Police in cities across the country did the Occupy movement a great favor when they raided the mothership Monday night and evicted Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park. In a coordinated series of actions that Oakland Mayor Jean Quan admitted included an 18-city law enforcement conference call, police raided encampments from coast to coast, using batons, pepper spray, riot gear and whatever it took, short of lethal force, to retake the parks, in the guise of public welfare and safety.

Some, like Bill O’Reilly, calling it a “legitimate political movement” for the first time only in pronouncing its eptitaph, boasted hopefully that “the Occupy movement is dead…and it’s a good thing.”

Not so fast, Bill.  New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg screwed up big time, and so did his law-and-order buddies with their Gestapo tactics. The camps were actually becoming a major drag on the movement, though they were its necessary and effective beginnings. By mid-November they had drawn influxes of transients, druggies, drifters and grifters, far more interested in free food and lodging as winter began to bear down than in sweeping political change. Increasingly, they had filled the encampments with hard-core homeless and a variety of mentally ill social outcasts, whose tactics of Occupation were based largely on a misplaced sense of entitlement. They were draining energy from the political focus of the movement, sullying the image of the original Occupiers and deflecting focus from economic injustice in this country to stories of petty theft, drug use and assault, and spreading filth and squalor.

If left alone, many of the larger camps especially, in more controversial locations than Occupy Santa Fe, and with far less sympathetic mayors and police forces, would have descended into tent-filled slums in a matter of days or weeks, damaging the movement further and perhaps destroying it.

Instead, the widely broadcast brutality of cops with truncheons and klieg lights, dragging sleeping and nonviolent campers from their tents I the middle of the night, accomplished just the opposite of their objective. This is why the mood in Zuccotti Park the following day, after it reopened once a judge ruled that First Amendment rights did not include sleeping bags and tents, was one of liberation and near-euphoria.

As Gandhi famously noted: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Stage 3 had begun in cities across the United States. The cops and mayors and 1-percenters thought the Occupiers would give up and go home, but they miscalculated, as the forces of oppression always do, after they panic when they realize they have overreached, big time.

There is too much wrong in this country for those who have become aware of it to give up and go home. The Occupy movement changed the dialogue from the trumped-up,  red-herring deficit issue to the real subject of injustice and unfairness in America. The 99 percent are the 99 percent for a reason. The emperors have no clothes, and now everybody knows it.  There is no going home, as the 30,000 or so rallying in New York’s Foley Square tonight and marching across the Brooklyn Bridge are exclaiming, as the thousands more who flooded Wall Street earlier are proclaiming, as the hundreds and thousands in marches and protests in dozens of cities, which will spread to hundreds of cities by this weekend, are reminding those who would continue to oppress and repress them.

We don’t know where exactly it’s all heading, but it is looking more real by the hour. Marches, rallies, teach-ins, move-your-money actions, and why not a nationwide strike, boycotts, flash mobs? If the cops stay violent, and the mayors keep making condescending speeches about the public health and welfare, they become the movement’s best recruiting tool. Bring it on, Bloomberg and your media minions, for you know not what you have unleashed!

In an ironic twist few would have anticipated two months ago, the Occupy movement risks being hijacked—not by the cops, the media or the money of Wall Street, but by the homeless. As wintry weather bears down on Santa Fe and a lot of northern cities and towns, the political activists in tents and sleeping bags are being replaced by transients, drifters, vagabonds, conmen and grifters, druggies and misfits of all kinds, looking for a handout, a tent, a hot meal and a place to hang that isn’t a church- or government-run shelter.

Those who are serious members of the OWS movement and have slept at the Railyard encampment here report an increasing number of occupants who have no interest in the movement except what they can gain from it personally. Instead of social or political commitment they have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. Naturally the mainstream media are picking up on the growing divisiveness, and it won’t play well on Main Street. People who don’t understand the movement or its goals are happy to exploit any perceived weakness or inconsistency. Violence, such that which broke out in Oakland a few nights ago, is the worst setback, especially when it is precipitated by the Occupiers, or appears to be. Camps full of disruptive misfits and social outcasts are nearly as bad.

On the one hand, the greed of the 1 percent and a gridlocked, dysfunctional government are largely responsible for the legions of homeless this society produces, and the movement cannot ignore them. On the other hand, parasitic and unstable transients, not the foreclosed and the economically displaced, are the ones filling the camps, and Occupy movements are facing a major strategic decision in one city after another.

To launch the movement, physical occupation of a park adjacent to Wall Street was a great political statement and a focal point for drawing participants and media coverage. Though most of the sites occupied in other places weren’t as meaningful, the symbolism of staking out a piece of public property as an act of civil disobedience was still powerful and appropriate. Now some are starting to question whether maintaining the camps is becoming a form of fetishism—an obsessive attachment to something that is not really the heart of the movement.

The time has come for Occupy groups to contemplate abandoning their encampments rather than seeing them be held hostage by drifters and grifters. Occupation was always a symbolic act, and more can be accomplished by the process most of the groups have now successfully established, of holding general assemblies and working/action group meetings in a variety of public spaces. Exercises in direct democracy, marches, rallies, picketing, teach-ins, and maybe even flash mobs, are effective tools each group can use, now that adherents have come together and the media are providing coverage. There are many targets on which the 99 percent can focus, and the Occupy sites are no longer essential for that purpose.

While the encampments have had a certain historical resonance as well, mirroring the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression, they could not practically speaking be expected to exist in the long term, so why not move beyond them now that they are becoming a logistic and a strategic liability?

This doesn’t mean the many outcasts they are drawing should be forgotten by the society that created them, but that is not a new problem or one the Occupy movement can allow to drag it down. America needs a message of unity from OWS and its supporters, not mixed signals, and not the negativity that is waiting to happen the first time a major casualty is reported from some Occupy camp. It won’t take long, it will happen any day now, and it will further undermine the confidence of the public and the image of the movement.

Onward, Occupiers—it’s time to break camp.

—Steve Klinger

When the protesters are streaked with gray, they say they’re too old to be taken seriously. When they wave signs for peace, they’re called naïve or treasonous. And now that the left, for the first time since the Vietnam generation, has significant numbers of young people “occupying” Wall Street and its proxies in cities across the country, they call them rag-tag and un-serious.

Older liberals are even more cynical, intoning that nothing, absolutely nothing,  will happen unless there are full-out riots, and then they’ll just get their heads cracked open. Mitt Romney calls the situation dangerous, invoking “class warfare.”

But after three weeks and counting, even the stodgy news anchors with their striped ties are grudgingly beginning to take notice of this phenomenon, which has spread to such unlikely places as Wichita, Kansas. Obama himself observed that the protesters have a valid argument or two, given the unrelenting greed of those who have literally capitalized on the nation’s economic misfortunes. It remains to be seen if the Great Conciliator will use this last chance to reconnect with his populist roots and dust off his campaign rhetoric of hope and change, or if he’ll retreat in some pivotal moment-to-come and cast his lot irrevocably with the fat-cat bankers.

In the downtrodden and disillusioned circles of progressives who have seen their modest gains of many decades battered by the virulent onslaught of the plutocrat-backed Tea Party, by the sweeping reactionary tide abetted by Koch Industries and ALEC, a few voices are beginning to whisper: Could it be, might it be, is there any way, by any stretch it could be, can we dare say we are on the cusp of the counterpoint to Arab Spring: American Fall, both seasonal and empirical?

To which I’d say it looks from here like it could have a fighting chance, despite the lack of a cohesive list of demands, despite the absence of top-down organizational origins—or maybe because of these lacks, for the very reason that the spontaneous inception of this movement had to arise in its own good time, on the very social media that were criticized for addicting and distracting this country’s youth from any useful purpose whatsoever.

The need was stronger, the greed perhaps more blatant in Egypt and Libya and Syria, but the hard times are percolating through the towns and villages of this teetering nation now, and maybe, just maybe, the 99 percent can be awakened to demand the change that only numbers, accompanied by great resolve and youthful enthusiasm, can produce.

Now even MoveOn.org and organized labor are climbing on the bandwagon, and soon a few more prominent mainstream Democrats will forget their invertebrate nature and lavish timid praise on the Occupiers—until some untoward act or comment sends them slithering back into gelatinous retreat.  But true leadership may yet emerge from the ranks of the acolytes themselves—or the weathered activists who have been scouring a somnolent landscape in search of them.

What they will do if and when their ranks swell and the entire nation takes notice I can’t answer, since the solution seems so far-removed from the government that let the problem fester and itself became the problem. Whether the 99 percent will rise up successfully—or at all—I can’t predict, nor whether such an uprising would restore our democracy or rather usher in a disastrous authoritarian retaliation that would doom it. But from here, it seems damn well worth the effort, and I’m going with that demographic that has its own future at stake, and I’m hoping we’ve underestimated them, because they, if anyone must lead the charge.

Rise up, our emerging band.
Rise up and make your stand.

It all boils down to a simple question: Why can’t Obama and the Democrats take the gloves off and expose the Republicans for the sociopathic subversives they really are?

Yes, Dr. Kidglove, as blogger Tom Wark likes to call him, gave a forceful speech and presented a jobs program larger than many expected. But as Robert Reich quickly calculated (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/american-jobs-act-obama-_b_955250.html) it would not make a big difference in reducing unemployment or otherwise stimulating the economy or avoiding a likely double-dip recession. At $200-300 billion of new spending it’s just not big enough, and many of the tax cuts are extensions of what’s already in place.

I said “would” because it will not become law. The Republicans will block it, using Mitch McConnell’s cynical talking point, no doubt coined long before Obama opened his mouth:
“This isn’t a job plan. It’s a reelection plan.”

Except the shoe is really on the other foot. To the Republicans, everything is about the election and nothing is about human suffering and national priorities. Obama has hesitated, procrastinated, accommodated and capitulated for the better part of three years, naively hoping for bipartisanship. His self-deluded attempts at leadership have repeatedly met with solid and unrelenting GOP resistance – no, flat-out obstructionism. Unlike some leftists who believe he is bought and paid for, I think he has simply shown himself to be overmatched  and incapable of necessary confrontation. So once again, abandoning principle for the sake of perceived expediency, he has presented a program he thinks/hopes/prays will get enough Republican support to be enacted as a half-measure.

But it won’t be good enough to matter if it does, and anyway, it will not, precisely because Obama again underestimates the cold-blooded ruthlessness of his opponents, who do not put country ahead of politics, and certainly not ordinary working people (or those who wish they were working people). This is what he and every Democrat and every sentient media commentator should be saying, over and over, until voters get the message: How can you trust the Republicans to help ordinary folks when they are constantly demonstrating they’re willing to ruin the country for the sake of reclaiming power?

As many have pointed out, the Republicans would say day was night if they thought it would give them an electoral victory in 2012. And they would, and do, watch millions suffer while pretending to act in their interest. Using their own past proposals to get their support did not work with health care or the debt ceiling,  and it will not work with jobs.  Maybe someone on Obama’s re-election team is planning to exploit GOP opposition to this plan once the campaign season starts in earnest. But in that case, as Reich asks, why not push the program that’s really needed so you can make a persuasive argument about how the right is selling the country down the river?

Take the gloves off and swing back. What is it about ‘No’ that you don’t understand?

I remember a beautiful end-of-summer in Scotland ten years ago. In lovely sunlight the soft breezes carried the lilt of lassies comin’ through the rye and lovers takin’ th’ high road to Loch Lomond.

Back home unemployment was a rising concern; it had reached 4.9 per cent in August, the highest rate in four years. Private employers had just cut 130,000 jobs, ten times the predicted amount, and shipped nearly 50,000 jobs overseas.

Independent economists said the bad news meant the long-awaited economic recovery still was not in sight. Not to worry, “we’re about where we should be,” said the chief economist at Merrill Lynch, one of the Wall Street firms that was happily selling AAA-rated investment packages that seven years later would be called “sub-prime” and “toxic.”

On a hillside east of a small town in the Scottish highlands, a natural waste-disposal field was in its fifth experimental year. Although toxic slush was deep underfoot somewhere, the air was scented only by a profusion of wildflowers. There’s more than one way to deal with toxic.

The remains of an ancient Roman fortification crested the hill. Later in the afternoon we would stand in its shade and watch Scotsmen sling a haggis in a traditional festival game. A few days later, we took a leisurely drive toward John O’Groat., stopping often to admire rocky shorelines and the occasional sandy beach.

