantic five-sided building. Like “Wall Street” at the end of the nineteenth century, it had become Leviathan, its actions veiled in secrecy, its reach extending around the world. Yet while the concentration of power in Wall Street had once evoked deep fear and suspicion, Americans by and large saw the concentration of power in the Pentagon as benign. Most found it reassuring.

A people who had long seen standing armies as a threat to liberty now came to believe that the preservation of liberty required them to lavish resources on the armed forces. During the Cold War, Americans worried ceaselessly about falling behind the Russians, even though the Pentagon consistently maintained a position of overall primacy. Once the Soviet threat disappeared, mere primacy no longer sufficed. With barely a whisper of national debate, unambiguous and perpetual global military supremacy emerged as an essential predicate to global leadership.

Every great military power has its distinctive signature. For Napoleonic France, it was the levée en masse -- the people in arms animated by the ideals of the Revolution. For Great Britain in the heyday of empire, it was command of the seas, sustained by a dominant fleet and a network of far-flung outposts from Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope to Singapore and Hong Kong. Germany from the 1860s to the 1940s (and Israel from 1948 to 1973) took another approach, relying on a potent blend of tactical flexibility and operational audacity to achieve battlefield superiority.

The abiding signature of American military power since World War II has been of a different order altogether. The United States has not specialized in any particular type of war. It has not adhered to a fixed tactical style. No single service or weapon has enjoyed consistent favor. At times, the armed forces have relied on citizen-soldiers to fill their ranks; at other times, long-service professionals. Yet an examination of the past 60 years of U.S. military policy and practice does reveal important elements of continuity. Call them the sacred trinity: an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.

Together, credo and trinity -- the one defining purpose, the other practice -- constitute the essence of the way that Washington has attempted to govern and police the American Century. The relationship between the two is symbiotic. The trinity lends plausibility to the credo’s vast claims. For its part, the credo justifies the trinity’s vast requirements and exertions. Together they provide the basis for an enduring consensus that imparts a consistency to U.S. policy regardless of which political party may hold the upper hand or who may be occupying the White House. From the era of Harry Truman to the age of Barack Obama, that consensus has remained intact. It defines the rules to which Washington adheres; it determines the precepts by which Washington rules.

As used here, Washington is less a geographic expression than a set of interlocking institutions headed by people who, whether acting officially or unofficially, are able to put a thumb on the helm of state. Washington, in this sense, includes the upper echelons of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government. It encompasses the principal components of the national security state -- the departments of Defense, State, and, more recently, Homeland Security, along with various agencies comprising the intelligence and federal law enforcement communities. Its ranks extend to select think tanks and interest groups. Lawyers, lobbyists, fixers, former officials, and retired military officers who still enjoy access are members in good standing. Yet Washington also reaches beyond the Beltway to include big banks and other financial institutions, defense contractors and major corporations, television networks and elite publications like the New York Times, even quasi-academic entities like the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. With rare exceptions, acceptance of the Washington rules forms a prerequisite for entry into this world.

My purpose in writing Washiington Rules is fivefold: first, to trace the origins and evolution of the Washington rules -- both the credo that inspires consensus and the trinity in which it finds expression; second, to subject the resulting consensus to critical inspection, showing who wins and who loses and also who foots the bill; third, to explain how the Washington rules are perpetuated, with certain views privileged while others are declared disreputable; fourth, to demonstrate that the rules themselves have lost what ever utility they may once have possessed, with their implications increasingly pernicious and their costs increasingly unaffordable; and finally, to argue for readmitting disreputable (or “radical”) views to our national security debate, in effect legitimating alternatives to the status quo. In effect, my aim is to invite readers to share in the process of education on which I embarked two decades ago in Berlin.

The Washington rules were forged at a moment when American influence and power were approaching their acme. That moment has now passed. The United States has drawn down the stores of authority and goodwill it had acquired by 1945. Words uttered in Washington command less respect than once was the case. Americans can ill afford to indulge any longer in dreams of saving the world, much less remaking it in our own image. The curtain is now falling on the American Century.

Similarly, the United States no longer possesses sufficient wherewithal to sustain a national security strategy that relies on global military presence and global power projection to underwrite a policy of global interventionism. Touted as essential to peace, adherence to that strategy has propelled the United States into a condition approximating perpetual war, as the military misadventures of the past decade have demonstrated.

To anyone with eyes to see, the shortcomings inherent in the Washington rules have become plainly evident. Although those most deeply invested in perpetuating its conventions will insist otherwise, the tradition to which Washington remains devoted has begun to unravel. Attempting to prolong its existence might serve Washington’s interests, but it will not serve the interests of the American people.

