Failed Banks and Failed Billions

Something to think about

More Financial Bubbles Ahead in the US Housing Market

By Bob Chapman

April 01, 2010 "International Forecaster" -- Bubbles have a hard time coming to an end, especially in residential real estate. Underlying forces such as government intervention to prolong the agony and the abject stupidity of builders extends the bubbles.

We are in a vast home inventory expansion and builders are going to build 535,000 new homes. The projected foreclosure rate could give us as much as a 3-year home inventory, up from present levels of about a year, if one includes the lenders shadow inventory. This past week the home building index rose 7.1% and it is up 25.1% year-to-date. The retail index rose 17% y-t-d, yet unemployment stubbornly clings to 22-1/8%. In fact, the retail index is up 87.4% y-o-y. We would say that index is grossly overpriced. As you can see bubbles have a way of not wanting to die quickly. This is caused by man’s disparately wanting to cling to the past attempting to take the easy way out rather than adapting to change. Government tries to keep sections of the economy alive rather than letting the cleansing process take its course.

The subsidization of the housing market is doomed to failure, because there simply isn’t enough money and credit available to keep it going indefinitely. All government is doing is re-flating a dying bubble. These Socialistic/Marxist policies just won’t work. Whether government likes it or not interest rates are headed higher, probably by 1% or more by the end of the year as government in its quest for more money to cover its debts crowds most others out of the market. This can be accommodated by the Fed, but not without higher inflation or perhaps hyperinflation, which in turn will drive interest rates even higher. We are seeing the reigniting of speculative mania in other markets as well – in the stock market and particularly in the low quality sector of the bond market worldwide. The mis-pricing of investments and finance is resulting in terrible distortions, mostly the result of Fed and government policy.

This mania has been aided and abetted by US dollar strength, especially over the past two months. We saw JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and others loading up on the long side of the dollar starting last October between USDX 74 and 78. They obviously knew the Greece episode was on the way. Irrespective, and in spite of no positive fundamentals, dollar strength was used to draw funds into dollar denominated assets. Supposedly the dollar has some sort of competitive advantage, which it doesn’t, and that a strong dollar will be re-flationary, which it has been. Gold and silver should have been flying to the upside, but our government detests free markets and it again temporarily suppressed prices. This is the result of the machinations of Larry Summers and Tim Geither. Dollar strength has the perceived benefit of the Fed’s ability to endlessly create money and credit.

It is this perception added to Greece, European and euro problems that have fueled speculation in world markets. Perceptions are one thing, and fundamentals are another more powerful force, which in time will reassert themselves. Problems will first be evident in the bond markets, which have already begun. As soon as the 10-year T-note solidly crosses 4% the market, the dollar and bonds will falter. The current strength is perceived to be the weakness of other currencies and their economies, prospective re-flationary policies and the concept of too big to fail. This is why there is the concept that the current “recovery” will persist. They also recognize that individual euro zone countries cannot inflate their way out of problems. One currency prohibits that from happening. This means Greece and others cannot monetize their debt and that means any kind of recovery is years away. All 19 near bankrupt countries are in the same boat except the US. Markets believe in the Bernanke put or backstop. They also believe the Fed will reinflate again. They would rather have inflation or hyperinflation, which they can in part control, rather than deflation, which once it begins cannot be contained.

Then enters the question will the Fed deliberately choose deflation in a year or two to bring about world government? Is this what Greece was all about? We do not know for sure. All we can do is guess. Do not forget Europe’s problems are not as bad as those of the US even though they are led to believe they are.

The 10-year Treasury note may well be telling us something and that is that higher rates are on the way. It certainly doesn’t auger well for any recovery. If credit spreads widen watch out. Such a development would mean the dollar would begin to retrace its recent gains. Dollar gains are over at 82 on the USDX. We await its correction.

We have spent more than 70 years as Americans and we gasp at the criminal enterprise that America has become. Lawbreaking has become as casual as running a business, whether it is on Wall Street or within the beltway in Washington. Worse yet, almost all malefactors never see the inside of a jail, they just have their corporations pay fines and go back to doing what they were doing, which was breaking the law.

One of the ultimate insults comes from the FDIC requesting donations. 200 to 500 banks will fail this year because of incompetence and terrible investments. We believe, as the year progresses, bank failures will explode. One of the factors leading us to this conclusion is that more than 1,000 banks have professionals overseeing bank operations from the Comptroller of the Currency’s Office. Worse yet, we are seeing many banks and credit unions telling depositors they may have to wait seven days or more for their money. Can bank holidays be far behind? We believe it will happen over the next couple of years.

As we go forward we continue to see massive Treasury purchases by the Fed. The monetization is spellbinding at somewhere between 50 and 80 percent. The more we look at this cartoon the more we know quantitative easing cannot stop. If it does the system will collapse. The Fed and the FDIC even want pension funds to buy their toxic garbage, as does Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. What a sordid turn of events, but not unexpected considering what we are dealing with.

Unemployment sticks at 22-1/8% as tax revenues continue to plunge as the budget deficit heads toward Mars. The next administration push will be to legalize illegal aliens. You ask where will this all end? Can you believe builders have been buying CDOs? Lennar has plunged in and Orleans fell into insolvency with 20% of their assets in toxic garbage.

There is no question zero interest rates, unbridled government deficits, stimulus plans and the Fed’s quantitative easing have been a failure. The result normally would be to pump more aggregates into the system. We will have to see what the Fed, Congress and the administration do, especially between now and the election. Is it any wonder we have called for a two-third’s official dollar devaluation and a debt default. Be patient we should see them happen within two years. Maybe we will get lucky and get tariffs on goods and services. That way we can bring most of our jobs back and get a healthy economy back with 5% unemployment. Many credit derivatives will be banned as well. We have been involved in markets for 50 years and we know sooner or later those who are leveraged – or on margin – lose sooner or later. As a broker we never had margin accounts. The halt in the downward fall of economics, finance and stock market prices are but an interlude. There are still no solutions, so the downside will begin anew. One thing that has come out of the foregoing and the recent troubles in Greece and with the euro is that gold has been recognized as money, as a currency. That view is going to grow as gold trades higher and higher. As an example, just look at the value of gold in euros and all other currencies. Gold has consolidated time after time at $1,050 to $1,100 no matter what the US government threw at the gold market. 
There have been a few exceptions to gold’s strength, but over time all currencies will fall against the only real money. On the short-term do not forget the government is very short gold and silver on the Comex, probably the LBMA and most certainly in the producer shares. This week’s numbers will give us an indication whether they have begun to cover. We are going to also see a resumption of inflation officially in the next CPI figures. Real inflation is again approaching 8% and this inflation will be reflected in gold and silver prices. Not all professionals are dumb enough to believe official figures. On the downside we do not believe $1,050 to $1,100 will ever be broken again. Your gains when they come will be quick and large.