When we stopped for fuel, the attendant for the single pump recognized us as Yanks. “Did y’ hear about the Twin Towers?” he asked. BBC radio told us the latest about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The U. S. national debt was just a shade over $5 trillion.

When he finally emerged from hiding, the President of the United States led a campaign of fear, half-truths, outright falsehood and “cooked” intelligence to launch a war against a country that had nothing to do with the September attacks and whose sleazy dictator had nothing to do with those who organized and financed it.

When he left office, that president and his unfunded wars had doubled the national debt.

Unemployment was over 10 per cent.

The toxic assets Wall Street had sold as prime investments went “Poof!” and the richest banks in the world were on their knees, begging.

A new President printed new money and showered it on the bankers who had brought the world to the brink of depression.

The national debt rose to $12 trillion.

The wars went on.

The unemployment rate remained twice what it had been in 2001. That’s not counting millions more jobless who have been unemployed for so long they no longer count as “statistics.”

So far only one man running for President has offered a plan intended to provide jobs for some of the unemployed. It calls essentially for tax credits to private employers to encourage them to hire more people. (These are the same private employers who cut 130,000 jobs in August of 2010 and shipped 50,000 of them overseas, causing independent economists to warn that we’d better do something soon about unemployment.)

Last month, the U. S. economy did not add one new job. Zero. Zilch. As soon as John Boehner says it’s OK, the President will talk to the nation about jobs.

What he says isn’t likely to do much for the millions without work. Talk doesn’t buy groceries.

Last month, for the first time in ten years, not one American was killed in Iraq in George Bush’s war. However, it was the worst month ever for American deaths in Afghanistan, Barack Obama’s war. Nobody reports the losses here and there in the dozen or so clandestine wars we’re fighting.

No politician running for President is talking about ending the wars that put us deeply in debt as a nation. Yet all the politicians say the debt is a crisis.

It is such a big, big crisis that we can’t afford to create public sector jobs fixing a national infrastructure that has been neglected for so long that it’s a risk to life and limb for our common citizens.

But it’s not so big a crisis that we need to end the huge tax cuts we gave to our very richest citizens.

This isn’t a country. It’s a bloody zoo, and the animals are in charge.

Read more by Thomas Wark at http://bordellopianist.blogspot.com

They’ve started roasting the green chile here in southern New Mexico.  This produces one of the great food aromas in the world, like baking bread or fresh-brewed coffee or grandma’s roladen.

All great chefs understand the importance of the olfactory element in  food.  So, too, do dogs, often with results that displease their human companions.

A few fortunate folks have developed keen olfactory skills for political odors, as well,.  In this country they’re called liberals.  Every now and then they catch a political aroma like green chile roasting.  More often than not, in these United States, what they smell is rotten meat.

They are underwhelmed of late by a really bad stink on the wings of the winds out of Texas.  Gov. Goodhair, as he was dubbed by the late, great Molly Ivins, wants to be our President.

Honest Injun!  THAT Gov. Goodhair.

The one whose only policy decision about the state’s record, impoverishing drought was, “pray for rain.” (It didn’t work.)

The one who brags about the “Texas miracle” of increasing jobs during the recession, whereas in fact in true job creation data Texas ranks last among the 50.

The one who has compelled the state’s history teachers to tell their pupils that Newt Gingrich and Phyllis Schlaffly are “great Americans,” whereas Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez are not.

The one who primed his base for his presidential run by staging a great pray-in featuring some of the most whacko, racist, ill-informed Christofascists on the face of the earth.

The one who set the all-time gubernatorial record for executing prisoners who suffered from mental disability.

Ramblin’ Rick thinks he can pull Texas out of the union with a stroke of his pen; calls Social Security and Medicare unconstitutional and — get this — thinks the way to get this country moving again is to suspend ALL Federal laws and regulations. And one of his lesser gaffes: Fed Chief  Ben Bernanke commits “treason” when he takes even mild regulatory action to keep the country solvent.

In Iowa, a handful of kooks got together in Ames to eat pork tenders and proclaim Michelle Bachmann, a Minnesota congressperson, their favorite for the Republican presidential nomination. This makes her Gov. Goodhair’s principal rival.

What a pair!

Bachmann could improve her knowledge of her country’s history by studying even Goodhair’s cockeyed version of it.  Last I heard she thought Paul Revere crossed the Delaware to warn Manchester, NH, that the British were comin’, which alerted Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain boys to win the battle of Lafayette, Ind.  Something like that.

She and her hubby made their little fortune by praying homosexual people into heterosexuality, the way God intended it.  Maybe her contest with Goodhair will come down to a praying contest.  What a choice to inflict on God!

Meanwhile, vile odors waft unto us from Minnesota and from Texas.  Fortunately, they come together right at the point of heavy green chile roasting, which neutralizes them.
Read more by Thomas Wark at http://www.bordellopianist.blogspot.com

On a Monday in early August, 2011, AIG (American International Group) filed claims in federal court against Bank of America alleging losses of $10 billion. The insurance giant claimed that the bank had intentionally disguised the risks of products to be insured. At the same time, Bank of America was already being sued for $82 billion in a multitude of other suits.  According to The New York Times, JP Morgan was also being sued for almost $40 billion, Wells Fargo was being sued for $35 billion, Citigroup for over $2 billion.  All were alleged to have marketed securities as solid investments when at the time of the sale they knew that these representations were untrue. In legal jargon, when a person makes a deal based upon a fact that he knows to be false and intentionally disguises the falsehood, that is fraud.  The giants of American capitalism were therefore this August in a hugely costly family quarrel, suing one another for throat-choking amounts of fraud.

Humongous enterprises are suing to protect their balance sheets because—contrary to the theory of capitalism—the free market has not made everything right.  Worse, when the American congress decided on August 2nd that the way to solve the problem was for the government to spend less, resulting in less economic activity overall, the U.S. stock market in a few days lost 1,500 points.  Not only were the giants of finance suing each other; they were losing confidence in the market as their security.

At the same time, French bank stocks were pressured on the fear of default spreading from Greece, to Portugal, to Spain. Further, U.S. banks hold huge loans interwoven with those French banks and as a result of the European scare in three days the U.S. stock market fell at first, 600 points. Then the gambling started and the market rose hundreds. By then marketeers were only betting against each other and the market fell again hundreds, rose again, fell again, in a game of guesses and risks, hubris and chicken.

America’s free market capitalism has, over the last 30 years, failed to put more income into the hands of more people, has failed the middle and lower classes driving them under water, and now is, for the first time, failing those at the very top.  While they sue each other the stock market staggers and rises, staggers and rises, manufacturing stalls, people who already work two jobs cannot work more, or borrow more, and the governments of the U.S., Britain, France and Germany have all determined that they are going to help them less.

Capitalism provides no theory to explain why it is failing from top to bottom.  The oligarchs are searching out more people to blame, more to sue, and different momentary heroes to elect to high office.  Blame is, however, not a solution for bad economic theory.  Someone is going to have to think new.  Not just about stimulus.  About corporations. About property. About plutocracy.  About monopoly.

American government is also a mess.  In the words of former republican congressman Tom Davis, “The political system, Republican or Democrat, over the last decade has delivered two failed wars, an economic meltdown, 20 percent of homes underwater, [and] stagnant wages.” (NYT, 8/8/11, The Caucus.)  In other words, the American political system is also stalling out.

Anyone who has watched the minority party in the first two years of the Obama administration, and the stalemate of the last months over the debt ceiling will agree.  The American political system is dysfunctional at best, failing at worst.

While capitalists sue capitalists and everyone blames the politicians for not being able to fix the capitalists, and while the capitalists spend billions to elect people who will prevent their being fixed, it is clear that this is a political and economic culture that is in deep trouble.

Some effort will be made to change politicians in 2012.  But changing the incumbents in the congress or the presidency will have little effect if no one has a better story to tell, or something more promising than killing either government or corporations.  They do not need to be just killed.  They need to be newly understood and reframed in a world of scarcity, a world of limits to clean water and air, limits to growth, limits to greed, and limits even to the rights of property.

It is time to move beyond Adam Smith and Ayn Rand or misleading slogans like survival of the fittest.  It is time to start over, and this time to follow some new instinct that appeals to the heart and not just the sword. Start over, and if the heart leads to feminine principles or to generosity and community, have the courage to follow on. Start over, and touch the earth and when we touch it try not to everywhere make it sore. Start over, as if life mattered, as if it mattered more than the fear of death.  Start over as if to live for each other and as if the future mattered.  Start over.

It’s Like Having a Reverse Midas Touch; All That’s Gold Turns to S—
Paul Krugman (whose name Kidglove can’t even pronounce) said it, and said it well: “The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized.”

If even the President of the United States won’t stand up to them, who’s going to lead the effort to “defeat and marginalize” these idiots? I’ve cupped my ear, my friends; the answer isn’t blowin’ in the wind.

What’s really depressing for intelligent, visionary, progressive Americans is that the extremists of whom Krugman speaks won’t be satisfied until they’ve destroyed and dismantled everything good the federal government has done in the last 100 years.

When Kidglove caved in on the phony deficit “crisis,” he opened the door for them to destroy Social Security (“the dole”), Medicare (“socialized medicine”) and Medicaid. No doubt the Cato Heritage squad is already putting the plan for this into the hands of the corporate puppets in Congress, something enabling us poor suckers to put roughly the equivalent of our Social Security payments into their beloved Market, so the hedge fund managers who pay no taxes can steal billions more.

Meanwhile, at the back door, the wolf has already entered the house of environmental protections.  Goodbye, clean air.  So long, potable water.  Hello,  cancer.  Goodbye, Grand Canyon, Arches, Vermillion Cliffs and a thousand other beautiful and wonderful places owned by We, the People.  Hello poisonous mining, fracking, drilling, coal burning and mountain top removal.  Goodbye green landscapes, blue skies and sweet-smelling earth.  Hello mercury run-off, fiish kills, oil spills and black lung disease.  They’ve already slipped a rider into H.R. 2584 (the 2012 appropriations bill) to severely weaken many environmental regulations.

In time, they’ll eliminate or emasculate OSHA,  the EPA and what shred of manhood remains in the NRC.  Fukushima II, anyone?

Here’s a sample of what they’ve already got in the legislative pipeline:

–Natural gas and oil drilling in and around Arches National Park.

–Uranium mining in the Grand Canyon.

–Increased amonia emissions from power plants.

–Ending requirements for better gas mileage in automobiles beginning in 2016 and reducing limits on carcinogens in exhaust emissions.

–Allowing chemical companies to dump pesticides into waterways and publish false information on pesticide labels.

–Repealing health-based air quality standards fior offshore oil operations.

–Eliminate regulation of mountaintop removal water runoff into streams, ash from the burning of coal and  hard rock mining.

There’s more.  Much more.  ALEC, the right-wing source of Koch- and Exxon-friendly state legislation, is propagating  laws to make it virtually impossible for environmental groups to sue polluters.

And then there’s education.  Besides cutting  funding for public schools they will in effect subsidize (with taxpayer money) private, religious schools through things called vouchers.  Any inducement for our best and brightest to become teachers will be doused by cutting teacher pay, benefits and pensions, a la Wisconsin.

The concept of trust-busting and regulating corporate crime is as old as Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency.  Deregulation, depending upon the Holy Market to regulate itself and allowing corporations to run the country is the new, raw deal.

Defeat them?  Marginalize them?  Not in Dr. Kidglove’s U.S.A.

Read more by Thomas Wark at www.bordellopianist.blogspot.com

The Democrats, in a baffling instance of rapid-cycling mutation, are proving again to be a subspecies of Homo sapiens that appears to have a backbone only when they are live on C-Span. In the backrooms where the deals get done they are total invertebrates, as demonstrated by the debt-ceiling deal emerging in Congress this weekend.

Republicans are pleading for just a little more Democratic support, which tells everything about whose plan is moving forward to avoid the trumped-up deadline for national default. Despite months of rhetoric about not making the little guy pay for budget austerity, the Democrats’ version of the “compromise” going forward is even more of what the Republicans wanted than they ever expected to obtain: A 12-member “Super Congress” that will have to come up with about $1.8 trillion in cuts by Thanksgiving – or entitlement programs will automatically be cut instead (the right’s objective all along). No revenue enhancement, no expiration of the Bush tax cuts, apparently no legislation even to eliminate tax loopholes.