Devising an alternative to the reigning national security paradigm will pose a daunting challenge -- especially if Americans look to “Washington” for fresh thinking. Yet doing so has become essential.

In one sense, the national security policies to which Washington so insistently adheres express what has long been the preferred American approach to engaging the world beyond our borders. That approach plays to America’s presumed strong suit -- since World War II, and especially since the end of the Cold War, thought to be military power. In another sense, this reliance on military might creates excuses for the United States to avoid serious engagement: confidence in American arms has made it unnecessary to attend to what others might think or to consider how their aspirations might differ from our own. In this way, the Washington rules reinforce American provincialism -- a national trait for which the United States continues to pay dearly.

The persistence of these rules has also provided an excuse to avoid serious self-engagement. From this perspective, confidence that the credo and the trinity will oblige others to accommodate themselves to America’s needs or desires -- whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or cheap consumer goods -- has allowed Washington to postpone or ignore problems demanding attention here at home. Fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit. Purporting to support the troops in their crusade to free the world obviates any obligation to assess the implications of how Americans themselves choose to exercise freedom.

When Americans demonstrate a willingness to engage seriously with others, combined with the courage to engage seriously with themselves, then real education just might begin.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (Metropolitan Books), has just been published. This essay is its introduction. Listen to a TomCast audio interview in which he discusses the book by clicking here, or to download to an iPod, here.

Excerpted from Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, published this month by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2010 by Andrew Bacevich. All rights reserved.

Sinful

2010-08-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

I checked out Newt Gingrich's latest book To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine from the library. I had heard about it earlier in the year and put in a request.

It takes a lot for me to pick up a book and read it: irresistible reviews, an inspiring author, a favored subject. Or, in this case, an outlandish title.

I have to say, this book is tough to understand. More precisely, it is tough to understand how a person whom I regard as a seasoned representative, scholar, educator (and a Christian!) could write something so painfully deceitful and cynical. This book appears to be directed at an audience that Gingrich must judge as having absolutely no capacity for critical thought.

It is the worst, most self-serving book I can recall. (Of course I know there's an endless supply of such trash. I just won't touch the stuff.) But I certainly didn't expect this from Mr. Gingrich (even though I never really forgave him for the pall his "Contract on America" cast over this country.)

From the first words, I was astounded that virtually every paragraph could be challenged on it's bias, assumptions, incompleteness, veracity, or faulty logic. This result would be really difficult to accomplish - even if it you had set out to do so!

I'll have to offer some examples here (where to begin!), but I suggest you get your hands on a copy, just randomly open to any page and read. I think you'll see my point.

(And last night, it was a bit unnerving when I heard a couple conservatives speaking after winning in yesterday's primaries, channeling "The Newt". I'd swear they were pulling quotes right out of the book.)

Selected quotations:

P. 2

America as we know it is now facing a mortal threat.
The Left have expanded their power through their control of academia, the elite news media, union leaders, trial lawyers, the bureaucracy, the courts, and lobbyists at the state and federal levels. They share a vision of a secular, socialist America run for the interests of the members of the political machine that keeps them in power. It will be an America where government dominates the people rather than represents them. In short, they want to use government power to change who we are and how we think.

This danger to America is greater than anything I dreamed possible after we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union disappeared in December 1991. We stand at a crossroads: either we will save our country or we will lose it.

P. 2

Traditional America values hard work, entrepreneurship, innovation, and merit-based upward mobility. But the secular-socialist machine rewards its members, punishes "overachievers," kills jobs by over-taxing small businesses, and even exploits your death to tax the savings you hope to pass on to your children and grandchildren.

P. 3

For many in the secular-socialist Left, however, the only thing exceptional about America is our supposed viciousness. They believe America is an exploitive (sic), imperialist aggressor, and that the U.S. military is a nefarious tool of corporate interests. Some on the Left even hope for America's wartime defeat as a means to stop us from promoting American values across the world.

...secular socialists believe the only reliable institution is a bureaucratic, centralized, supremely powerful government....They don't believe Americans can be trusted to make the "right" decisions.

P. 4

The America in which we grew up is vastly different from the America the secular-socialist Left want to create. And that's why saving America is the fundamental challenge of our time. The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did. (Emphasis added.)

This diagnosis may strike some readers as alarmist. But this book will show just how radical, how corrupt, and how ruthless the Left have become. You will see also why the term "secular-socialist machine" is the only honest way to describe the Left's ideology and the way they operate today.