Now that most of the evidence is in, it is apparent that Lehman Brothers management created a colossal fraud even bigger than that of Enron with its Repo 105 maneuvers and was assisted by its accounting firm of Ernst & Young, and by the NY fed under the direction of our current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Geithner and all the top management and directors of Lehman should be charged criminally, but all being Illuminati members no one has been charged. Do not expect much from the Department of Justice. Eric Holder was the official who wrote the pardon letter for March Rich, tax cheat and Mossad operative for the State of Israel. As you can see Holder is where he is today because of his enablement of criminal activity. It shows you again that Wall Street, banking and Washington are nothing more than a criminal cartel. The question now is who else on Wall Street is doing the same thing? We already know they keep two sets of books, which is sanctioned by the BIS, the FASB and your government. What is really going on at these Illuminist firms, besides that they tell us they are doing God’s work.

As this criminal activity unfolds the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke wants more regulatory authority for the Fed so the Fed can better cover up criminal activities. He says the Fed is unequally suited to supervise large, complex financial organizations and to address both safety and soundness risks and risks in the stability of the financial system as a whole. This is the ringleader talking. This is the nexus, the core, the leader of criminal activity in America grasping for even more power. This is the same group under Greenspan and then Bernanke that created the stock market bubble of the late 1990s, the housing, mortgage, commercial real estate bubble, the bubble that took the Dow to 14,100 and then from 6,500 to 10,900, the toxic garbage bubble and the bubble on Wall Street and in banking.

These are the people who lost Americans trillions of dollars so they could implement world government. All this just didn’t happen; it was planned that way. Yes, they are unequally suited to the creation and transmission of criminal activity. This is the same Fed that spent two years in Lehman’s offices and found nothing, because they aided and abetted their criminal activity. They knew everything that was going on. They were trying to bail Lehman out and it did not work. The SEC was there with them, shoulder to shoulder, covering up the crime scene. They are all liars and thieves, not incompetents. We then wonder how deep and serious the fraud is at other firms. From what we have seen so far we haven’t even scratched the surface. We want to see all these facilitators in jail. We do not want to see the Fed with more power. We want to see the Fed out of business as well as the end of the SEC and CFTC. As you can see our government and Wall Street are totally corrupt and unless we do something about it they will destroy our country.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

The Old America is Fading

In spring one has hopes for the beloved country. But an old guy like me can't keep the doubt from creeping in.

By Garrison Keillor

April 01, 2010 "Salon" -- It is spring glorious spring (da do ron ron ron da do ron ron) and our gallant president has rallied his fractious forces against wacko demagoguery, the crocuses are up, and birds are returning from the South, preferring to raise their children here in Minnesota where we pull our pants on one leg at a time and not all at once. Some people in Washington haven't managed to get their pants on in years.

Slowly, slowly, the simple fact dawns on the electorate that the Democrats have passed a moderate Republican healthcare reform. That's what it is. The frenzy on the right is pure fear of stepping out of line with the Republican politburo and getting shipped to Siberia. This lockstep mentality is rare in American history. Here is a grand old party frozen, suspended, mesmerized, in thrall to a gaggle of showboats and radio entertainers and small mobs of fist-shakers standing staunch for unreality, and no Republican elected official dares say, "Let us not be nuts." There will be books written about this in years to come, and they will not be kind to the likes of Rep. Boehner and Sen. McConnell.

Meanwhile, it is spring, and one has hopes for the beloved country, though an old guy like me has his doubts. We are in the midst of a deluge of literature that only gets deeper and wider. Back in the day, you glanced at a couple newspapers and a handful of magazines and that was it, your duty was done, you had the evening free to sit on the porch and jiggle the ice in your glass and talk slow sensible talk with the friends and neighbors. But now, if you dare open your computer and go online, you are swept away into a vortex of surf and whirled around and around and when you finally gather the will to click Disconnect, you find that hours have passed. Weeks, perhaps. And you can't remember a bit of it.

It's all minced together, the raving bloggers and the cat who does backflips and Flip Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, San Salvador, Salvador Dali, Dolly Parton, George Patton, Patti Smith, Smithfield hams, Knut Hamsun, Sonny Liston, Franz Liszt, Lester Flatt, the origin of pancakes, Kay Kyser and his College of Musical Knowledge, kaiser rolls, Roland Barthes, Bart Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, wind energy, G. Gordon Liddy, Little Richard, Richmond Virginia, gin, Ginger Rogers, Roger Miller, Miller Lite and Thomas Edison -- and all you get from the experience is a lot of iron filings on the magnet of your brain and a vague sensation of activity of some sort, you're not sure what.

It's remarkable that the American people manage to withstand this storm of data and get outdoors and rake up the leaves and cultivate around the rosebushes. Turn on your radio and there's a lot of yelling about Marxist socialism and We Need To Take Back Our Country, and yet the American people plant tulip bulbs and sluice off the driveway and haul the glass bottles to the recycling center. Some sanity persists.

But the old America is fading, and I mourn its passing. Children don't wander free and mess around in vacant lots the way we used to -- they're in daycare now or enrolled in programs, and one worries about a certain loss of verve and nerve among the young who've been under constant supervision for too long.

And the old hometown is no longer a town but has morphed into suburban anonymity, and it hurts me. My grandmother taught school there, my grandfather came in 1880 and served on the town board that brought in telephone service and paved the roads, but their community of mutual assistance is gone, gone, gone. I have old friends in their 80s who've lived in that town for 50 years -- good citizens, church people, passionate volunteers and solid Republicans -- and in a crisis, when their health took a bad turn, nobody noticed. Neighbors don't know each other; ambulances come and go and nobody comes by to ask what's going on. The community they thought they were part of simply doesn't exist anymore. If you fall by the wayside, you may as well be in the wilds of Alaska.

What you do, if your life goes to pieces, is call up a social worker and she will see that you get some sort of assistance. So don't bad-mouth government programs. Unless you have fabulously wealthy children, you're going to need the help.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)

© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

The Criminal NSA Eavesdropping Program

O.K, so the domestic spying program was and is illegal. What can be done about it. Do Bush Cheney and the others who made this decision just walk free. If so, why keep going on about it?

The precedent has been set. If no one pays for this illegality, presidents and vice presidents in the future will not hesitate to do something like it, or worse, again.

By PAUL ELIAS

March 31, 2010 "Salon" -- - While torture and aggressive war may have been the most serious crimes which the Bush administration committed, its warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens was its clearest and most undeniable lawbreaking.  Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker yesterday became the third federal judge -- out of three who have considered the question -- to find that Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program was illegal (the other two are District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor and 6th Circuit Appellate Judge Ronald Gilman who, on appeal from Judge Taylor's decision, in dissent reached the merits of that question [unlike the two judges in the majority who reversed the decision on technical "standing" grounds] and adopted Taylor's conclusion that the NSA program was illegal).  

That means that all 3 federal judges to consider the question have concluded that Bush's NSA program violated the criminal law (FISA).  That law provides that anyone who violates it has committed a felony and shall be subject to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense.  The law really does say that.  Just click on that link and you'll see.  It's been obvious for more than four years that Bush, Cheney, NSA Director (and former CIA Director) Michael Hayden and many other Bush officials broke the law -- committed felonies -- in spying on Americans without warrants.  Yet another federal judge has now found their conduct illegal.  If we were a country that actually lived under The Rule of Law, this would be a huge story, one that would produce the same consequences for the lawbreakers as a bank robbery, embezzlement or major drug dealing.  But since we're not such a country, it isn't and it doesn't.