The cardinal rule of negotiation with terrorists and rogue states is, don’t ransom hostages or you simply reinforce and encourage the behavior. This is especially true when you have taken yourself hostage. The Republicans in Congress, with the Tea Party sticking knives into their backs, are a gang of terrorists, holding the United States and its system of democracy hostage. The debt ceiling crisis is an artifice – blackmail, pure and simple. The right knew from Obama’s cave on the budget a few months ago that he and Senate leaders would not only blink on the debt ceiling but would deliver the keys to the candy store with their eyes shut tight.

Obama had a reasonable option: invoking the 14th Amendment, which states that the debts of the United States shall not be questioned. Certainly there was some legal gray area, but in the absence of a reasonable and fair legislative agreement, he could have kept the option open and exercised it under a state of emergency – but not this conciliator-in-chief. He could have led, as he was elected to do, but he abstained. Essentially, he abdicated his constitutional duties, as he has been doing for two-and-a-half years.

Majorities of over 70 percent of the public in recent polls have said they want the rich to pay their fair share of reining in the deficit, but the Republicans continue to lie shamelessly in pretending they are following the will of the people. The media perpetuate outrageous false equivalencies in reporting the so-called balanced view that both sides need to compromise. Only some bloggers, a few columnists and a handful of radio and television commentators have pointed out that the emperor has no clothes: The “compromise” is persuading the kidnapper to take your food away in four months instead of next week as the price for agreeing to leave the oxygen flowing to your tomb.

And this from a party that putatively controls the Senate and the White House. Last time I checked, that was two-thirds of the day-to-day decision-making authority in this country. Why should they be the ones to blink in this game of chicken, especially when the President holds the trump card of invoking the 14th Amendment?

This deal should incite a riot but will probably only get AARP members to bang on their bedpans for a few days. It should bring millions into the streets with signs and shouts of protest. All it will do is send those millions into the streets and under the overpasses one family a time when all the safety nets erected over decades of social progress are ripped away from them by the plutocratic predators who will devour the nation until, like the parasites they are, they succumb along with their host victim.

And sadly, most shameful of all, is a president so many of us supported to change the way things are done, who wasn’t up to the task, who proved oh so much better at spouting promises than  protecting his charges and the democracy that elevated his sorry ass.

This blog has been fulminating for a couple of months (or maybe since the midterm elections) as I watch the spectacle in Washington that the President elevates by describing as a three-ring circus. As any circusgoer or participant well knows, meticulous planning and coordination go into every circus stop at every town, and every act, from trapeze to juggling to animal routines. This is not to be confused with the dysfunctional frenzy in the Beltway.

The debt-ceiling crisis has in common with the circus that it is built on role-playing and enacted to mesmerize the audience, but the Washington version goes beyond entertainment and has no logical script other than the objective of maximizing political gain on behalf of those seeking financial gain.

In the final days of this trumped-up crisis, an artificial day of reckoning that only further denigrates government in the eyes of the populace, extemporaneous grandstanding rules the show. Republicans hold government, the President, the Democrats in Congress and the America people hostage in a cynical and hypocritical game of brinksmanship, alleged to be about controlling deficit spending but in reality about completing the redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the plutocracy.

Democrats have made strategic mistakes; for far too long they have lost the media-driven battle of public opinion, as usual being unable to match the Republicans’ ability to manipulate the victims themselves (Tea partiers, blue-collar workers, retirees, struggling homeowners) into orchestrating their own economic and political demolition.

The most offensive aspect of the whole thing has to be the collusion among the triumvirate of greed-driven plutocrats, co-opted politicians and mainstream-media talking heads whose rank hypocrisy knows no shame. Correspondents and news anchors talk about spreading blame and purport to provide a “balanced” perspective in lamenting that the sides can’t seem to compromise. Public opinion polls are twisted into confirming that the frustrated public just wants the two parties to reach an agreement. A problem almost entirely generated by wartime spending, Wall Street excess and self-serving deregulation has been allowed to be portrayed as one of runaway “entitlement” spending and false comparisons to balancing household budgets.

Commentators talk ad nauseum about compromise and deal-making. To our woe, the smartest guy in the room is the President, who has brainwashed himself into believing the compromise dictum, though he should have known a month into his presidency that “compromise” and “bipartisan” are code words for a strategy to prevent his re-election, even at the risk of destroying the nation.

Better-informed observers than I have chronicled the steadfast refusal of virtually the entire Republican delegation (especially in the current House) to compromise, while the Senate has elevated the filibuster to a new art from – all to thwart Obama and the Democrats, no matter how centrist or even right-leaning their agenda. But Obama can’t get the C-word out of his head and persists in the mindset of some self-styled ambassador instead of the leader and the agent for change many of us thought we were electing.

He has already capitulated on his principles regarding everything from the environment to single-payer health care, torture and secret rendition, drone attacks, national security, immigration, and is now willing to send Medicare down the slippery slope to pay the rightwing ransom in a scenario that is entirely of their making.

What he needs to do is explode the myth of equal blame and expose the total hypocrisy and cynicism, his re-election hopes be damned (though ironically they might well be advanced if he showed an iota of leadership). At this eleventh hour he needs to give Congress a very short leash to reach a workable agreement on a debt-ceiling extension and a package of spending cuts plus revenue-enhancement measures that will settle the issue through the 2012 elections. He needs to draw a line in the sand.

If no deal is reached in another two or three days, he needs to invoke the 14th Amendment, declare a state of emergency and extend the debt ceiling by executive decree.  There is much Democratic support for exactly such a course in the absence of a deal. The Republicans will scream bloody murder, but let them. They can’t lie, posture and manipulate any more than they already are. If the House wants to deliberate impeachment proceedings, so be it; at least it will give them something to do. If the courts must get involved, let them; they can’t be any less rational than the Republican leadership in Congress. If it costs Obama his re-election, he should realize that’s a better alternative than allowing the nation to slip into default and bring disaster on the economy and the American people.

He just might find an unexpected reaction – a groundswell of support from a nation that decisively elected a president to lead, not follow.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when the deal was made to assign a prominent speaking role to an obscure Illinois state legislator at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

There had to be a deal. Whoever made it, wherever it was made, there must have been enormous amounts of money involved, and a most cleverly constructed conspiracy. That boy Barry was being groomed for the presidency. He spoke (and wrote) good Democrat. Deeds, it turns out, were another matter.

The plot worked to perfection. “Democrat” Obama achieved the presidency, but from the outset his administration was very . .. Republican. Rightward Republican, right of Eisenhower, almost Reaganesque.

If we knew when that deal was made, and who made it, we’d know why.

As a candidate, he said more than once that single payer was the best solution to America’s sad health care mess. But as president he immediately sold his soul to the pharmaceutical industry, whose “Harry and Louise” TV ads had torpedoed the Clinton efforts at health care reform. Half a loaf, we were told, is better than none, but the health care bill he finally nudged through a Democratic-controlled Congress was barely a slice, moldy and sans butter.

His war posture is closer to the neocon hawk than to Ike; he has continued the worst policies of the Bush administration on civil liberties at home, human rights abroad, torture, detention and secret black hole prisons. Even some moderates on the left consider Obama to be impeachable for 1) ordering military attacks on sovereign nations without Congressional authorization; 2) issuing Executive Orders for the extra-judicial assassination of U. S. citizens in violation of the constitutional guarantee of due process; 3) presiding over military, paramilitary and intelligence service use of torture in violation of prohibitions against cruel and unusual treatment; 4) ordering attempts to assassinate foreign heads of state; 5) obstructing justice by failing or refusing to investigate credible allegations of torture brought against the previous administration.

As a candidate he promised relief for over-mortgaged home buyers but as president he bailed out the bankers who brought the economy down and didn’t lift a finger to stop foreclosures, which continued at record rates.

He has done nothing to solve the nation’s greatest economic problem — unemployment — while watching CEO and executive pay and bankers’ bonuses soar into the stratosphere.

In public he can still talk good Democrat but in private he folds to every right-wing Republican whim and folly. Trickle-down economics? Do the voodoo, baby! Extend tax cuts for the super-rich? My pleasure, sirs.

Every time Republicans say “Boo!” he pulls in his horns still further. This week he decided not to nominate the obvious best choice to head the new Consumer Protection Agency, Elizabeth Warren, because Republicans and their corporate masters hate and fear her. His nominee, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, actually has a fairly good record of pro-consumer litigation, and already Republicans are crying “Boo!” again: emasculate the agency or we’ll block this nominee, too. The stage is set for a double cave-in: stripping the agency of power and dumping Cordray in favor one of Timmy Titmouse’s Goldman Sachs pals.

Of course a deal was made. Perhaps we’ll never know the particulars: who, when, where. But we can guess. Just consider who has profited most from the Obama presidency so far.

‘Tweren’t us common folk.

Read more by Thomas Wark at http://bordellopianist.blogspot.com

As a newcomer to Santa Fe (though it is the second time around), I’m a little puzzled about how things work up in this neck of the Land of Enchantment.

There is a fire burning in the Santa Fe National Forest. As of 11 am on Sunday it had grown to 900 acres, six miles northeast of Tesuque and nine miles north of Santa Fe. The plume of smoke seen yesterday is back, there’s a red flag warning for virtually the entire state, with winds expected to gust up to 50 mph this afternoon, with sustained winds 25-30 mph. The humidity is in single digits, the forest is bone-dry, a tinderbox ready to ignite, as it obviously has. And though this fire was no more than 5-7 acres when reported, crews were unable to keep it from erupting; containment remains at 0 percent.

But the attitude toward this fire seems to be as ho-hum as if it were a quarter of an acre in the middle of the monsoon. After a front-page story yesterday the New Mexican has nothing new today, in fact nothing on its web site at all, unless you click on most-read stories. Instead, it’s all about Father’s Day, the Buckaroo Ball and the Railrunner Groupon. Television news stations flew their copters over the area, but their reports were basically hearsay and endless repetition. They managed to buttonhole no one in authority and likely would not have known what questions to ask them if they had.

Forest Service officials, according to New Mexico’s official Fire Information site http://nmfireinfo.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/pacheco-canyon-fire-update-6182011-430-pm/ are maintaining Stage 2 fire restrictions for the entire Santa Fe National Forest. Hyde Park Road is closed at the forest boundary and campers in the area are supposedly on alert – but no evacuations and no closure of the forest.

I’m no expert on the moisture content of the combustibles, but there seems to be widespread agreement these are the worst conditions in the state in recent memory. Already crews are stretched thin, and equipment is scattered all over the Southwest as the Wallow Fire continues to spread along the Arizona border and fires burn near Raton, Carlsbad, Ruidoso and Estancia.

I love the opportunity for forest recreation as much as the next guy, but does it make any sense to leave this forest open under these conditions?  I realize no structures are threatened as the blaze heads toward the Pecos Wilderness. I understand that Santa Fe thrives on tourism, but is anyone taking the even moderately long view that a forest with thousands of acres of blackened aspens and mixed conifers won’t have much appeal to visitors for a long time to come, let alone for fall colors? What about the wildlife that will die and the watershed that will take years to recover from the major wildfire this is quickly becoming, or a new fire that could start while the forest remains open?

I understand that protected forests build up too much undergrowth and overly dense stands of trees ready to explode in the crown fires that are most damaging and hardest to control. But this does not seem like the time to make amends for overzealous stewardship, when conditions are tantamount to tossing a bag of gasoline-soaked rags into your 120-degree garage.

How about some answers from those who make these decisions? Better yet, how about some questions – the right questions – from those in the media whose job it is to ask them?

They’re trying to bully television stations into refusing to air an ad by a progressive group that asserts — accurately — that the House Republicans’ infamous “Ryan Budget” would end Medicare.

It is a clear and obvious fact that House Republicans would end not just Medicare, but also Medicaid and other social programs that benefit  the aged, the sick, the unemployed and the impoverished.

The Republicans say they are not, either, ending Medicare; they would still call their program “medicare,” even though it would NOT pay for your medical care the way Medicare does.  Confusing?  The Republicans want it that way.  What they call “medicare” is in fact a system of providing vouchers that you could use to pay a private insurer for medical coverage — if you can find one that will accept your vouchers as payment in full for a policy, which of course no private insurer will do since they’d all be free to raise premiums far above the value of the vouchers. It would legalize robbery by insurers from the people who can least afford to be robbed.