Time has not run out, but it is running short. It's up to those of us who love our country to save America from the destructive, irreversible transformation that the Left have in store for us.

This is just the opening salvo, a taste of what Mr. Gingrich has in store for the reader. Note that I did not search out passages that use the term "secular-socialist machine". The label appears profusely - a useful device in brainwashing, but not in rational discourse.

If one were to replace Gingrich's use of "secular-socialist Left" with "blacks", "Hispanics" or "Muslims", it would become clear that he attacks this perceived threat in the same way racists irrationally attack the perceived threat from those "who are different".

More from the Newt:

P. 35 (Here, Newt gives a history lesson. A clear explanation why Obama is a radical.)
The "Left" is a term stemming from the seating of political parties in the National Assembly during the French Revolution. The radicals were seated on the left and the conservatives on the right. Today, the Left comprise a range of opinion favoring various levels of state control over society and over the economy. So the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda is indeed leftist...

P. 37

A purely secular outlook does not acknowledge God. It does not consider the implications of one's actions beyond the impact they make within one's own life. It does not recognize any higher moral order beyond that which human beings have rationally developed.

P. 37

For example, the Declaration of Independence, America's founding political document, boldly proclaims, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

This extraordinary sentence makes some key assumptions: that God is sovereign over the affairs of the universe; that God created man; an that man must obey an order of justice God Himself has instituted.

How then can a purely secular worldview account for the original American understanding of our rights and freedoms?

It cannot.

P. 46 (Gingrich rails against radical tactics, which he himself commonly employs in his own "personal" revolution)

Perhaps nobody has been more clear about the Left's need for dishonesty than Saul Alinsky.

One of the twentieth century's most influential radicals, Alinsky is considered the godfather of community organizing...

Many of his "rules" are guideline for engaging in immoral, dangerous, political dishonesty. Echoing the maxims of Vladimir Lenin, the architect of Soviet Communism, Alinsky justifies almost any immoral act, especially outright dishonesty and hypocrisy, if it's done while pursuing revolution.

David Horowitz, in his small book Barack Obama's Rules of Revolution: The Alinsky Model, cogently explains the significance of Alinsky's teaching to the modern Left.

For Alinsky, a radical's primary goals must be acquiring power and destroying the current system. What replaces it is of secondary concern. He teaches that you amass power by organizing people based on their naked self-interest, not on any idealism or common vision of the future.

P. 62-63

President Obama hides his duplicity behind secrecy, clever language, and legalisms. Like President Reagan, Obama possesses captivating, eloquent rhetorical gifts. While Reagan used rhetoric to clarify and educate, however, Obama uses his skills to confuse and deflect. These are profoundly different models of leadership. But then, clarity was Reagan's ally, since he was a conservative who articulated the values of the American people. In contrast, as an apologist for the secular-socialist Left, Obama knows clarity is his opponent; the less the American people understand about what he is doing, the better.

P. 71-72 (As a historian, Gingrich's memory seems to fail him. Does the name Nixon ring a bell?)

Contrary to their promises to clean up Washington, the president, House speaker, and Senate majority leader have governed with a political machine mentality that is more corrupt and secretive than anything we have seen in modern American politics.

P. 129 (Another of the conservatives' arch-enemies is attacked. This one is particularly hilarious, as Gingrich attacks its one country-one vote system. Membership is even granted to despotic nations, such as Saudi Arabia! Of course, no mention is made of where most "Western democracies" sourced much of their wealth.)

In some ways, the UN machine is even worse than the machine of the American Left; first, since even the most despotic governments are entitled to UN membership, the UN is not limited by elections or the need to keep up democratic appearances. And second, lacking America's legal framework for government transparency, the organization is even more prone to corruption than is the American Left.

Despite the fact that a handful of Western democracies pay the vast majority of the UN's annual budget (the United States alone pays 22 percent), the UN's most influential voting block is a group of 130 undeveloped countries called the G-77. Using the UN's one country-one vote system, the G-77 has hijacked the UN to turn it into a mechanism for redistributing wealth from the developed to developing countries.

P. 137 (Here Newt basically expresses his outrage that the UN has the gall to criticize and obstruct some of our self-serving pursuits. In other words, that other nations have a say in the matter.)

The UN could make an immense contribution to world peace, human rights, and the spread of democracy. But it is not doing that - and that's a tragedy. Having proven impervious to all attempts at reform, we need to sideline this dysfunctional, self-perpetuating, bureaucratic machine until it stops acting as a vehicle for the world's most oppressive states to exert their will over the world's free democracies.