Although news reports are focusing (appropriately) on the fact that Bush's NSA program was found to be illegal, the bulk of Judge Walker's opinion was actually a scathing repudiation of the Obama DOJ.  In fact, the opinion spent almost no time addressing the merits of the claim that the NSA program was legal.  That's because the Obama DOJ -- exactly like the Bush DOJ in the case before Judge Taylor -- refused to offer legal justifications to the court for this eavesdropping.  Instead, the Obama DOJ took the imperial and hubristic position that the court had no right whatsoever to rule on the legality of the program because (a) plaintiffs could not prove they were subjected to the secret eavesdropping (and thus lacked "standing" to sue) and (b) the NSA program was such a vital "state secret" that courts were barred from adjudicating its legality.

Those were the arguments that Judge Walker scathingly rejected.  All of the court's condemnations of the DOJ's pretense to imperial power were directed at the Obama DOJ's "state secrets" argument (which is exactly the same radical and lawless version, as TPM compellingly documented, used by the Bush DOJ  to such controversy).  From the start, the Obama DOJ has engaged in one extraordinary maneuver after the next to shield this criminal surveillance program from judicial scrutiny.  Indeed, their stonewalling at one point became so extreme that the court actually threatened the Obama DOJ with sanctions.  And what TPM calls the Obama DOJ's "Bush-mimicking state secrets defense" has been used by them in one case after the next to conceal and shield from judicial review a wide range of Bush crimes -- including torture, renditions and surveillance.  As the Electronic Frontiers Foundation put it:  "In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's."

That's why this decision is such a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration:  because it is their Bush-copying tactics, used repeatedly to cover up government crimes, which the court yesterday so emphatically rejected.  And it's thus no surprise that media accounts tie the Obama administration to the cover-up of this program at least as much as the Bush administration.  See, for instance:  Charlie Savage and James Risen in The New York Times ("A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency's program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration's effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush"); Time ("The judge's opinion is pointed and fiercely critical of the Obama Administration's Justice Department lawyers" and "The judge claims that the Obama Administration is attempting to place itself above the law").  The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals also previously condemned the Bush/Obama "state secrets" position as abusive and lawless.

In December, 2005, The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been doing for years exactly that which the law unambiguously said was a felony:  eavesdropping on the electronic communications of Americans (telephone calls and emails) without warrants.  We knew then it was a crime.   Three federal judges have now concluded that it was illegal.  And yet not only do we do nothing about it, but we stand by as the Obama administration calls this criminal program a vital "state secret" and desperately tries to protect it and the lawbreakers from being subject to the rule of law.  This decision may make it more difficult for the Obama administration to hide behind sweeping secrecy claims in the future, but it won't negate the fact that we have decided that our leading political officials are completely free to commit crimes while in power and to do so with total impunity.
* * * * *

One related note:  back when Judge Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush NSA program was unconstitutional, law professors Orin Kerr and Ann Althouse (the former a sometimes-Bush-apologist and the latter a constant one) viciously disparaged her and her ruling by claiming that she failed to give sufficient attention to the Government's arguments as to why the program was legal.  Althouse was even allowed to launch that attack in an Op-Ed in The New York Times.  But as I documented at the time, the argument made by these right-wing law professors to attack Judge Taylor was grounded in total ignorance:  the reason the court there didn't pay much attention to the legal justifications for the NSA program was because the Bush DOJ -- just like the Obama DOJ here -- refused to offer any such justifications, insisting instead that the court had no right even to consider the case.

That's why I find it darkly amusing that, today, the same Orin Kerr is solemnly lecturing The New York Times that Judge Walker here did not consider the merits of the claims about the program's legality because the Obama DOJ argued instead "that Judge Walker couldn't reach the merits of the case because of the state secrets privilege."  Kerr is wrong when he says that this ruling does not constitute a decision that the Bush NSA program was illegal -- it does exactly that, because the plaintiffs offered evidence and arguments to prove it was illegal and the Obama DOJ (like the Bush DOJ before it) failed to offer anything to the contrary -- but he 's right that Judge Walker did not focus on the merits of the defenses to the NSA program because the Obama DOJ (like the Bush DOJ) refused to raise any such defenses.  But exactly the same thing was true for Judge Taylor when she ruled three years ago that the NSA program was illegal, which is why the right-wing attacks on her judicial abilities back then (led by Kerr and Althouse) were so frivolous and misinformed.

Copyright ©2010 Salon Media Group, Inc.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Our Government Is Planning to Stay at War for the Next 80 Years

Anyone Got a Problem with That?

Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War.

By Tom Hayden

April 01, 2010 "LA Times" - March 31, 2010 -- Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an "arc of instability" caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just "small wars in the midst of a big one."

Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared war would entangle 20 future presidential terms stretching far into the future of voters not yet born. The American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches 5,000, with the number of wounded a multiple many times greater. Including the American dead from 9/11, that's 8,000 dead so far in the first decade of the Long War. And if the American armed forces are stretched thin today, try to conceive of seven more decades of combat.

The costs are unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit spending of recent years, yield "virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors," according to a New York Times budget analysis in February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today's younger generation of resources for their future.

The term "Long War" was first applied to America's post-9/11 conflicts in 2004 by Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of U.S. Central Command, and by the retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, Gen. Richard B. Myers, in 2005.

According to David Kilcullen, a top counterinsurgency advisor to Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and a proponent of the Long War doctrine, the concept was polished in "a series of windowless offices deep inside the Pentagon" by a small team that successfully lobbied to incorporate the term into the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, the nation's long-term military blueprint. President George W. Bush declared in his 2006 State of the Union message that "our own generation is in a long war against a determined enemy."

The concept has quietly gained credence. Washington Post reporter-turned-author Thomas E. Ricks used "The Long War" as the title for the epilogue of his 2009 book on Iraq, in which he predicted that the U.S. was only halfway through the combat phase there.

It has crept into legal language. Federal Appeals Court Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a darling of the American right, recently ruled in favor of holding detainees permanently because otherwise, "each successful campaign of a long war would trigger an obligation to release Taliban fighters captured in earlier clashes."

Among defense analysts, Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who teaches at Boston University, is the leading critic of the Long War doctrine, criticizing its origins among a "small, self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists" who view public opinion "as something to manipulate" if they take it into consideration at all.

The Long War has momentum, though the term is absent from the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review unveiled by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February. One commentator has noted the review's apparent preference for finishing "our current wars before thinking about the next."

Still we fight wars that bleed into each other without clear end points. Political divisions in Iraq threaten to derail the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops scheduled for 2012.

As troop levels decline in Iraq, they grow to 100,000 in Afghanistan, where envoy Richard C. Holbrooke famously says we'll know success "when we see it." The Afghan war has driven Al Qaeda into Pakistan, where U.S. intelligence officers covertly collaborate with the Pakastani military. Lately our special forces have stepped up covert operations in Yemen.

It never ends. British security expert Peter Neumann at King's College has said that Europe is a "nerve center" of global jihad because of underground terrorists in havens protected by civil liberties laws. Could that mean NATO will have to occupy Europe?