This is the basic Republican philosophy: government exists to serve the interests of only the richest and most powerful people and institutions in the land. The most powerful institutions in the land, of course, are corporations, which, according to the Worst Supreme Court in History are people, too.  Real people — workers, family farmers, small businessmen, the unemployed, the sick, the tired, the poor, those who speak with funny accents, those whose skin is the wrong color — are not entitled to suck at the teat of government because that causes the richest and most powerful people to  pay taxes, which are sinful, evil things that only the sick, the tired, the poor and the afflicted should have to pay because they can’t afford multimillionaire lawyers and accountants and lobbyists to create loopholes that allow them to pay virtually no tax.

So stop whining.  Crawl off somewhere and suffer in silence, you lazy unemployed  slobs, you welfare queen sluts, you baby-factory refugees, you ignorant  non-English speaking leaches, you tree-hugging enviro nerds, you bleeding-heart Commie ratfink libruls, you  . . . well, you know who you are.

This is Merka, by God, the land of the Red, White and Blue, the flag-waving, tea–bagging, race-baiting, other-hating, war-making, bloodthirsty, world-ruling home of the brave and land of the free.

Love it or leave it.

Read more by Thomas Wark at http://bordellopianist.blogspot.com

By Steve Klinger

“Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we can’t do,” a gloating Barack Obama said last night after a team of Navy SEALS gunned down Osama bin Laden in his Pakistan hideout. I beg to differ.

We may be able spend billions of dollars to fight al Qaeda and track the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks. Obviously, we can engage in at least three wars at the same time. We can rationalize the need to hold anyone accountable for torture and extraordinary rendition. Clearly we can continue the Bush policy of targeted assassination, as demonstrated yesterday in a gambit Reuters described this morning as a pure “kill operation” with no attempt to capture. (Obama administration officials said we’d have captured bin Laden if he hadn’t resisted.)

On the home front, we can bail out Wall Street, sell out Main Street and cop out of holding anyone accountable for the rapacious corporate excesses that are destroying the middle class.  In fact we can anoint corporations with the rights of human beings and then watch as the megabucks of the former methodically dismantle two centuries of social progress to protect the latter.

But what we can’t seem to do, and Obama should remind himself of it once in a while as he gazes fondly on his Nobel Peace Prize, is rise above the perpetuation of violence.

The rhetoric of U.S. political leaders and the voices emanating from the lamestream media are dripping today with patriotic fervor, übernationalism and vengeance of biblical proportions. “Justice has been done,” Obama proclaimed in his television address late last night, concluding his address with numerous references to God. Said South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, “The message of this event is that if you choose to do harm to the American people and try to destroy our way of life, there is no place to hide and no passage of time will keep you safe.”

The sanctimonious high-fiving extended all the way to Rush Limbaugh, who gushed at one point, “Thank God for President Obama.”

I would like to inquire, how many of the 2974 Americans killed on Sept. 11, 2001 were brought back by the assassination of bin Laden? How quickly will we now disengage our forces from Afghanistan, having eradicated the object of our invasion? How soon will our human dignity be restored in airports and border crossings, where treating everyone as a potential terrorist only underscores the victories terror and violence continue to win on a daily basis at the expense of civil liberties?

Glasses will be raised by the millions this evening as even Republicans begrudgingly acknowledge this triumphant moment when our Special Forces showed the world you don’t mess with America. Obama will no doubt get a boost in the polls as he heads into his re-election campaign. But in the minds of hate-filled fanatics who see their own bloody self-sacrifice as the most exalted path to heaven, there will be no panic and no stampede to lay down their arms. Not only did we hand them the master martyr’s death to avenge, we taught them a lesson about western civilization and Christianity. How sweet a victory it is when your enemy can no longer claim the high ground, having shown he is just as barbaric as you are!

Do you have to hate everything in order to be a new Republican?

You’ve got to hate women: the Republicans in Congress refused to accept any budget that funds the health and social services that millions of American women need just to eke out an existence. These are the kind of people who came up with “barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.”

You’ve got to hate animals: my Republican congressman wants to kill all the wolves in the southwest and other Republicans want to gut wildlife protections and endangered species laws.  These are the kind of people who would shoot Bambi between the eyes, feed poison to Lassie, put Flicka in hobbles and filet Flipper.

You’ve got to really hate poor people.  In a land where the richest one per cent of the are getting richer still by leaps and bounds, while the rest of fall further and further behind, the Republicans want to cut funding for programs to help the poor.  When Barry Goldwater, the godfather of neoconservatism, was running for President, Bill Mauldin drew a cartoon depicting an impoverished woman in tattered clothes on a church step, with B.G. towering over her saying, “Quit whining.  Go out and inherit a department store.”

You’ve got to really hate the planet we inhabit.  Let the filthy rich mining companies turn Grand Canyon and Arches National Parks into slag-filled swamps of bile and rot.  Drill, baby, drill!  Put the tree-huggers in concentration camps and make them drink from the streams befouled by mountain-top removal.  These people never met a landscape they didn’t want to defile.

You’ve got to really hate good health.  The Republicans want to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency.  Never mind that it prevents the polluters from causing cancer, diabetes, asthma and emphysema in millions of Americans.  It’s a damned nuisance for industries with billion dollar profits that don’t pay a nickel of income tax. These are the kind of people who would make matchsticks out of Tiny Tim’s crutch.

You’ve got to really hate the old and the sick.  Republicans want to end Medicare and Medicaid as we know it.  They detest what they call Obamacare.  They think primitive tribes had it right: when you’re old, infirm or sick, you should just crawl off into the wilderness and die.  Except that if the Republicans had their way, there’d be no wilderness to crawl off into.

You’ve got to hate real people and love corporations.  (See Supreme Court decision in Citizens United.) No wonder women are beginning to incorporate their uteruses: “It’s a person, not a choice.”

You’ve got to really hate liberals. Liberals, by definition, are open to new opinions and progress; they favor  individual liberty in political and social affairs.  Next thing you know they’ll be wanting to inflict stuff like  habeas corpus on us.

You’ve got to really hate working people.  Republicans have already put 27 million Americans out of work, and now they’re zeroing in on  the unions that protect workers’ rights.  A variation on the idea in the Mauldin cartoon. These are the kind of people who would strangle the canary in the coal mine because it costs too much for birdseed.

But Republicans still love motherhood and apple pie.  Unless, of course, mother is a liberal.  Then, well, send her out into the wilderness!

Read more by Thomas Wark at http://bordellopianist.blogspot.com

President Barack Obama
The White House
Washington, DC

Dear Pres:

Thanks for the recent e-mail about your 2012 campaign, which mentioned my financial and other support of your election in 2008, and requested that I redouble my efforts on your behalf this time around.

Unfortunately, I cannot do that.

You wrote:

We’ve always known that lasting change wouldn’t come quickly or easily. It never does. But as my administration and folks across the country fight to protect the progress we’ve made — and make more — we also need to begin mobilizing for 2012, long before the time comes for me to begin campaigning in earnest.

A quick review of the progress you’ve made turns up:

* continuation of the wars we elected you to end and the addition of a new one, initiated with the same kind of subterfuge and deception your predecessor used before invading Iraq. (A shady deal with Saudi Arabia to look the other way if it invaded Bahrain, provided the Saudis would muscle their Arab League cronies to support a bid for a UN “no-fly zone” over Libya.  For shame!)

* continuation of, and then worsening of, your predecessor’s denial of constitutional rights to citizens illegally detained at Guantanamo.

* continuation of your predecessor’s illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens under the unconstitutional so-called Patriot Act.

* strengthening the corporate hold on all branches of government, until the last faint ember of democracy flickers and dies.

* total cave-in to a Congressional minority on health care, the economy and unemployment.

* summoning John Boehner to the White House, presumably to sell out to Tea Pot Republicans on funding for social services in order to pay for the sins of the filthy rich bankers who are raking in record bonuses on Wall Street since you bailed them out of a crisis of their own making.

Barry, old buddy, I fell for your eloquent line of bovine excrement once.

As your predecessor once tried to say, but typically messed up, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

My conscience will not permit me to support your re-election.

Read more by Thomas Wark at http://bordellopianist.blogspot.com

A friend who is as passionately anti-war as I am — and has been for the same, long time — has engaged me in a friendly disagreement regarding the war in Libya.

As part of the dialogue he has sent me Juan Cole’s recent internet posting, “An Open Letter to the Left on Libya.”

Most of Cole’s arguments are reasonable, his assessments of the situation sound, his sincerity indisputable. The case he makes is essentially what weighed heavily on my mind as I considered what President Obama and his advisors finally decided to do in Libya.

Cole, however, fractures his own case for a reasoned, dispassionate discussion on the left with this paragraph:

If the Left opposed intervention, it de facto acquiesced in Qaddafi’s destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya’s workers and poor, along with large numbers of white collar middle class people. Qaddafi would have reestablished himself, with the liberation movement squashed like a bug and the country put back under secret police rule. The implications of a resurgent, angry and wounded Mad Dog, his coffers filled with oil billions, for the democracy movements on either side of Libya, in Egypt and Tunisia, could well have been pernicious.

Neither I nor Dennis Kucinich nor many others who share our views “acquiesce in Qaddafi’s destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya’s workers and poor.” Cole’s accusation is baseless and insulting.

As for the rest of the paragraph, I compliment Mr. Cole on his ability to see into the future. Perhaps some day he will help me pick a few stocks to invest in.

My concern about President Obama’s action involves the United States Constitution. It placed the war-making power solely in the hands of Congress. In 1973 the Congress itself muddied the waters with a War Powers Act that presidents have used ever since to make war whenever they damn pleased. Obama has done this in the case of Libya.

The United Nations Security Council cannot repeal the United States Constitution or any part thereof. Even in the muddied water of the 1973 Act, President Obama overstepped his authority on this matter.

The humanitarian objectives of the United Nations resolutions could have been met in time to prevent “destruction of a movement” for democracy in Libya by using the armed forces of those nations that endorsed the resolutions and were able to act immediately under their own laws and constitutions.

President Obama could have joined them in support of the anti-Qaddafi forces after consulting with Congress as required in the 1973 law.

I still have questions in my own mind about the initiative for the Arab League request to the U. N. that resulted in the Libya resolutions by the Security Council. The fact that none of the Arab League members rushed to join the combat caused me to wonder if arms were twisted — perhaps unethically, perhaps even illegally — in the deep diplomatic background before the UN action. My friend points out that Qatar recently joined the affray, which still to me smacks of the quasi-legitimacy of the Bush II “coalition” in the invasion of Iraq.

But the real concern is the addition of yet another precedent to support the notion that Presidents of the United States have war-making powers. The framers clearly did not intend that he or she should have such power. They vested it solely and absolutely in the Congress.

If that Constitutional mandate is outdated in today’s world, there is a process for amending it. The 1973 War Powers nonsense does not fulfill that process. A constitutional amendment, with ratification by two-thirds of the states, is what it takes.

Obviously that hasn’t happened. Instead, the door has been wedged open a bit further for this President and subsequent ones to bomb and otherwise make war upon any head of state who disagrees with U. S. policy. This in turn tends to prolong the endless war policy of the United States corporatocracy that I, Cole and my anti-war friend all oppose with every fiber of our being.

Read more by Thomas Wark at http://bordellopianist/blogspot.com

As someone who lived a gentle breeze away from Three Mile Island when its nuclear emergency took place, I have long been concerned about the proliferation of the technology to meet our increasing energy needs.

All of the chemical engineers I have known — particularly my own brother, who was not a nuclear expert, and my favorite hiking companion, who was — tried to persuade me that nuking was safe, clean, efficient and, while not perfect, still the best alternative to fossil fuel energy.  Their arguments — particularly regarding improved safety technology since TMI — were cogent.

Once, atop a mountain in southwest Virginia, my hiking friend and I looked eastward where once treed peaks filled the horizon, and were horrified to see moonscapes of mountaintop removal projects to obtain coal to fuel power plants. At that  moment the arguments for nuclear energy seemed particularly compelling. After all,  Chernobyl could never happen again.  Nor could TMI.

Now, tragically, we know otherwise.  We know that something unspeakably terrible can happen even in a technologically advanced society that has employed the best available science to make its nuclear plants safe.  Surely our hearts bleed for the people of Japan, on whom we inflicted Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as they now suffer the horrors of a powerful earthquake, a tsunami and new nuclear disaster.