P. 150-151 (Newt attacks other conservation enemies - the czars and EPA. Though I guess the EPA was doing just fine under G.W., as it overturned decades of environmental protections. Gingrich loves the use of labels designed to incite and inflame.)

Consider the White House czar system. It is an unconstitutional centralization of power in the hands of the appointed, unaccountable bureaucrats. It is guaranteed to increase corruption, lead to political cronyism, and give the president unprecedented - and un-American - power to manipulate, coerce, and bribe people.

The solution is to eliminate the White House czar system, not to reform it.

The EPA has become an engine of undemocratic bureaucracy filled with people who seek to impose their fanatical views on an unwilling American population. The EPA and its entire regulation-litigation, Washington-centered, command-and-control bureacracy needs to be replaced.

That's enough. The book numbers roughly 350 pages, full of gems such as these.

No South Afghanistan Handover for a 'Few Years': US

2010-08-24T12:04:00.000-07:00

Allowing policy decisions to be driven by "conditions on the ground", gives military leaders undo influence over our foreign policy debate. This effect is magnified when Generals Conway, Petraeus and McChrystal (with or without their Commander-in-Chief's consent) take their "wag the dog" pitch directly to the American people.

Virtually all mainstream media (and their imbedded reporters) compliantly join the choir of voices cautioning against hasty decisions in the face of "conditions on the ground". (It has been especially sad to witness NPR move into the war booster camp whenever the government pulls their chain.) Had we yielded to such blind optimism we'd still be in Vietnam.

Foreign occupation is THE condition on the ground that is at the root of this conflict.

Published on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 by Agence France Presse

WASHINGTON - General James Conway, head of the US Marine Corps, told reporters Tuesday that Afghan forces would not be ready to take over security from US troops in key southern provinces for at least "a few years."

"I honestly think it will be a few years before conditions on the ground are such that turnover will be possible for us," General James Conway told reporters, referring to Marines deployed in the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

Conway, who just returned from visiting Marines in Afghanistan, said some Afghan units "somewhere" might be able to assume the lead for security in 2011 but not in the south, which he called the "birthplace" of the Taliban insurgency.

His comments were the latest sign from US military leaders that a major troop withdrawal remained a long way off, despite a July 2011 deadline set by President Barack Obama for the start of a drawdown.

Conway acknowledged that public support for the US mission was declining but appealed for patience, warning of the risks of any early withdrawal.

"I sense our country is increasingly growing tired of the war," he said.

But Conway cited a fellow commander's assessment that "we can either lose fast or win slow."

The general added that the administration needed to do a better job of explaining the mission in Afghanistan and the importance of preventing Al-Qaeda and its allies from securing safe havens in the country.

The Circle Jerk Continues

2010-08-18T15:01:00.000-07:00

The same Neocons and their friends in AIPAC, who brought America (and the World) the "No-End-In-Sight Iraq War" are salivating at the prospect that the U.S. and Israel may soon kick ass in Iran. These are people who get off on war - of course, in the name of their God and defense of their tribe. They defend a nation that has surreptitiously developed between one and two hundred nuclear weapons and condemn those who seek to develop nuclear power (and quite possibly a nuclear weapon) as "madmen". American taxpayers finance this insanity and American companies profit. In deals such as the purchase of F-35 strike fighters announced yesterday, tax payer dollars are bestowed upon Israel and come back as profits for the American weapons industry. Here are some examples of the "Chicken Hawks" in action:

The Point of No Return

Published in The Atlantic

By Jeffrey Goldberg

For the Obama administration, the prospect of a nuclearized Iran is dismal to contemplate— it would create major new national-security challenges and crush the president’s dream of ending nuclear proliferation. But the view from Jerusalem is still more dire: a nuclearized Iran represents, among other things, a threat to Israel’s very existence. In the gap between Washington’s and Jerusalem’s views of Iran lies the question: who, if anyone, will stop Iran before it goes nuclear, and how? As Washington and Jerusalem study each other intensely, here’s an inside look at the strategic calculations on both sides—and at how, if things remain on the current course, an Israeli air strike will unfold.

Continue reading at theatlantic.com.

In a related story, John Bolton states Israel has 8 days to hit Iranian nuclear reactor.

And, batting clean-up, we have PNAC booster Elliott Abrams: Obama Bombing Iran? Don't Be Surprised.

Finally, one of the rare voices of sanity out there: Kucinich Urges Colleagues to End 'Longest War in U.S. History'