It's time the Long War strategy was put under a microscope and made the focus of congressional hearings and media scrutiny. The American people deserve a voice in the strategizing that will affect their future and that of their grandchildren. There are at least three important questions to address in public forums:

* What is the role of the Long War idea in United States' policy now? Can the Pentagon or president impose such war-making decisions without debate and congressional ratification?

* Who exactly is the enemy in a Long War? Is Al Qaeda (or "Islamic fundamentalism") considered to be a unitary enemy like the "international communist conspiracy" was supposed to be? Can a Long War be waged with only a blanket authorization against every decentralized group lodged in countries from Europe to South Asia?

* Above all, what will a Long War cost in terms of American tax dollars, American lives and American respect in the world? Is it sustainable? If not, what are the alternatives?

President Obama has implied his own disagreement with the Long War doctrine without openly repudiating the term. He has pledged to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by 2012, differing with those like Ricks who predict continuing combat, resulting in a Korean-style occupation. Obama also pledges to "begin" American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan by summer 2011, in contrast to those who demand we remain until an undefined victory. Obama told West Point cadets that "our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended, because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own."

Those are naive expectations to neoconservatives and to some in the Pentagon for whom the Long War fills a vacuum left by the end of the Cold War. They will try to trap Obama in a Long War by demanding permanent bases in Iraq, slowing American withdrawals from Afghanistan to a trickle and defending secret operations in Pakistan. Where violence flares, he will be blamed for disengaging prematurely. Where situations stabilize, he will be counseled it's because we keep boots on the ground. We will keep spending dollars we don't have on wars without end.

The underlying issues should be debated now, before the future itself has been drafted for war.

Tom Hayden was a leader of the student, civil rights, peace and environmental movements of the 1960s. He served 18 years in the California legislature, where he chaired labor, higher education and natural resources committees. He is the author of ten books, including "Street Wars" (New Press, 2004). He is a professor at Occidental College, Los Angeles, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics last fall.

© 2010 LA Times All rights reserved.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Obama's U.N. Sanctions Push

IRAN

After long resisting calls to join in sanctions efforts aimed at the Iranian nuclear program, "China signaled to its partners on the United Nations Security Council that it is ready to consider a council resolution" in favor of sanctions. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "affirmed late Monday the participation in Iranian sanctions talks of China, seen as the most hesitant member of the so-called 'P5-plus-1' -- the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany that are negotiating with Tehran." On Wednesday, the six major world powers -- the United States, Russia, France, Great Britain, Germany, and China -- agreed "to begin putting together proposed new sanctions on Iran over its suspect nuclear program after China dropped its opposition." U.S. and other Western diplomats are "also pressing hard on two non-veto-wielding Council members, Turkey and Brazil, both of which have publicly questioned the usefulness of sanctions, to at least abstain on any final vote." President Obama predicted on Tuesday that he would be able to persuade the United Nations to "move forcefully" against Iran with new sanctions within weeks, not months. "The fact that Beijing has agreed to discuss these steps is bad news for Tehran," writes Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar. "This is why Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dispatched the top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, to hold talks with the Chinese government." State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the United States wants to focus on financial holdings of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, as part of a resolution that puts an appropriate bite on the Tehran government but spares the Iranian people undue hardship. The Iranian government remains defiant that sanctions will not halt its nuclear program.

'AN INTELLIGENCE COUP':
Earlier this week, ABC News reported that an Iranian nuclear scientist "who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, had defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States." Intelligence officials called the defection of scientist Shahram Amiri "an intelligence coup" in the continuing CIA operation to spy on and undermine Iran's nuclear program. In a recent report (pdf) to Congress, the CIA concluded that "Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so," but also restated its previous conclusion that "we do not know whether Tehran eventually will decide to produce nuclear weapons." While the upcoming National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is expected to revise some of the key conclusions of the 2007 NIE -- which held that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen -- the news that the United States has had custody since last June of a key Iranian nuclear scientist raises questions about how drastic those revisions might be. ABC reports that Amiri "has been extensively debriefedThey say Amiri helped to confirm U.S. intelligence assessments about the Iranian nuclear program." Obama told CBS that "all the evidence indicates" that Tehran is trying to get the "capacity to develop nuclear weapons." since his defection by the CIA, according to the people briefed on the situation.
 
CONSERVATIVES COMPLAINING:  
For eight years, the Bush administration failed to effectively confront Iran's nuclear ambitions, yet many former Bush officials and supporters are now criticizing the Obama administration for the same thing. Former (recess-appointed) U.N. ambassador John Bolton, a long-time advocate of bombing Iran, said Thursday that Obama is "naive" in thinking more sanctions against Iran will stop its nuclear program. "This additional round of sanctions will have no material impact," Bolton said. Likewise declaring the new sanctions to be "failing" even before they've been adopted, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute described the options as: "Either Iran gets a nuclear weaponpreparing to accept an Iranian nuclear weapon. However, another Weekly Standard writer, Reuel Marc Gerecht, has credited Obama's approach with putting pressure on the Iranian regime, writing that "Obama could rightly claim that his outreach policy toward the Islamic Republic helped create the tumult that we've seen" since Iran's June 12 elections. Similarly, journalist David Ignatius, a long-time Iran watcher, wrote that "White House officials argue that their strategy of engagement has been a form of pressure, and the evidence supports them." and we manage the risk, or someone acts to eliminate the threat" through military force. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol declared Obama's engagement policy a failure and accused the administration of
 
FORGING EFFECTIVE PARTNERSHIPS:  

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-senator Obama clearly stated that a secondary benefit of his Iran engagement policy was the creation of greater international unity and focus on the Iranian nuclear problem. "If it [negotiation with Iran] doesn't work," Obama said during the first presidential debate, "then we [will] have strengthened our ability to form alliances to impose tough sanctions" on Iran. That strategy seems to be working. Russia had been a skeptic of sanctions, but has now indicated a willingness to consider them. In late March, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that Iran was allowing an opportunity for mutually beneficial dialogue with the West to "slip away." "The [Iranian] regime has become more isolated since I came into office," Obama said in an interview with CBS News. "Part of the reason that we reached out to them was to say, 'You've got a path. You can take a path that allows you to rejoin the international community, or you can take a path of developing nuclear weapons capacity that further isolates you.'" Center for American Progress analysts Sam Charap and Brian Katulis wrote that Obama's "emphasis on collaboration and shared responsibilities constructed a new foundation for global security co-operation, which will extend beyond reining in Iran's nuclear program. In little over a year, the engagement policy has revived America's influence and leverage and created a diplomatic infrastructure that will make America more secure." As Rudy DeLeon, Winny Chen, and John Gans wrote in a 2008 report (pdf) for the Center for American Progress, "diplomacy, when integrated with other policy tools," provides "a powerful force multiplier for advancing U.S. interests."
 


There is nothing civil about civil wars!

The Obscenity of War

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_obscenity_of_war_20100330/

Posted on Mar 30, 2010

By Amy Goodman

President Barack Obama has just returned from his first trip as commander in chief to Afghanistan. The U.S.-led invasion and occupation of that country are now in their ninth year, amid increasing comparisons to Vietnam.

Daniel Ellsberg, whom Henry Kissinger once called “the most dangerous man in America,” leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg, who was a top Pentagon analyst, photocopied this secret, 7,000-page history of the U.S. role in Vietnam and released it to the press, helping to end the Vietnam War.