Today we know not how all of this will end.  Workers have returned to the Fukushima nuclear plant to attempt to prevent the unspeakable from happening.  None of the world’s nuclear experts who have been commenting on the disaster in Japan knows if this can be done.  Like us, they can only hope.

But this much is clear: Nuclear power is neither safe nor clean.  And, as the slogan elsewhere on this page reminds us, “Nature bats last.”  Our planet has a fiery core; it has fault lines; its thin envelope of compatibility with human life has been tampered with by the very humans it protects.  We will have earthquakes; we will have tsunamis; we will have hurricanes; and we will pay the price of our tampering with Nature.

Nuclear plants  leak radioactive waste from underground pipes and radioactive waste pools into the ground water at sites all over the world. Science has yet to devise a method for adequately and safely handling long lived radioactive wastes.  Nuclear waste disposal was my hiking companion’s  particular sub-specialty.  He spent the twilight of his working career trying to deal with the waste problem at the Hanford site where the first atomic bombs were created.

Despite his faith in technology and his fellow scientists, there is still no safe, satisfactory way to deal with nuclear waste.

Several nuclear plants in this country are sited on, or perilously close to, fault lines. Perhaps that fact alone will prod us away from further nuclear dependency, away from filthy fossil fuels, and toward safe, renewable energy sources. Technically feasible renewable energy sources in the world are capable of producing up to six times more energy than current global demand.  Even now, nuclear plants around the globe deliver less energy than renewable sources of power.

Consider the recent coal mining disasters.  Consider the cost in money and wars of sucking a finite supply of petroleum out of the earth.  Consider the environmental consequences of gas and oil drilling.  Consider TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima.

Wind farms and solar panels do not kill.

Read more by Thomas Wark at http://bordellopianist.blogspot.com

A cartoon in today’s local newspaper (March  8) represents the outright lies a gullible electorate believes, partly because the mainstream media repeat them as fact without bothering to do basic journalism checking them out.

It depicts a thuggish, bloated figure labeled “unions” riding the back of a small, overburdened figure labeled “taxpayers.”

Its creator accepted as fact the blatant lies that have been repeated countless times in print, on the radio and on television, especially since the Wisconsin public employee protests began.

The media have parroted without challenge Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s wildly untrue statements in support of his so-called “budget repair bill,” a thinly-disguised attempt to destroy unionism in one of the states where it began.

Here is David Cay Johnson, multiple Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, best-selling author, distinguished university lecturer (and registered Republican) :

“(Walker) says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to “contribute more” to their pension and health insurance plans.

Accepting Gov. Walker’ s assertions as fact, and failing to check, created the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not.

Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin’ s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

How can that be? Because the “contributions” consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so, a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services.

Thus, state workers are not being asked to simply “contribute more” to Wisconsin’ s retirement system (or as the argument goes, “pay their fair share” of retirement costs as do employees in Wisconsin’ s private sector who still have pensions and health insurance). They are being asked to accept a cut in their salaries so that the state of Wisconsin can use the money to fill the hole left by tax cuts and reduced audits of corporations in Wisconsin.”

There are foolproof and longstanding laws of economic cause and effect that make this arrangement beneficial to both sides.

Understanding them requires a bit more time, study and effort than simply repeating what politicians like Walker say, as too many journalists today are wont to do. But here, from the economist Dean Baker, is an easy-to-grasp explanation:

“At the center of the right’s story is the view that governments are somehow being reckless or irresponsible when they provide guaranteed pensions for their workers. They tell us that these guaranteed benefits will bankrupt state and local governments, imposing impossible burdens on future taxpayers.

This story can be easily shown to be untrue. While the right has been scaring the public with talk of a trillion dollars in unfunded liability in state pensions, this sum can also be expressed as about 0.2 percent of state income over the time-frame in which the liabilities will have to be paid.

In other words, if states raise 20 cents in taxes or cut 20 cents in other spending for every hundred dollars of future income, they will be able to meet their current pension obligations. This is not a trivial sum, but it doesn’t seem likely to bankrupt our youth either.

Furthermore, the vast majority of this shortfall was due to the plunge in the stock market that followed the collapse of the housing bubble. Overly generous pensions were not the problem. The problem here were the greedy Wall Street types who profited from the housing bubble and the incompetent economists who did not see it. Of course the market has recovered much of its losses, so future years’ pension reports are likely to show that most of the shortfall has already been eliminated.

But it is important to understand the basic logic of defined benefit pensions, since many are trying to eliminate them altogether. Defined benefit pensions are in effect a form of insurance. They guarantee workers a level of retirement income based on the years that they work.

This guarantee of future income is more valuable to workers than getting the same amount of money in salary since it would be very expensive for workers to buy the same insurance from the financial industry. From the standpoint of the government, the insurance is virtually costless.

State and local governments will survive into the indefinite future. If the stock market is down any given year or set of years there is little consequence for a government offering a pension fund. Of course, a down market would be devastating for an individual worker if it happens at the point where he/she retires.

This simple logic means that governments can give workers something that is of great value – a guaranteed retirement income — at very little cost. (Research shows that even after adding in pensions, health care and other benefits, public sector workers are paid slightly less than their private-sector counterparts. This means that because governments offer defined benefit pensions they can either attract better workers at the same pay, or the same quality workers at lower pay, than if they did not offer pensions. This is as basic as economics gets.”

Facts, basic economics, logic, legal precedent, even the Constitution — – none of these seem to modify in anyway the bullying anti-intellectual nonsense of the prevailing Tea Pot element of the Republican party. And far too many members of the voting public believe their lies.

Read more by Thomas Wark at http://bordellopianist.blogspot.com

A grown man is not supposed to cry when a retired baseball player of 84 dies in a convalescent hospital in southern California, but this wasn’t just any old baseball player, it was Duke Snider, and I can still remember hearing the cheers in the apartment where I grew up, eight block from Ebbets Field, when the Brooklyn Dodgers mounted a rally back in the mid-50s, and the wind was blowing right.

This was the graceful, gliding centerfielder who rivaled Mays and Mantle in his heyday, before he stepped in a hole in Wrigley Field and tore up his knee, who was described by one sportswriter as having “steel springs in his legs.”  There was even greater torque in his hips and shoulders as he drove the ball out of the park on 407 occasions – or perchance struck out, which he did a lot as well.

But he was the Duke, probably the greatest of the Boys of Summer, and I kept a scrapbook of his exploits, only to leave it behind when I went away to college and my parents moved to Florida. It wound up, like most of my belongings, flooded in my aunt’s suburban basement a couple of years later.

The memories of Snider’s heroics in the 1955 World Series and numerous pennant races of that era were strong, however, and I couldn’t forsake the Duke and his cohorts even after Walter O’Malley uprooted them for more lucrative pastures in Los Angeles. While some of my friends became Yankee or, later, Met fans, I finessed the AM radio dial late into the night, searching for an LA Dodger broadcast. I even wrote to Vin Scully, who actually answered me, to relate that there were no radio stations from LA sending Dodger games back to Brooklyn. Where was MLB.com when I needed it?

About 15 years ago, I happened to be driving up the Florida coast on my way to the Orlando airport during spring training, and on an impulse I stopped at the Dodgers’ fabled training camp in Vero Beach to take in a Grapefruit League game. The crowd was sparse that day, but I spotted Snider, then about 70, sitting all by himself in the stands up behind third base. It took all the courage  I could muster, but I approached him and introduced myself. He was gracious and willing enough to talk about the Dodgers’ days in Brooklyn and their controversial departure, which he blamed not on O’Malley but on Robert Moses, a New York City official with great power over land use in those days.

Be that as it may, we had a pleasant chat and I drove off to the airport, tearful then as I was today, with those innocent days of baseball hero worship fresh in my heart.

I can’t think of anything more traumatic in my childhood than the day the New York Post announced the Dodgers were abandoning Ebbets Field — not for Jersey City, which would have been bad enough, but for California, and taking the Giants with them!

A couple of years later, the wrecking ball smashed into the 50-year-old bricks of that hallowed ballpark so that a man named Marvin Kratter could demolish it to build apartments.  I clipped out the photo and put it in my scrapbook.

Snider grew slow and fat and mercifully retired after a year with the Mets and another, inconceivably, with the San Francisco Giants.

But my boyhood bond was strong, and I was elated when he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1980.  In retrospect, his career statistics don’t measure up to those posted by the other New York centerfielders of his day, but for a few seasons he could run and field and throw with the best of them and blast the ball as high and far as anyone. In fact, he hit more home runs than anyone in the National League in the decade of the 1950s.

He was the Duke of Flatbush, and today I wept for him and, I suppose, for the dreams of childhood, so irrevocably replaced with adult realities, where greed trumps glory every time.

“Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.”
Anonymous

By Steve Klinger

Almost eight years ago, the United States had just begun visiting “Shock and Awe” upon Iraq. Less than two years removed from 9-11, the mainstream media were waving the flag as vigorously as the Bush administration, but even more sanctimoniously.  Those of us protesting the war and the crackdown on free speech couldn’t get our rallies covered by area newspapers or television stations. We couldn’t even get a letter to the editor published.

So with an idea I had, and some generous help from a local group called PeaceAware and a few individuals, we published a little tabloid called Grassroots Press. The lead story and photographs were done by Thomas Wark, a retired editor with national credentials and a Pulitzer Prize to his name. The first issue, which might just as easily have been the last for all we knew, covered a university solidarity event and the growing peace movement in southern New Mexico and featured an article on the new “’peace candidate” for president, Dennis Kucinich. There was plenty of commentary on the stifling media atmosphere surrounding the war, a discussion of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of America, a warning about developmental threats to the Otero Mesa ecosystem. The centerspread featured photos and comments from community activists and why they were keeping vigil against the war – exactly the stuff the Sun-News and my former paper, the Bulletin, wouldn’t touch. On the back page was a People’s Guide to Internet Resources, an amazing URL list of alternative news and opinion sites, government agencies, social and economic justice sites and what we would soon be calling blogs.

Grassroots Press never grew very large, but we did find a way to keep it going, with a little advertising from local progressive businesses and candidates, subscriptions and some generous donations. Other than the printers and an underpaid graphic designer, the rest of us donated our services, though over time we were able to pay writers occasionally and sometimes find a little gas money for those who helped distribute the paper.  I’ll confess, I became the benevolent dictator in charge of whipping up the bimonthly mix of articles, photos, ads and directories.

Over those eight years we tracked the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and increasingly turned our attention to the growing social injustice and burgeoning violence on the border, and the resistance efforts of groups on either side, from the women’s weaving cooperatives in Chiapas to the besieged and bloodied residents of Lomas del Poleo and the victims of the violence in Juarez. We exposed military recruitment tactics in local public schools; we warned of the dangers of electronic voting machines; we examined the growing threats to civil liberties. Frequently we looked at the growth of militarism in New Mexico and threats to our environmental treasures. Increasingly, we documented efforts at localism, food security, recycling and sustainable energy practices in southern New Mexico.

A few years ago we explored the unsavory circumstances involving the State Land Office, a growth-oriented City Council and a local developer that led to the annexation of Vistas at Presidio. Soon we were in the thick of local political battles that, over a few election cycles, brought a progressive city government to Las Cruces. We supported progressive candidates on state and county levels and watched their efforts also meet with success.

The problems with accountability and transparency in local government have abated somewhat, and sustainability initiatives have increased. But the economy and the national political climate, not to mention the corruption in Santa Fe, brought a backlash at the polls last November and increasingly heated rhetoric on key issues in a divided state.

All the while, looming beyond the day-to-day stuff, the American empire continues its incremental implosion, the corporatists extend their malignant reach into every cranny of government, and the planet continues its slide toward eventual demise as a habitable environment – at least for Homo sapiens.

I won’t pretend there is no further need for the beacon we’ve tried to shine, but I will acknowledge that the time has arrived for me personally to go in a different direction, and thus this current issue will be the last print edition of Grassroots Press (unless a successor should step forward). The entire newspaper industry is shifting away from print as the Internet, computers, tablets, mobile and personal devices remake the media landscape. We will continue the Grassroots Press website from our new home in Santa Fe (no, we’re not going just to be near Susana), and we urge you to visit us at www.grass-roots-press.com and to continue sending your commentary, your articles, your letters and your announcements as we attempt to exert more of a statewide presence.  I believe totally that legitimate grassroots journalism and political activism are the only avenues we have to defend and nurture what is left of our democracy, but I need to do my part in a different way.

