Perhaps there were truly free markets before the industrial revolution, where townspeople and farmers gathered in a square to exchange livestock, produce and handmade tools. In our modern world, such a market does not exist. Governments set up the rules of the game, and those rules have an enormous impact on our economic outcomes.

In 2007, the year of the crash, the top 1 percent of American households took in almost two-and-a-half times the share of our nation’s pre-tax income that they had grabbed in the 40 years folliwing World War Two. This was no accident – the rules of the market underwent profound changes that led to the upward redistribution of trillions in income over the past 30 years. The rules are set by Congress – under a mountain of lobbying dollars – but they are adjudicated by the courts.

The Supreme Court, with a right-wing majority under Chief Justice John Roberts, has become a body that leans too far toward the “1 percent” to be considered a neutral arbiter. So whether they know all the ins and outs of the court’s profound rightward shift or not, those protesting across the country as part of the Occupy movement are motivated by its corruption as well.

While conservatives constantly rail against judges “legislating from the bench,” it is far more common for right-leaning jurists to engage in “judicial activism” than those of a liberal bent. That’s what a 2005 study by Yale University legal scholar Paul Gewirtz and Chad Golder found. According to the scholars, those justices most frequently labeled “conservative” were among the most likely to strike down statutes passed by Congress, while those most frequently labeled “liberal” were the least likely to do so.

A 2007 study by University of Chicago law professor Thomas J. Miles and Cass R. Sunstein looked at the tendency of judges to strike down decisions by federal regulatory agencies, and found a similar trend. The Supreme Court’s “conservative” justices were again the most likely to engage in this form of “activism,” while the “liberal” justices were most likely to exercise judicial restraint.

The most notorious case of activism by the Roberts court was its ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, which overturned key provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, rules that kept corporations — and their lobbyists and front groups (as well as labor unions) — from spending unlimited amounts of cash on campaign advertising within 60 days of a general election for federal office (or 30 days before a primary).

At a 2010 conference, former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, put the potential impact of Citizens United in stark terms. “We’re now in a situation,” he told the crowd, “where a lobbyist can walk into my office…and say, ‘I’ve got five million dollars to spend, and I can spend it for you or against you. Which do you prefer?’”

To arrive at their ruling, the court’s conservative majority stretched the Orwellian legal concept known as “corporate personhood” to the limit, and gave faceless multinationals expansive rights to influence our elections under the auspices of the First Amendment.

“They wanted to hear the possibility that that’s the way the constitution would read to them,” said Grayson. “So they picked an issue out of the air that nobody had conceived of [as a First Amendment case] because 100 years of settled law meant that corporations cannot buy elections in America, and they not only allowed corporations to buy those elections, but they made it a constitutional right.”

Early on, the plaintiffs themselves had decided not to base their case on the First Amendment. It was the conservative justices themselves who ordered the case re-argued fully a month after a ruling had been expected, asking the lawyers to present the free speech argument they’d earlier abandoned.

In his dissent, Justice Stevens noted that it was a highly unusual move, and that the court had further ruled on a Constitutional issue that it didn’t need to consider in order to decide the case before it — the diametric opposite of the principle of “judicial restraint.” He charged that the conservative majority had “changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”

That’s nothing new. The Citizens United decision simply advanced a bizarre legal doctrine, developed during the last 150 years, that effectively codifies the power of corporate interests.

Corporate personhood’s origin in English law was reasonable enough; it was only by considering companies “persons” that they could be taken to court and sued. You can’t sue an inanimate object.

During the 19th century, however, the robber barons, aided by a few corrupt jurists deep in their pockets, took the concept to a whole new level in the United States. According to legal textbooks, the idea that corporations enjoy the same constitutional rights as you or I was codified in the 1886 decision Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. But historian Thom Hartmann dug into the original case documents and found that this crucially important legal doctrine actually originated with what may be the most significant act of corruption in history.

It occurred during a seemingly routine tax case: Santa Clara sued the Southern Pacific Railroad to pay property taxes on the land it held in the county, and the railroad claimed that because states had different rates, allowing them to tax its holdings would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th  Amendment. The railroads had made the claim in previous cases, but the courts had never bought the argument.