“President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war,” Ellsberg told me recently. He cites the “Eikenberry memos,” written by U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, which were leaked, then printed last January by The New York Times.

Ellsberg said: “Eikenberry’s cables read like a summary of the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan. ... Just change the place names from ‘Saigon’ to ‘Kabul’ ... and they read almost exactly the same.”

The Eikenberry memos recommend policies opposite those of Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who advocated for the surge and a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Eikenberry wrote that President Hamid Karzai is “not an adequate strategic partner,” and that “sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable.” Petraeus and McChrystal prevailed. The military will launch a major campaign in June in Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar. Meanwhile, with shocking candor, McChrystal said in a video conference this week, regarding the number of civilians killed by the U.S. military, “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” U.S. troop fatalities, meanwhile, are occurring now at twice the rate of one year ago.

Tavis Smiley has a PBS special this week on one of the most powerful, and overlooked, speeches given by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The address was made on April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before King was assassinated. The civil rights leader titled his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” and controversially called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

The press vilified King. Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” Smiley told me: “Most Americans, I think, know the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Some Americans know the ‘Mountaintop’ speech given the night before he was assassinated in Memphis. But most Americans do not know this ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech.” Smiley added, “If you replace the words Iraq for Vietnam, Afghanistan for Vietnam, Pakistan for Vietnam, this speech is so relevant today.”

Like King, Obama is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, Obama mentioned King six times, yet defended his war in Afghanistan. Princeton University professor Cornel West, interviewed by Smiley, said of Obama’s Nobel speech, “It upset me when I heard my dear brother Barack Obama criticize Martin on the global stage, saying that Martin Luther King Jr.‘s insights were not useful for a commander in chief, because evil exists, as if Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t know about evil.”

In early March, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, offered a resolution to end the war in Afghanistan, saying: “We now have about 1,000 U.S. troops who have perished in the conflict. We have many innocent civilians who have lost their lives. We have a corrupt central government in Afghanistan that is basically stealing U.S. tax dollars.” The resolution was defeated by a vote of 356-65. A Washington Post poll of 1,000 people released this week found that President Obama enjoys a 53 percent approval rating on his handling of the war in Afghanistan.

The public is unlikely to oppose something that gets less and less coverage. While the press is focused on the salacious details of Republican National Committee spending on lavish trips, especially one outing to a Los Angeles strip club, the cost to the U.S. taxpayer for the war in Afghanistan is estimated now to be more than $260 billion. The cost in lives lost, in people maimed, is incalculable. The real obscenity is war. Ellsberg hopes that the Eikenberry memos will be just the first of many leaks, and that a new wave of Pentagon Papers will educate the public about the urgent need to end Obama’s war.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2010 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

More Accurate Emissions Data Needed Worldwide, U.S. Researchers Say

From: Ben Block, Worldwatch Institute, More from this Affiliate
Published March 30, 2010 04:14 PM

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A lack of trust wafted through the Copenhagen air when negotiators gathered at December's United Nations climate summit. While many developing countries offered emission reduction commitments, several delegates from industrialized nations remained unconvinced that such reductions could be proven.


To guarantee that the commitments do take place, the Copenhagen Accord [PDF] concluded that developing countries will be held to domestic measurement, reporting, and verification standards (MRV) and that submissions to the United Nations will be subject to "international consultation and analysis under clearly defined guidelines." But a new analysis finds that the guidelines may still not be enough to ensure that reported emission levels are truly accurate.

Recent technology advancements have allowed each country to estimate fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions more accurately, but independent data, especially for other greenhouse gases, is still unavailable for most countries-whether wealthy or poor, according to a report from the U.S. National Research Council.

In many industrialized countries, self-reported national inventories are, on average, estimated to have uncertainties of less than 5 percent for national CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use. Uncertainties for net CO2 emissions from land use change (such as deforestation) and for emissions of methane, nitrous oxide (N2O), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) often range from 25 to 100 percent.

Rapidly improving satellite technology offers tremendous potential for accurate emission measurements, especially of natural CO2 sources and sinks such as forests. The Japanese Aerospace Agency and United Nations launched the first satellite that could track greenhouse gases last year. While the crash of NASA's $278 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite in February 2009 was a step back, U.S. President Barack Obama's fiscal year 2011 budget request includes $170 million for a replacement craft. Brazil and India plan to launch satellites in the next two years that will monitor their domestic emissions. Meanwhile, private companies such as Google are developing software that may also advance satellite measurements of carbon emissions.

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There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Sadrists: We want a Prime Minister with a Paternal Spirit

OMG. That's all we need. More patriarchy. No one needs that and the last forty years should proven that beyond any doubt. It would be different if we had had any examples of a good father.

Patriarchy is, hopefully, on its way out for the next several thousand years.

31/03/2010
Qassim al Kaabi and Mina al Oraibi

Najaf/Washington, Asharq Al-Awsat - Sheikh Saleh al Obaidi:

the official spokesman for Shia religious leader Muqtada al Sadr confirmed that the Sadrist trend has reservations about the nomination of specific people to fill the post of prime minister and that it supports the idea of putting forward a number of candidates from each list that wants to nominate a representative for the premiership rather than committing to one candidate.

With regards to the Sadrist view of the specifications of the next prime minister, Al Obaidi told Asharq Al-Awsat: “The first thing is that he works for Iraq and not only for his party or list. Secondly, he is characterized by a spirit of paternalism in dealing with those present and is not an instigator or tense.”

Sources close to al Sadr told Asharq Al-Awsat that during talks with delegations from the State of Law coalition and the Iraqi National Alliance, al Sadr insisted that Ayad Allawi, head of the Iraqiya List personally “plays an important part in the next government.”

In reference to the new Iraqi government, US Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill stated that “a number of states want to have an influence on the formation of government; we are worried about countries interfering.”

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Allawi: Iran seeks to prevent me becoming Iraq PM

Get used to it, Mr. Allawi. We have to put up with the same thing with the corporate world, now that the Supremes have decided that speech is money, and the religious crazies are trying to run things or over-throw the duly elected government.

Head of Iraqiya bloc accuses Iran of interference in favour of outgoing Maliki's State of Law Alliance.

LONDON - Former Iraqi premier Iyad Allawi accused neighbouring Iran on Tuesday of seeking to prevent him becoming prime minister again, after his bloc emerged strongest from national elections.

 
Tehran was interfering in the election process in Iraq, where his Iraqiya bloc won 91 seats in the 325-member Council of Representatives, two more than Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law Alliance, he told the BBC.

 

"Iran is interfering quite heavily and this is worrying," Allawi told the British broadcaster, accusing the Islamic republic of inviting all the major parties to Tehran apart from his bloc.

"They have invited everybody -- but they haven't invited us -- to Tehran," he said.

 
Asked directly whether Iran wanted to stop him becoming prime minister, Allawi responded: "I think so, they made it very clear... that they have a red line.

 
"We are concerned about respecting the will of the Iraqi people."

 
Neither Iraqiya nor State of Law clinched an overall parliamentary majority and a protracted period of coalition building, which could take months, is now expected.