There are far too many people to thank for me to list by name. You made it all possible, and you know who you are. Thank you, each and every one. Keep the torch burning.

It’s a pity that the likes of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich have no option in party affiliation except to align themselves with the gutless Milquetoasts who call themselves Democrats.  But such is political reality in the two-party system of the former democracy called the United States. They have to lie down with dogs and accept fleas like the so-called health care reform act, which passed only after it was so modified that it merely perpetuates the crimes it set out to reform. Dean and Kucinich ultimately supported it because, for a complicated set of reasons, they perceived it as slightly better than nothing at all.

In his working class district of Ohio, Kucinich has retained his seat in Congress in successive elections despite enormous sums of money spent by the Republicans in vain efforts to buy enough votes to oust him. But if they failed at the ballot box, the Republicans now will get rid of Kucinich by the massive scam called redistricting.

Under the law, each state gains or loses seats every ten years according to its new population as determined by the U.S. Census.  Because Ohio lost population, it is required to redraw its Congressional districts later this year.

Here’s what Kucinich said in a recent letter to constituents:

My district might be eliminated. We need to begin to work now to prepare for what is sure to be a major effort to silence your voice. As you know, my work in Congress has never been about me. It’s about the hopes and aspirations of the people of the 10th district and the people of our Nation.

I don’t know where my district will be. But I owe it to you and to all those who have ever supported me to not sit idly while questions are being raised in every major media outlet about whether I will be forced out of Congress by redistricting. I will not let any special interests force me out. Your support will ensure that the debate – on issues as important as ending the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, implementing single-payer healthcare, and remaking our economy for Main Street not Wall Street – will continue.

I’m not going to let our voices and our movement be abolished by the stroke of a pen. There’s too much at stake. This is the time to stand up and speak out. And based on the support and responses I’ve seen so far, I know you’re right there with me.

Good luck, Dennis.  Hell, I remember the afternoon a friend plunked down two bucks at the parimutuel window in Liberty Bell park for a “win” ticket on a 1,000-to-one shot, the longest odds in the history of the venue.  The nag won and my friend took his bride out to dinner at Le Bec Fin.

And here’s Dean:

The question is still what kind of country do we want to live in?

Republicans often play to the worst impulses in human nature and separate people from each other, scapegoating minority groups and dismantling our community support systems. We have a better answer.

We know what we believe.

We believe in community. We care about our neighbors and we help each other. We can provide a bright future to our children with a quality education and we can provide a secure retirement free from poverty and dependence for our grandparents. And we can accomplish it within a reasonable budget so we don’t leave a burden of debt on the next generation. Democrats are responsible and balance budgets. Democrats lift up the community and make sure that everyone has a chance for a future.

We believe in security. We will foster strong partnerships with other nations to ensure the secure and safe prosperity for all. We will reduce our dependence on resources that make us vulnerable to attack. We will use our American ingenuity to strengthen our own economy and our environment. We won’t start wars of choice and then perpetuate them to keep the military contractors in business. We will fund schools and investment in green jobs over funding bombers and missile defense our military doesn’t need or even want.

We believe in liberty. We respect every American’s right to practice their own religion and to live a life free from bigotry, abuse, and harassment. We will fight discrimination and deliver on the promise of equality for all Americans. We believe that no one, not multinational corporations nor the government, has the right to your personal information to keep tabs on you for profit or unwarranted policing.

We believe in community, security and liberty and we will never back down.

Truly, they won’t quit.  But how often do thousand-to-one shots win?  Don’t make your dinner reservations yet.

Read more by Thomas Wark at http://bordellopianist.blogspot.com

Rep. Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican who has been outspoken in remembrance of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the wake of the shooting, said he wishes there was one more gun in Tucson, Ariz., the day of the massacre. “I wish there had been one more gun there that day in the hands of a responsible person, that’s all I have to say,” Franks said, visibly irritated at a question about increased gun control.

Spoken just like a freedom-loving American NRA champion. One more gun.

That’s what we need. How dare these liberal freedom-tamperers vilify the Second Amerndment and the right to bear a Glock 19 or an AK-47 by talking gun control when a fellow wants to go hunting or defend his family – or get heroic in front of a Tucson grocery store?

So what if the background-check system failed miserably because, while everyone knew Jared Loughner was crazy, no one reported him or did anything to stop him? If we’d had one more gun in Tucson we’d have erased the vermin before he could have shot all 20 of those innocent people. Oh, he might have gotten a few, but that’s just collateral damage for freedom American-style.

So what if the overturned ban on assault weapons has helped pour thousands of automatic firearms into Mexico, where over 30,000 have died of gunshot wounds in the last three or four years?

One more gun and the Virginia Tech shootings wouldn’t have left 27 dead…maybe only half a dozen.

One more gun (or maybe two) and we could have stopped the Columbine killers early on in their spree.

One more gun and there’d be no need to worry about pistol-packing Tea Partiers demonstrating near the President.

One more gun and we could shut up all the Brady bill supporters and the assault-weapon ban supporters and anyone complaining about the plan to allow open carry for Texas college students.

One more gun and someone would have nailed George Tiller’s murderer right in the act.

One more gun and someone might have taken out Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan or James Earl Ray.

Come to think of it, why stop at guns? The world is a dangerous place, and God wants us to defend it in the name of freedom.  One more fighter jet. One more tank. One more killer drone. One more nuke.

Because as Rep. Franks would have it, one good weapon deserves another.

I remember how it was, covering this kind of breaking news. We had to anesthetize ourselves against normal human emotional pain.

Where were you when you first heard about the assassination of John Kennedy? About the planes flying into the twin towers?

There were reporters to be dispatched, assignments to be made, facts to be double-checked, directories to be consulted, neighbors to be found, experts and authorities to be interviewed. There was no time for tears.

Old habits die hard.

Today the numbness has worn off. Others have dispatched reporters, made assignments, interviewed neighbors and authorities, made their reports.

Today I am weeping.

My tears were triggered by, and are especially for, a little girl. She was the youngest and most innocent of the victims in the Tucson madness yesterday.

Christina Taylor Greene was born on September 11, 2001. She was part of the Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11 project. Her entry reads: ” I hope you know all the words to the Star Spangled Banner and sing it with your hand over your heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles.”

The tears began the moment I read that.

The profound, simple poetry of hope, written by a little girl.

Back in the numbness, I read the pious prattling of the politicians: Palin, Boehner, McCain, Obama. Verbal Novacaine.

And then I read, “I hope you jump in rain puddles.”

Through the tears I saw, dimly, but I saw it. I saw the old vision of hope, before the likes of Obama turned the word into a parody of itself, into the cheap talky-talk of our sound byte world.

Hope is not audacious.

Hope is a rain puddle.

A little girl taught us this profound truth. Will it die with her? Will the insanity that ended her life continue to fester and grow in this brutalized country of ours?

Is there still a thing called hope?

Can we actually join hands and jump in rain puddles together?

Can we? Will we?

Read more by Thomas Wark at www.bordellopianist.blogspot.com

In these United States, the bad guys are relentless and have unlimited funding. The good guys dislike the smell of their own sweat and still believe that virtue has amorphous power to prevail against all odds.

No wonder the democratic republic founded on a thesis of checks and balances died a dozen years ago and nobody noticed.

Illustrations abound. Nay, they inundate us daily. They flood us, overwhelm us, numb our senses, beat us into a miasmic mass of helpless resignation.

A microcosm: southern New Mexico is blessed with public lands whose unique characteristics are less spectacularly beautiful than, say, the Grand Canyon; whose historical importance is less obvious than, say, Mesa Verde’s; whose archeological value is less self-evident than, say, the great pyramids; whose thundering silence, unchanged openness, vistaed hopes and majestic instancy feed only souls hungering after solace, not not egos bottomless with greed. They deserve preservation, these lands; protection from the predations of the land-rapers, a license of passage to generations unborn.

I came to live here because of these lands. They are my church, my place to recover from wounds, to think, to simply be. I want to share them with anyone and everyone who will respect them, cherish them, leave them simply to be.

Of course I joined the movement to protect them in perpetuity from from human abuse.

Proposals were written, hearings were held, viewpoints were aired, money was spent, alliances were formed, lies were told, facts were presented, “stakeholders” were asked to comment, experts were called to pontificate, ignoramuses were allowed to prattle, legislation was written and more hearings were held.

At the last of these, the same old well-funded prevaricators, distorters and transmogrifiers turned out in force, spewing the same old bilge that had been refuted many times before. Sen. Tom Udall, the junior of New Mexico’s senators, both of whom supported the wilderness legislation, played prosecuting attorney. His skilled cross-examination stripped each of the nay-sayers of any remaining vestige of credibility.

The legislation, which had already passed the U. S. House of Representatives, seemed headed toward passage by the Senate and signature into law by the President.

But the corporate and private interests that control us do their real work not in public hearings; they work behind the closed doors of the inner offices inside the Beltway. There the pressures were brought to bear upon our gutless public servants that caused the wilderness bill to languish unvoted on. The lame duck congressional session ended and decades of dedicated citizen legwork within the system died.

The lemmings of Teabagistan are chortling with glee in the usual venues of ignorance: call-in radio and ungrammatical letters to local rags that purport to be newspapers, bumper stickers and bill boards, church message boards and crude trade association pamphlets.

By the time a new people’s movement of enlightened conservationists can be formed — IF such can ever be re-formed — the lands will have been devastated, raped of their historic, cultural and natural beneficence.

Just on the matter of public land management alone, similar dramas of dreams deferred are playing out in Utah, Idaho, Montana and throughout the west. Take Utah: some of our most precious heritage lands have long been coveted by the Midases of extraction and the Huns of off-roading. A death-bed sell-out in the last days of Bush II gave the destroyers license to do their worst; it has taken nearly two years for the Dr. Kidglove administration to reverse the Interior Department rules that allowed their criminal acts. But without supportive action by the whores of Congress, this will come to naught.

The bad guys will win, as they always do in these United States, simply because they do not relent, and they have unlimited finances. And because they really don’t have any opposition.

No sweat, right?

Read more by Thomas Wark at www.bordellopianist.blogspot.com

Silent night . . .

Before they can be hired, Fox News “journalists” have to pass a beliefs test designed by the network’s top boss, right-wing Republican Roger Ailes, to prove their political conservatism.  Recently, a management memo ordered  all “news” employees  not to mention “climate change”  or warming temperatures without immediately stating that critics dispute the data on which these notions are based.  They are not permitted to state that climate change data are peer reviewed by other qualified scientists; or that their “critics”  either lack suitable scientific credentials or are bankrolled by Exxon-Mobil and other major extraction industries  with an implicit understanding that their “science” will produce company-friendly conclusions.

Holy night . . . .

On Christmas Day, a child-soldier, who has never been convicted of a crime, will be held in solitary confinement for 23 hours, and not permitted proper exercise for the hour outside his cell  in a military prison.  This will mark his seventh month of such confinement, which physicians and experts in international law have defined as torture. Acting  on his belief that every citizen has a moral obligation to shed light on immoral actions of his government, Pvt. Bradley Manning  allegedly gave electronic data to WikiLeaks that the government wanted to hide. Manning is being force-fed anti-depressant medication in the hope that it will prevent his committing suicide. He has not been tried on any charges; he has not even been granted the pre-trial hearing that is mandated by  Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is neither uniform, nor just.

All is calm . . .

The Justice Department has acknowledged it plans to increase the number of its Gestapo-style raids on the homes and offices of peace activists and critics of government policy. Such raids allegedly were legalized by the 6-3 Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.  It held that speech and advocacy otherwise protected by the First Amendment was a crime if government agencies found it to be “coordinated with or under the direction of a foreign group listed by the Secretary of State as ‘terrorist.’”

All is bright. . . .

As of Dec. 16, at least 293,685 people have been killed in warfare around the world this year. The United States incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be among the leading killers of civilians, along with the civil strife in Somalia and the Sudan, and the drug cartel wars in Mexico.

Round yon Virgin, mother and child . . .

One in six Americans will go hungry this Christmas, or have to forego other necessities such as heat or medicine, in order to buy food.

Holy infant so tender and mild . . .

For eight years our government has held detainees at Guantanamo without charge or prospect of trial, while administering to them a dangerous drug that an Army doctor characterized as “pharmacological waterboarding.”

Sleep in heavenly peace . . .

While gloating Republicans watched, President Obama signed into law legislation that provides:
$1.1 million in personal tax cuts for the heads of five banks that required $142 billion of taxpayer bailout money;
$1.3 million in personal tax relief for Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire who owns Fox “News” and other media cash cows;
$400 a year tax increases for America’s poorest workers;
tax cuts totaling $35.41 billion for the 400 wealthiest Americans;
slashes in funding for Social Security and Medicare, the only sources of income and health care for millions of elderly Americans;
and massive tax cuts for the corporations that ship American jobs overseas.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

Americans bought 1.2 million greeting cards this holiday season that contained images of polar bears.  That’s about five times as many images as there are living polar bears in the entire world. The bears are an endangered species whose habitat has been reduced more than 21 per cent by the global warming that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire denies is happening.  Now the wealthiest corporations in history — American energy companies — are about to begin massive drilling in the Arctic Wildlife refuge, which will destroy a critical habitat of the bear.

Silent night, holy night . . .

Nearly 20,000 people have been killed in the last five years in Somalia, many of them with some of the 40 tons of weapons the United States has shipped into the country.  Somalia  has not had an effective government since 1991.  This year, the warring factions have begun exporting violence to neighboring countries like Uganda, where a series of July bombings killed 70 civilians.

Shepherds quake  . . .

In the Darfur region of Sudan,  more than 1.5 million people will spend Christmas lacking the outside assistance they need for basic survival — food, shelter, water and sanitation facilities.  Several hundred thousand have died either as the result of combat between rival insurgents, or from starvation and disease caused by the fighting.  International aid agencies have been expelled.

, , , at the sight . . .

In April an explosion at a British Petroleum drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 men,  injured 17 and set off the worst oil spill in American history.  The environmental damage was incalculable; the extent of despoilation of marine and wildlife habitat may never be known.  After months of accepting at face value BP’s propaganda about the leak, the U.S. government finally filed a lawsuit on Dec. 15 against BP and eight other companies involved in the disaster.

Glories stream from heaven afar .  .  .

Already one of the poorest, least developed nations in the world, Haiti was struck on Jan. 12 by the worst earthquake in the hemisphere in 200 years.  More than 300,000 people died.  Port au Prince, the capital, was virtually destroyed.   International aid has largely failed to reach the people who need it, many of whom are homeless refugees, because of crime, corruption and inept management.  Later in the year a cholera epidemic killed at least a thousand more Haitians.

Heavenly hosts sing hallelujah . . .

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that corporations are people with unlimited powers of free speech, including the right to spend whatever it takes to rig elections and put only corporate-friendly hacks into office at every level of government.   Sixty-one per cent of the Roberts court’s rulings have been pro-business, as opposed to 42 per cent for all of the courts that preceded it.

Christ the savior is come . . .

June of 2010 was the fourth consecutive warmest month on record globally. Temperatures were 1.25 degrees F. above average, 2.2 degrees F. in the northern hemisphere.  In Moscow alone, 11,000 people died of hyperrthermia, edema, or other heat-related causes. A consensus of scientists held that these weather events could not have taken place if atmospheric carbon dioxide  had been at pre-industrial levels.

Christ the savior is come.

In 2010, The State of Texas required sweeping changes in textbooks for the state’s schools.  They will reflect that no Hispanic American ever achieved anything worth recording in history texts, but Phyllis Schlafly and the National Rifle Association did.  That the civil rights movement was rooted in the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers, not the non-violence of Martin Luther King.  That the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Christian country.  But because Thomas Jefferson, a leading Founder, coined the phrase, “Separation of church and state,” his name has been stricken from the list of “figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century,” replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. And science teachers must teach the creation myth as an alternative to real science.

Merry Christmas!  God bless us, every one.

Read more by Thomas Wark at http://bordellopianist.blogspot.com

When Barack Obama said at a meeting with GOP leaders last week he hadn’t done enough to reach out to Republicans in his first two years, after I cleaned up at the sink I had to invoke the words of Barney Frank and wonder — Mr. President, on which planet do you spend most of your time?

Then I figured out he was just laying the ground work for the mother of all “compromises, ” a capitulation on his campaign promise to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

It even came with a preamble, chastising his critics before their lips could mouth a protest: “Sympathetic as I am to those who prefer a fight over compromise, as much as the political wisdom may dictate fighting over solving problems, it would be the wrong thing to do, ” he said on Monday. “The American people didn’t send us here to wage symbolic battles or win symbolic victories. ”

On Tuesday, he poured salt in the wound, slamming the left wing of his own party, calling some Democrats “sanctimonious” for standing on principle, and whining that “this is the public option debate all over again. ”

Obama didn’t spare Republicans in his invective, comparing them to hostage-takers, but he carried the metaphor to regrettable lengths, contending that the temptation to resist hostage-takers fades when the hostages are in harm’s way. Al Qaeda will remember that one.

In selling the middle class down the river with his deal, even as he purported to act in its interest, Obama managed to redefine compromise itself. This isn’t compromise, it’s appeasement. It’s not deal-making but capitulation. You can’t compromise when you cede the ground before you try to draw the boundaries. You can’t make deals with bullies. You can’t offer concessions to power-hungry sociopaths. You can’t play Neville Chamberlain to Hitler. Well, of course you can, but when you finally realize you’d better draw a line in the sand you’re six feet under water.

The deal Obama swallowed was nothing less than Republican blackmail, with a dash of high fructose corn syrup for sweetening: The lockstep, hardass right, which wouldn’t budge on blocking an extension of unemployment benefits, which wouldn’t allow a vote on the Start Treaty, which refused to support protecting middle-income tax payers from the sunset of the Bush bill, got the president not only to blink once again but to take an infuriating swipe at his own political base. He’d extend the tax cuts across the board for two years and they’d extend unemployment benefits for 13 months. A temporary 2 percent cut in Social Security taxes could allow Obama to claim he was stimulating the economy, but even worse than the protected tax cut for the wealthy was a sweetheart throw-in on estate taxes that will help all of 39,000 American families at the top of the food chain while increasing the deficit by $25 billion.

As usual, Bernie Sanders told it like it is, vowing to fight the tax bill in any way he could and giving yet another speech that Obama, if he had any cojones, should have been giving. Sanders called the deal “a moral outrage, ” rightly noting it’s just the beginning of the right-wing agenda:

“In my view, it is a moral outrage that at a time when this country has a $13.8 trillion national debt, a collapsing middle class and a growing gap between the very rich and everybody else that the Republicans would deny extended unemployment benefits to 2 million workers who are desperately struggling to pay their bills and maintain their dignity. It is also beyond comprehension that the Republicans would hold hostage the entire middle class of this country so that millionaires and billionaires would receive huge tax breaks. In my view, that is not what this country is about and it is not what the American people want to see. Our job is to save the disappearing middle class, not lower taxes for people who are already extraordinarily wealthy and increase the national debt that our children and grandchildren would have to pay.

“The immediate political task in front of us is to rally the American people so that in the next several weeks we can find at least a few Republicans who will join us in saying no to increasing the deficit by giving tax breaks to the wealthy and no to holding the unemployed and the middle class hostage.

“I believe that we have the American people on our side on this issue. My office, and I come from a small state, has received more than 600 calls today, 99 percent of them in opposition to this so-called compromise that the president negotiated with the Republicans.

“I will do everything in my power to stand up for the American middle class and defeat this agreement.”

The real problem, as Sanders noted while Obama turned a blind eye, is that the tax deal will cause the deficit to balloon even further, so Republicans can come back in two years and cry oh, my goodness, this isn’t working and spending must be cut. Now just what spending do you think these bastards will want to cut: the defense budget — or education, Social Security and Medicare?

Obama was also wrong that the American people don’t want to draw a line in the sand and pitch a fight over the Bush tax cuts. Even Blue Dog Democrats in the House were outraged by the deal being floated, and early indications are that VP Joe Biden has some serious ‘splainin’ to do to get enough support to pass a bill anything like what Obama proposed.

And Sanders, all by himself, can filibuster in the Senate and stall any action in the upper chamber, which I hope he does, and which Americans of conscience from both parties and beyond should urge him to do, if it comes to that.

As for Obama, it is still unfathomable how a man of his intelligence and learning can persist in his self-deluded rationale of “compromise” with the very devils who have made it plain they want to make the country ungovernable for him, and in fact will bring government to a halt in the spring, when by law the national debt must be reauthorized.

Meanwhile Obama, playing right into their hands, is succeeding in splintering the Democratic Party, very likely drawing a primary challenge that will lead to a GOP victory in 2012, but much worse than that an ongoing and vicious bloodletting of middle-class America. At a time when the income gap in this country is shattering records and Republicans, with just enough help from Republican-lite Democrats, are obstructing every measure to help Main Street survive the rapaciousness of Wall Street, Obama refuses to lead, refuses to listen, refuses to acknowledge (in Paul Krugman’s words) the “kick me” sign on his back – while accusing those of us with a conscience and a backbone of ignoring reality.

Irony is so amusing if it’s not accompanied by pain and suffering.

The “Obama Renaissance” of the Democratic Party didn’t last long, did it? Dozens of interlocking factors contributed to the recent Republican resurgence. Here are a few of them:

• The Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision which allows the billionaires and their corporations to buy any and all elections. Democracy as we once knew it is over unless this is changed.

• The corporate media, owned by billionaires, which ignores whatever it wants to ignore, and supports whatever enhances the power of the ruling class.

• A totally obstructionist Republican Party, which prevented an economic recovery solely to enhance their own political power.

• A timid and collaborationist president and his Conserva-Dem allies, who would prefer working with Republicans than liberals.

• The Republicans have always had a far superior propaganda machine. For one thing, they actually have a message to promote (bullshit though it may be), while the Dems, as usual, depend on the corporate media to get their message out, and are unable to effectively articulate their side of the argument – probably because most Dems, starting with Obama, are actually stealth Republicans.

• Hate, hate, hate! Fear, fear, fear! Fox News and the hate jocks: Beck, Limbaugh, and all the rest. Every Podunk little town with a radio station has its own personal hate jock. The strategy here is to poison the discourse. Keep people confused, distracted, and fearful. Eliminate any possibility of idealism. Destroy whatever remains of the civilization we once knew.

What I find most fascinating is the “separate reality” the right-wing manipulators have created for their followers. Within this reality facts are optional, the cerebral cortex is short-circuited, and the lizard brain takes control. Liberals seem incapable of creating messages that speak directly to the brain stem the way that conservatives do. Our intellectual policy wonk discussions cause conservative eyes to glaze over.

The basis for the conservative philosophy, as exemplified by the teabaggers and bankrolled by the billionaires, is fundamentalist Christianity. This curious religion, with its peculiarly Old Testament emphasis, is a faith-based worldview. Faith means “belief without evidence.” There’s no need for logic, facts, or evidence within this worldview. Circular reasoning, or no reasoning at all, is typical. Christians know the truth, and there’s no need for further discussion. “You’re either with us or against us.” It’s a self-contained system that brooks no compromise.

This faith-based worldview supplants science, as the new Republican majority in Congress is about to show us. Take climate catastrophe, for example. In essence, the conservatives are saying, “We don’t believe in global warming. Therefore, global warming doesn’t exist.” Talk about circular reasoning! Pretty slick, eh? But unfortunately, global warming does exist, like it or not, and is rapidly getting worse. The conservative attitude is unspeakably arrogant, and will create tragic consequences for us all.

You can’t reason with people like this, because facts and reason play no role in their thought processes. Compromise is useless. All we can do is put all our energies into building up our side, and hope that our side prevails.

But is there really an “our side”? It looks to me that liberalism represents more a style of consumerism than a sustainable culture. Perhaps on a mental level we share similar ideologies, but in actuality, we’re just a bunch of consumers, pitifully unorganized for the most part, living our isolated lives and guarding, as best we can, our small share of the loot. I first noticed this phenomenon several decades ago, when there was a lot of talk about “community.” I realized that mouthing the words didn’t change anything: I was still totally on my own, and it was up to me to create whatever life I was capable of creating. I couldn’t depend on anybody else.