 
Senior figures from State of Law and other major Iraqi parties have visited Tehran since the March 7 parliamentary election -- but no official from Iraqiya is known to have travelled to the Iranian capital.

 
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who heads one of the autonomous Kurdish region's two long-dominant blocs, and Shiite Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi, a member of the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), both visited Tehran over the weekend to mark Nowrouz, the Iranian and Kurdish New Year.

 
The INA is a coalition led by Shiite religious groups, including the movement loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

 
Since Talabani and Abdel Mahdi's visit, senior officials from Maliki's State of Law, the Sadrist movement, and the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, a Shiite religious group that is also part of the INA, have visited the Iranian capital.

 
Allawi's comments came as the US ambassador to Iraq voiced confidence that al-Maliki would abide by the law despite his mounting criticism of what he alleges is election fraud.

 
Ambassador Christopher Hill downplayed suggestions the political row following the election could descend into violence.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

U.S. Commanders Spend 1 billion in cash/year

Lawmakers in Congress are beginning to grow concerned over the amount of cash being distributed by American military commanders in war zones. Provided so the military can make friends with local citizens and help struggling economies, the amount of appropriated for the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) is now more than $1 billion a year.

 

But how that money is spent is unclear, as generals have not been forced so far to account for all their CERP expenditures. That could change if Congress forces the Department of Defense to create better oversight of who is getting how much in Afghanistan and Iraq. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is resisting such a requirement.

 

“Even with improved execution and oversight, it is unrealistic to expect a tool like CERP – whose very effectiveness is tied to its flexibility and the discretion granted to local commanders in a war zone–to attain a zero-defect standard,” Gates told a congressional committee.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Iran, Israel and an Obama Miscalculation in the Works?

We shall see. I hope Obama is right.

By Alan Hart

March 31, 2010 "Information Clearing House" - -President Obama’s apparent desire to “move forcefully” against Iran with new sanctions “within weeks, not months”, makes me wonder if he is calculating that he will be in a better position to put some real pressure on Israel, and possibly bring about regime change there, if he can successfully bully Iran into playing the game his way. If that is what Obama is thinking, he could be setting himself up (or is being set up?) for another humiliation.

On one level of argument there is a case for saying that if he could persuade Tehran to meet his requirements on the development of its nuclear program, he could then say to Israel something very like, “I’ve neutralized the Iranian threat, now you must give an absolute priority to making peace with the Palestinians.”

Leaving aside for the moment the matter of Iran’s response to more aggressive bullying, the problem with that way of thinking is what it ignores. Israel’s leaders and AIPAC are playing up the Iranian threat not because they truly believe that a nuclear armed Iran would pose a threat to the Zionist state’s existence, but because it, the asserted threat, is an effective way of limiting the White House’s freedom to pressure Israel. The point?

Even if Obama did succeed in getting what he wants from Iran, that would not improve his chances of bringing Israel to heel, with or without regime change. So from that perspective, Obama would end up being humiliated again. But there is a much worse, even catastrophic scenario.

What if moving quickly and forcefully with new sanctions on Iran did not bring about a policy change in Tehran?

Obama would then have painted himself into a corner where his options would be either to say, in effect, “We’ve got to live with the fact that Iran might possess nuclear weapons,” or to give Israel the greenlight to attack Iran and risk the U.S. being drawn into a war which might not end until the whole Middle East was in flames and the global economy had been completely wrecked.

That would be quite some miscalculation.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Hope is For little Kids and Tooth Fairies

Dear Joe, 

I'm with you, but I would not say that hope is not just for kids and fairies. Without hope, despair is our constant companion; a companion that keeps us dysfunctional and blind to opportunities around us for improvement, not only for ourselves but for all of mankind

 
By Joe Bageant

March 31, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --

Joe,

Reading you is like drinking those bottles full of clear liquids the night before a colonoscopy. The next day I survive the test and am told that I do not have colon cancer -- yet. Still, I am getting the test in spite of the fact that I know that my pack a day cigarette habit coupled with 12 fancy beers a day is probably gonna kill me first. I've been working for a very large corporation for the last 20 years as a print advertising designer. I am on the Endangered Species list at 58. I have been playing the consumer game for the past 45 years. I've known that the whole thing was a lie since I was 13 -- before that I lived in a world that was so monochromatic that when I heard the Beatles I thought that heaven had come to earth.

I wanted to tell you my whole story, but have decided to spare you that. I have one simple question: seeing what you see, knowing what you know, what are your recommendations for how to proceed? Because I am seeing that just drinking hard enough to not think about it is no way to live. Or is it? When the best hopes being offered are simply the offerings of another corporate lackey, how does one live?

Do trips to Mexico help?

I realize as I write this that you are not pretending to be a self-help guru for baby boomers with a guilt complex. Still, I cannot help but hope that you have some thoughts for a one-time proud hippie (I marched against the war in Vietnam in Detroit in 1968 and again against the war in Iraq in 2003) who longs to extricate himself from the accumulated bullshit of years of consumerism.

I write letters to congressmen and senators and get form letter responses -- personalized, no less. So I would like you to write me back, tell me you read what I wrote, that you got this e-mail. That's all. I will be satisfied.

Yours in hopelessness,

Brad

------

Brad,

Yeah, we are on the endangered species list all right. But the rest of America, and maybe even mankind, is not far behind. Not that it's any consolation, of course. I have to smile at your mention of the Beatles being like heaven coming to earth. Me too!

In reply to your query, all I can do is tell you my experience. I don't know shit really. Certainly not the answers to other people's questions, especially those of such a serious nature. However, I do know my own experience. Sort of. So all I can do is share that.

You ask if "trips to Mexico help?" Because Mexico is my home for the time being, (I spend most of my time here now, and have obtained legal residency status) and only go back to the US when necessary, I'm not sure if "trip" is the right word. I rather feel that the world is my home now. Consequently, I do not know if "help" is the right word either. I no longer have any geographical goals, per se, other than I seem to be a better person in some locales than in others. I hope I am not running, because at this age running, physically or metaphorically, takes too much effort. I'd rather walk, with periodic rest stops -- such as this one in Mexico.

It took me over fifty years to figure out there is no running away, or finding some perfect life. We just exchange one set of problems for another. I ran away to the US Navy to escape a small redneck town. I ran away to the West Coast to become a hippie. I ran to homestead in Idaho on an Indian reservation, I later ran back into the straight world, mostly out of fear for financial security. And when it became personally undeniable that America had become a lonely totalistic empire, whose heart is a bank vault, and that I would not survive its enforced loneliness, masked by gunpoint cheer and state authorized messages of "hope," and loudspeakers above the workhouse extolling the "work ethic," well, it was either be somewhere else or die inside. Get a different set of problems. Some nights even sickness or hunger looked acceptable, compared to the screaming, yet silent anxiety I was experiencing. I swear it was fucking unbearable. By 2005, I was in Central America for I did not know how long.

Personally, I found that the problems I encountered every day in places like Belize (and now Mexico) somehow suited my own innate sensibilities better. I had no expectations really. Which is good because both paces would have been extremely disappointing if I had. Mainly I just wanted to give up any "advantage" I supposedly had as a citizen of the "greatest nation on earth," which was, as I said, quite literally, killing me, much as it seems to be killing you.