Perhaps this is why I have never taken liberals as individuals, or liberalism in general, as seriously as I might have preferred. I think liberals, by and large, are intelligent enough to create a measure of health, wealth and happiness for themselves; more power to them. They have achieved a certain level of satisfaction. There’s nothing wrong with this, but liberals, like all successful people, have a lot to lose, and are understandably cautious. They aren’t nearly desperate enough to actually risk anything, and thus the status quo continues.

Not surprisingly, a timid electorate elected a timid president. Those of us who knowingly voted for “the lesser of two evils” sure got our comeuppance, didn’t we? Even though we knew that we’d get screwed either way, Obama’s lack of leadership is more than most of us had expected. Sometimes we’ve got to fight for what we believe in, but Obama doesn’t seem to believe in much, except for protecting the ruling class. If we don’t fight for our own interests, we will soon end up with “shared sacrifice” being imposed on everybody but the wealthy. And let’s not forget the three-step process the ruling class has in store for us: fascism, serfdom, dieoff. We’ve already got fascism, and they’re busily working on the serfdom part. Dieoff will take care of itself. The Republicans and their billionaire overlords are not our friends, and there can be no compromise with them. And we can no longer support the compromisers – which means you, Dems.

The church-going fundamentalists have the advantage of a cohesive shared worldview that is reinforced every week when they go to church, and at all other times by their secular prophets such as Beck and Limbaugh. Liberals, in their diversity, tend to have a live-and-let-live attitude, which often translates into “whatever.”  But you can’t do much with such vagueness. Except, perhaps, to elect tepid politicians who will betray us at every turn.

Turning the fundamentalists into a disciplined political fighting machine was a brilliant strategy on the part of the ruling class. This isn’t surprising, because the billionaires can hire the best minds that money can buy to map out the most effective strategy for them. (The Democratic Party, on the other hand, systematically ignores the excellent advice that is constantly being offered to them for free on the Internet.)

We are now suffering from an unholy alliance between the fundamentalists, who will believe anything their authority figures tell them to believe, and the billionaires, who have unlimited resources which they have already used to purchase Congress, government policy, the news media, and every other lever of power that can be bought. The fundies and the billionaires have one goal in common: total dominion. “Enough” is not part of their vocabulary. At the point where we would expect sane people to say “enough is enough,” they cry, “More, more, more!”

In other words, they want it all, and they won’t stop until they get it. Unless they’re stopped, that is. The billionaires and their enablers are the most formidable adversary we have ever faced, but at least the fundamentalist philosophy contains the seeds of its own repudiation. Fundamentalism, at its core, is a harsh philosophy based on fear: fear of a supposedly all-loving, all-merciful Jehovah God who, in his compassionate vengeance, will send you straight to everlasting damnation and torment in Hell if you don’t profess the right ideology. This destructive, ancient belief system is already being slowly expunged from our culture. The demographics aren’t in their favor, which is why they are trying so desperately to take over while they still can. We can never compromise with such madness.

You will notice a theme developing here: No Compromise. Some of us actually feel the need to stand for something, starting with No Compromise. This is the opposite of Obama’s habit of collaborating with the enemy behind closed doors.  Many progressives have already repudiated Obama and the Dems, but the time isn’t quite ripe for this to go viral. Dem voters won’t really start to wake up until after the lame duck session is over and they see what the Dems did about Social Security and tax cuts for the wealthy and the Catfood Commission recommendations. The Dems will almost certainly continue their flagrant sellout as they squander the last days of their so-called majority. It will be a relief to them not being in the driver’s seat anymore. (Although the billionaires have been calling the shots all along.)

I read widely on the Internet. I read hundreds of articles for every article I write myself. I’m curious to see what other progressive-types are thinking. I’m assuming that if anybody figures out what to do – something that will really work – the strategy will quickly spread. I’m seeing mostly the same old stuff: “Elect more and better Dems.” “Vote Third Party.” “Start community gardens.” “Organize!” But recently I’ve been noticing an uptick in the outrage level. A certain percentage of Dem voters are tired of being betrayed by their so-called representatives. They’re getting pissed. They’re starting to revolt. And in their cautious American way, they’re revolting by doing nothing, which means not voting. This revolution has already started, and just wait till 2012.

Here’s one thing we can count on: The worse the objective situation, the worse the delusion level will become. We will be seeing some amazing new outbreaks of mass insanity as this situation grinds along. Let’s not overestimate the intelligence of the American people in the face of our challenging new reality: More Americans believe in angels than in evolution. As the tectonic plate of superstition (which held the world in darkness for millennia) collides with the tectonic plate of reason (which makes civilization possible), there will be many surprises in store. This will keep things very interesting for the remainder of our sojourn on this planet.

(My blog has a new address: http://newearthtimes2.blogspot.com )

“The tyranny most corrosive to democracy is not the tyranny of money but the tyranny of illusion.”
Benjamin Barber in The Nation

By Steve Klinger

The most frightening thing about the current state of the crumbling American Empire (aka democracy) isn’t military, political or even economic in nature – it’s cognitive. It is one thing to conduct a dialogue with those who dispute your point of view due to a different interpretation of facts, knowledge, logic or reason; it is quite another to try to communicate with those living in a different reality that values none of those concepts.

It’s like two people driving cars in opposite directions.  One has a view of the road and the other is looking at a video simulation. Multiply this by many millions and you can begin to comprehend the scale of the traffic wreck in which this nation is about to find itself. For the most part, the countless tons of metal have not yet collided, the human occupants have not yet been bloodied and mangled, but the squeal of the brakes is chilling as we hold our collective breath, anticipating the catastrophic impact.

The drivers looking through clear glass see heavy traffic but a possible way forward, if the rules of the road are obeyed. The others are steering to a screen that shows monsters and terrorists to be struck down, then switches randomly and in rapid order to American Idol, Glenn Beck, NASCAR and Sarah Palin’s Alaska. Barack Obama stands in the intersection with a whistle and a flashlight, eager to explain the inner workings of traffic control, but no one will listen, so he tells the drivers with clear windshields to come to a halt.

Hyperbole? Maybe so, but then the degree of cognitive dissonance in 21st-century America is unprecedented. In a society driven by unfettered free enterprise, controlled by an insatiable plutocracy, all the tools of Constitutional governance are breaking down as virtual wealth evaporates and real wealth drains into the richest pockets, and with it, political power. Blend this with a culture that values hedonism, hero-worship, distraction, violence, ignorance and addiction and it should come as no surprise that trouble lies ahead on every horizon.

Given its great wealth of natural resources and its centuries of success in dominating and exploiting those obstacles in its path to world dominion, it has taken a while for this nation to hit the wall. But now, running out of frontiers and resources, and faced with rising competition from hungrier, more disciplined, less decadent societies, the U.S. is unable to sustain the growth that fuels its lifestyle. All the complexities of modern civilization have robbed it one by one of obvious solutions, such as slavery, colonialism and wholesale outsourcing. Bereft of its former industrial production but with its appetites unslaked, the beast starts to devour itself through its one remaining industry: finance.

The rabble, drugged into complacency by the illusion of middle-class comforts and upper-class dreams, doesn’t begin to worry until all those well-laid plans of affluence and leisure start to run afoul of some very persistent realities: unemployment, foreclosure, immigrants, competition, declining wealth, natural disasters.

Under these conditions, fear, uncertainty, self-doubt and, yes, anger, quite naturally begin to arise. But given the illusions on which so many millions of Americans were raised – fantasies of wealth, happiness and success – is it surprising that in time of crisis the ability to reason or even value rationality should fail them?

Compound this with a cunning ability on the part of the media and politicians who serve as the mouthpieces for the plutocracy to find constant scapegoats for the masses to blame, to ignite culture wars in which champions of nonviolence, sharing, compassion and social justice are portrayed as elitist and conspiratorial. Hearkening back to those times of pestilence and famine when the primitive portions of the brain dictated human behavior, the puppetmasters sway their minions by invoking primal emotions that resonate with fear and fundamentalism. Thus can evolution theory come to be equated with creationism, and global warming be rationalized and bigotry justified.

Thus can someone like Sarah Palin do no wrong in the eyes of those who idolize her. To her supporters, the more she reveals ignorance, spews hypocritical platitudes and butchers words, the more admirably antithetical she becomes to the educated, reasonable, articulate “elitists” who put her down. Even quitting her elected position as Alaska’s governor doesn’t diminish her appeal because she has managed to personify the “rogue” image that contrasts with the career politicians from whom America needs to be “taken back.”

The movie Idiocracy hilariously portrayed a nation of dysfunctional morons 500 years in the future, but it begged the obvious question of whether it will take that long or there will be any nation left to govern. And in its broad satire, it failed to distinguish between a decline in pure intelligence and the more insidious reality of a culturally induced rejection of learning and reason, knowledge and science, logic and understanding.

Either way, the incapacity of the masses plays into the hands of those in whom the power really resides. It’s almost as if they planned it that way. The question to ask may not be whether Idiocracy takes place 500 years too late but whether 1984 was set 30 years too early.

Twenty-five centuries ago, governments were by dynastic monarchies, shamanistic religious dictatorships or warlords.  The Athenians came up with the radical liberal notion of government of, by and for its citizens. Even this revolutionary improvement on previous systems was not without  flaw.  When  Rome succeeded Greece as the dominant power in the civilized world, it replaced direct democracy with another radical liberal concept: representative democracy.

Guided by the Enlightenment philosophers they so admired, the founders of the American democracy sought to establish a republic in which the spectrum of political thought could endure not just as a system of checks and balances upon themselves, but also one which inherently militated against the excesses of power that could plunge it into anarchy, oligarchy, monarchy or military dictatorship. It was a system that borrowed much from Rousseau’s Social Contract, which itself can only function under a rule of law.

The two-party system that evolved within the republic of the founding fathers mandated a left, a right and a center of fluctuating but roughly equal strength.  The balance of power would always lie with the center, but balance could exist only if both left and right remained viable.

But the Democratic party deserted its base on the left and the base failed to reassemble around a new political organization. (The fatal weakness of a two-party democracy.) Today, the dwindling handful of liberal Democrats holding public office are not merely powerless within their party; they are treated with contempt by their party and its man in the White House.

The man in the White house wears a different party label than his predecessor, but his presidency is merely a continuation of most of the worst of the far right policies of the Bush II administration.

When the Republican House of Representatives has finished with Dr. Kidglove and the Timidocrats of the Senate two years hence, perhaps even the American electorate will realize that the democratic republic of the Founding Fathers is no more, its Constitution reduced to the status of, say, the Oath of the Tennis Court.

The democratic rule of law  began with the Athenian shift from law as something “imposed” –thesmoi — to something rooted in the people’s social traditions and ideals — nomoi . It came to us through the Enlightenment via the Magna Carta and our mother country’s system of common law.  Talk about radical liberal documents! The Magna Carta, as Winston Churchill put it, gave us “a law which is above the King and which even he must not break.”

In the United States, the framers passed on to us the idea of a “Supreme Law of the Land,” which was above everyone — President, Chief Justice, member of Congress. It brought us, directly from the Magna Carta, the supreme laws of habeas corpus, posse comitatus and, enshrined in the Fifth Amendment, due process.

But the Democrats of Congress, most of whom had long since abandoned the liberal principles of government in which our republic was born, ceded to George W. Bush powers that even the King of England doesn’t have: superiority over the law itself.  Now the president could order warrantless surveillance  of citizens; detention without charge or trial (due process), and criminal torture of detainees.  He could boast about it in print without fear of being brought to justice.  His successor could take his imperial presidency to new extremes and arrogate to himself the right to order the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens.

Dr. Kidglove has, in the name of “compromise,” extended many other violations of the Social Contract in both domestic and foreign affairs.  He will permit continuation of tax policies that favor the very rich over the other 98 per cent of the citizenry.  He will allow further corruption of an already bad “health care reform” law.  He will preside over the devastation of Social Security, further empowerment of huge corporations and the elimination of only those “earmarks” that help people rather than business, supposedly to reduce the government’s fiscal deficit.  He will continue to fight the illegal wars that caused the deficit and will ask for more and more funds to fight them and more and more American toops to bleed and die in them.

He will do all of these things, and more, because there is no political left in the United States to contest him.

There is no democracy here.

Read more blogs by Thomas Wark at http://www.bordellopianist.blogspot.com