Beyond that, I wanted to spend the remaining 10 or 15 percent of my life doing stuff with human beings, face-to-face, asshole to belly button -- babies being born, people dying, getting drunk, worshiping their gods, experiencing joy. And I wanted to do so without any mediation by soul killing American corporate culture. I did not want "security" as Americans and Europeans perceive it, and still don't. The only way to do that is to intentionally stay pretty broke. Money is a rigged game -- you cannot win by trying to buy security. Oh, you can have the illusion of it, but the price is your soul. The entire world architecture of money, beyond basic sustenance, is a horribly corrupted -- especially since the advent of the "virtual world economy," a paper and digital racket that sucks away the people's hard earned wealth before they ever see it.

Well, I say, fuck their offerings. And screw childish "hope." Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies. The world we awaken to each morning is the only real thing there is. And if we are spiritually, morally and philosophically intact, and humble enough to feel it and love it each day, we don't need to hope some unseen force or bunch of politicos, or an "economy" or so-called leaders are gonna make it better for us. The orchids outside my doorway are blooming and my wife still loves me after all these years. A real gypsy taught me a song yesterday and Easter is in the air in Mexico. I guess that as a burned out old hippie and a writer, I cannot imagine anything else to hope for.

I truly do understand what you are saying about consumerism. I lived it too. I still have a house full of stuff in Virginia that is the biggest bane on my life. Tons of stuff -- old paintings, family documents, guitars, stuff my kids made while growing up, art and artifacts gathered from around the world in the course of a life, file cabinets full of articles I wrote for magazines and newspapers over the past 40 years. My wife and I are paralyzed over what to do with the stuff. She retires in a year or so and so still lives up there in the middle of it all. When I am there, we sip wine and savor the memories connected with acquiring those things together, the 18th Century drawings we bought together at Covent Garden in London, the love we felt in Venice. And when I am in Mexico, I understand that the freedom of my austere life here is of greater value than any of those things. Which does not keep me from missing them from time to time. But in my heart I know that, for the most part, I have beaten American consumerism (though I'll always be a sucker for good imported booze). The other thing I know for sure is that the only way for a man to "extricate himself from the accumulated bullshit" is to extricate himself. Walk away. There is no plan one can make to do so while living in the belly of the beast. The beast of American capitalism will not let you, but will encourage the belief that you can. As my webmaster Ken, who left America over a decade ago say, "The only way to do it is to just get up and do it."

Also, I believe it can still be done while remaining in America, once one rises above the "learned helplessness" that comes with being a captive of the empire. But it still entails giving up most of what you know, and more importantly, what the society around you believes is reality. It means becoming a renunciate. Giving up everything in a society that believes the very things that are destroying it are necessities. No car, no processed foods, no cell phone, few clothes, little or no technology, no media entertainments, refusal to own investments, no more than five or six hundred square feet of living space, dedicated hours each day for reflection on the little things one does to maintain one's self, such as cooking or bathing, or gardening -- but especially renunciation of technology. Technology not only carries the disease, but is its most virulent aberrator of human consciousness. In fact, even at its best, it colonizes and mutates human consciousness, just as this laptop stands between you and I, distorting our communication as much as it facilitates it. Is an exchange of digital packets between two human beings, each isolated at the end of a cybernetic node, really human communication? Of course not. (Yes, I know how much shit I'm going to get for that statement.)

Anyway, I try to limit myself to owning only one piece of high technology -- this laptop. I don't own a camera phone, or a cell phone (much to the ire of publishers, friends and some family members). To my shame, I do have a television in my little casita. I missed my wife so much at first, that I bought it just so I'd have distraction in the lonely evenings, which of course, did not work. It was a stupid American thing, an ignorant knee-jerk consumer reflex, as if the voice of Larry King were going to substitute for the words "I love you" when night falls. I'm learning all the time to beware of what is available around us.

Regarding writing congressmen, I never bother. It's just part maintaining the appearance of democracy. Everybody writes their congressmen on both sides of an intractable, polarized and deadlocked system dedicated to preserving iron fisted capitalism, no matter what happens. No matter how the vote on a piece of legislation goes down. I have absolutely no faith in the American political system. Or ultimately, in any political system for that matter. Ain't no saviors of the people up there on Capitol Hill. Just powerful men and women who don't have a clue but have plenty of ambition and ego and avenues to feed both -- with a few exceptions like Dennis Kucinich.

I am convinced we all have to find our own way, and find it alone, most likely at great cost -- that great cost being the loss of all that we thought we knew about the world. I am coming to understand that as Americans, we were born into a powerfully induced mass illusion. An infantile consciousness of "I-want-I want," which drives the machinery of war, waste and profits, and which colonizes our minds and souls from birth like a progressive disease. I say "coming to understand," because, as an American I can never truly understand. My consciousness and neurosystem are far too mutated to ever understand. But I find great relief in the effort.

And also pain. Some nights I drink, and cry inside for both the world as I have known it -- youth tasted so good -- and for the kingdom of mankind that might have been, but really never could have been. Because the kingdom is truly within each of us, never in the clamorous throng.

But in the morning the roosters crow, and wood smoke stirs in the air, and this village wakes up, and does all those ancient things decent people do in so much of the rest of the world. Old women sweep the street in front of their doorways, men uncomplainingly go in search of a day's labor, and young mothers nurse babies in the courtyards, full knowing that what they see around them is all there will ever be for them, and that the Virgin of Guadeloupe blesses each morning. Just as their mothers and grandmothers knew it. Already they are tired for the world. But not joyless.

And neither am I.

Lately, I've had a spate of emails saying how bleak and hopeless some of my writing has become, in the estimation of many readers. This comes not so much as criticism, but as observation. I am no longer taken aback by it. To me, it's simply a kind of reporting on the world as best I can.

Others ask me the best way to escape America to Belize or Mexico. How to plan a breakout from the empire to these places as I have described them. Once in a while I reply, even though I know better. Each person's conditioning and perceptions are different. And surely their experience would be different, were they to do what I have done. That's a given. In the end, all I can tell you is that you will have to act according to your own inner lights then be willing to live with the results. And even then, I'm not sure that's true. But it seems true at this day and hour, in this little stone courtyard on a hillside under a spring sky.

Podemos ver el mundo con ojos de fría y un corazón caliente.

In art and labor,

Joe

About Joe: - Born 1946 in Winchester VA, USA. US Navy Vietnam era veteran. After stint in Navy became anti-war hippie, ran off to the West Coast ... lived in communes, hippie school buses... started writing about holy men, counter-cultural figures, rock stars and the American scene in 1971 ... lived in Boulder Colorado until mid 1980s ... 14 years in all ... became a Marxist and a half-assed Buddhist ... Traveled to Central America to write about third World issues..
 

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Is America Becoming a Third World Country?

Judging by my Comcast service, I would say yes. Egypt isn't this bad.

When It Comes to Innovation,
  By Arianna Huffington

March 31, 2010 "Huffington Post" --  Is America turning into a third world country? That was the provocative topic of a panel I took part in last week at a conference sponsored by The Economist entitled "Innovation: Fresh Thinking For The Ideas Economy."

Once upon a time, the United States was the world's dominant innovator -- partly because we didn't have much competition. As a result of the destruction wreaked by WWII, the massive migration of brainpower to the U.S. caused by the war, and huge amounts of government spending, America had the innovation playing field largely to itself. None of these factors exist as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.

America now has plenty of countries it's competing with -- many of which are much more serious about innovation than we are. Just look at the numbers:

A report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation looked at the progress made over the last decade in the area of innovation. Out of the 40 countries and regions it examined, the U.S. ranked dead last.

A study on innovation by the Boston Consulting Group concluded that America is "disadvantaged in several key areas, including work force quality and economic, immigration, and infrastructure policies."

In 2009, patents issued to American applicants dropped by 2.3 percent. Those granted to foreign-based applicants increased by over 6 percent.

Why are we falling behind like this? For one thing, we've lost our educational edge. America once led the world in high school graduation rates. We are now ranked 18th out of 24 industrialized countries.

And the percentage of 15-year-olds performing at the highest levels of math is among the lowest. South Korea, Belgium and the Czech Republic, among others, have at least five times the number the U.S. does.

Plus, we are no longer investing in innovation. Until 1979, around 50 percent of all research and development funds were provided by the federal government. That number has fallen to 27 percent. And, during the 1990s, the bottom fell out of U.S. funding for applied science, dropping by 40 percent.

The economic crisis is also taking a toll on innovation. Venture capital investment in the U.S. for the first three quarters of 2009 was $12 billion. Over the first three quarters of 2008, it was $22 billion.

These numbers may not place us in the third world ... yet. But the trend is not a good one.

Adding to the problem is the sense that America's best days may be behind us. Many economists and historians are warning that our current economic downturn has created a new normal. That the country will never be the same. Things are, of course, going to be different. But that doesn't have to mean that they are going to be worse. However, if we don't get serious about innovation, they will be. When it comes to our approach to innovation, we desperately need some innovation.

For starters, we need to kick our high-speed Internet plans into high gear. A robust, broadband-charged, countrywide information superhighway is going to be key to staying ahead of the innovation curve.

As FCC Chair Julius Genachowski explains, broadband isn't just important for faster email and video games -- it's the central nervous system for democracies and economies of the future:

Broadband is indispensable infrastructure for the 21st century. It is already becoming the foundation for our economy and democracy in the 21st century... [and] will be our central platform for innovation in the 21st century.

How indispensable is it? In a study of 120 countries, researchers found that every 10 percent increase in broadband adoption increased a country's GDP by 1.3 percent.

Unfortunately, when it comes to broadband, America is also falling behind.

In 2001, the United States ranked 4th among industrialized countries in broadband access. By last year, we had dropped to 15th. As for average broadband download speed, we rank 19th.

Nearly 93 million Americans still don't have broadband in their homes. And while 82 percent of those who attend college in the U.S. have access to broadband, only 46 percent of high school graduates do.

To help close the widening gap between us and the rest of the digitally connected world, the Obama administration has proposed a National Broadband Plan, with the goal of increasing broadband access from around 65 percent currently to 90 percent by 2020.

The proposed plan would make high speed broadband available to 100 million Americans by 2020, and ensure that every high school graduate is digitally literate.

This sounds great. But 2020? Given that we're already behind, how about initiating a broadband version of the Manhattan Project? If it's truly a priority, and, as seems obvious, important to national security and the relative position of the United States in the world, why put it off for a decade?

Another focus of innovation is the green economy. One proposal that would jumpstart green innovation is the creation of a Green Bank, which, according to John Podesta and Karen Kornbluh, would "open credit markets and motivate businesses to invest again," and "enable clean-energy technologies -- in such areas as wind, solar, geothermal, advanced biomass, and energy efficiency -- to be deployed on a large scale and become commercially viable at current electricity costs."

Such a bank would also help loosen the available credit for small businesses, and establish the reliable source of funding entrepreneurs need to know will be there if they devote themselves to green technologies and start ups.

Fortunately, such a proposal is already making its way through Congress. Reed Hundt, the former FCC chair under President Clinton, is now the head of a group called the Coalition for Green Capital, whose goal is "to establish a government-owned, wholesale, non-profit bank that would fill the void that exists in clean-energy legislation in America today." Hundt is currently joining Congressman Ed Markey in trying to make the Green Bank proposal part of the next jobs bill. Which makes sense, since, according to Hundt's group, a Green Bank would create about four million jobs by 2012.

Another area ripe for innovation is our immigration policy -- particularly when it comes to granting visas to foreign-born entrepreneurs.

Great ideas come from all over the world, and if we don't welcome the people with those great ideas and make it easy for them to come here, they will go elsewhere. Indeed, they already are going elsewhere. Right now the U.S. has an immigration limit for skilled workers of 65,000, and an additional 20,000 slots for those with advanced degrees from U.S. universities. This kind of rigid cap doesn't make sense in today's world. The "visa process has been plagued with backlogs resulting from this quota," says Jonathan Ortmans, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. "As a result, high-skilled immigrants are looking for opportunities elsewhere in an increasingly competitive global labor market, taking their innovative ideas with them."

Enter the people behind startupvisa.com, a group with an innovative proposal for increasing America's share in the global idea marketplace. They want to make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to come to America and start job-creating business.

Our current law allows foreign investors to get a visa if they start a business in the United States with $1 million in capital that creates at least 10 jobs here. The venture capitalists behind Start Up Visa want to shift the emphasis from foreign investors to foreign entrepreneurs who can get funding from American investors. The idea is to reward good ideas. And by requiring those with good ideas to first get foreign funding, you make it more likely they will just decide to create their companies someplace else too.

This proposal is also in the legislative pipeline. The Start Up Visa Act is co-sponsored by Sens. John Kerry and Richard Lugar. Their bill would create a two-year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who are able to raise a minimum of $250,000, with $100,000 coming from a qualified U.S. angel or venture investor. After two years, if the immigrant entrepreneur is able to create five or more jobs (not including their children or spouse), attract an additional $1 million in investment, or produce $1 million in revenues, he or she would become a legal resident.

Kerry and Lugar made their case in a recent op-ed:

At a time when many are wondering whether Democrats and Republicans can come together on anything, there is at least one area where we're in strong agreement: We believe that America is the best country in the world to do business. And now is the time to reach out to immigrant entrepreneurs -- men and women who have come from overseas to study in our universities, and countless others coming up with great ideas abroad -- to help drive innovation and job creation here at home.

The senators, who hope to pass the measure this month, are positioning it as a jobs initiative, not an immigration reform initiative, and hope to include it as part of a larger bill aimed at helping small businesses add jobs. "This bill is a small down payment on a cure to global competitiveness," Kerry told BusinessWeek.

These, of course, are just three ways of promoting innovation. But they are prime examples of what we need if we are to shake off our complacency and avoid the slow slide to third world status.

America is rich with resources -- both natural and human -- but we can no longer afford to utilize them so inefficiently. We can't afford to be the only nation in the industrialized world in which half the country doesn't have access to broadband. We can't afford to allow other nations to take the lead in creating a green economy. And we can't afford to keep making it so hard for people with job-creating ideas to start their businesses here.

 

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