In a 2005 interview, Hartmann described his surprise when he went to a Vermont courthouse to read an original copy of the verdict and found that the judges had made no mention of corporate personhood. “In fact,” he told the interviewer, “the decision says, at its end, that because they could find a California state law that covered the case ‘it is not necessary to consider any other questions’ such as the constitutionality of the railroad’s claim to personhood.”

Hartmann then explained how it was that corporations actually became “people”:

In the headnote to the case—a commentary written by the clerk, which is not legally binding, it’s just a commentary to help out law students and whatnot, summarizing the case—the Court’s clerk wrote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The discovery “that we’d been operating for over 100 years on an incorrect headnote” led Hartmann to look into the past of the clerk who’d written it, J. C. Bancroft Davis. He discovered that Davis had been a corrupt official who had himself previously served as the president of a railroad. Digging deeper, Hartmann then discovered that Davis had been working “in collusion with another corrupt Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Field.” The railroad companies, according to Hartmann, had promised Field that they’d sponsor his run for the White House if he assisted them in their effort to gain constitutional rights.

Hartmann noted that even after the ruling, the idea of corporate personhood remained relatively obscure until corporate lawyers dusted off the doctrine during the Reagan era and used it to help reshape the U.S. political economy.

Nike asserted before the Supreme Court . . . as Sinclair Broadcasting did in a press release last month, that these corporations have First Amendment rights of free speech. Dow Chemical in a case it took to the Supreme Court asserted it has Fourth Amendment privacy rights and could refuse to allow the EPA to do surprise inspections of its facilities. J.C. Penney asserted before the Supreme Court that it had a Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from discrimination—the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to free the slaves after the Civil War—and that communities that were trying to keep out chain stores were practicing illegal discrimination. Tobacco and asbestos companies asserted that they had Fifth Amendment rights to keep secret what they knew about the dangers of their products. With the exception of the Nike case, all of these attempts to obtain human rights for corporations were successful, and now they wield this huge club against government that was meant to protect relatively helpless and fragile human beings.

Such is the power of a corrupt judiciary.

Returning to the present, while Citizens United is arguably the Roberts court’s most widely criticized ruling, it was not the only time the majority has bent over backward to protect the interests of corporate America and the 1 percent. Legal reporter Dahlia Lithwick, writing on Slate, condemned the court’s “systematic dismantling of existing legal protections for women, workers, the environment, minorities and the disenfranchised.” Those who care about spiraling inequality, she wrote, “need look no further than last term at the high court to see what happens when—just for instance—one’s right to sue AT&T, one’s ability to being a class action against Wal-Mart, and one’s ability to hold an investment management fund responsible for its lies, are all eroded by a sweep of the court’s pen.”

The takeaway is that those camping out in town squares across the country must direct their energy not only at Wall Street, but also at its enablers, in Congress, and ultimately, at the high court.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Reposted from AlterNet.

Countercurrents.org

Mention fascism and most peoples’ minds turn to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Japanese Fascism, Papadopoulos’ Greece and South Africa’s Apartheid regime. However, most people are blissfully unaware of a rising form of fascism, more virulent than all past fascist regimes combined. Its aim is to subjugate the entire planet and its resources to U.S. corporate interests.

It is true that German Fascism, was evil, but it is also true that its evilness has been exploited, even exaggerated by one powerful Zionist entity and its supporters to justify the persecution and dispossession of the Palestinian people. German Fascism has diversified and mutated into super fascism supported by regimes claim to be “liberal democracies”.

The word Fascism originated from the Latin ‘Fasces’, means a bundle of sticks tied together to represent the ruling élite. At the heart of fascist ideology are corporatism, militarism, nationalism, racism and total control of citizens. Fascism is, “ a political system or regime with a tendency toward or actual exercise of Fascism ” [Webster's Dictionary]. Unfortunately, many opportunists and apologists for Israel-U.S. crimes use the word fascism as a name-calling, carelessly thrown it around to demonise others in order to mislead the public.

In his 2003 essay Fascism Anyone ? , the British writer, Laurence W. Britt, identifies fourteen characteristics of fascism common to past fascist regimes. Are they common and shared by regimes today? The purpose of this essay is to seriously inform people of the growing danger of fascism today, using the fourteen characteristics as a matchup.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism . Fascism is deeply rooted in a profound form of nationalism based on an illusion of race superiority, “white supremacy”. The Patriotic Act, “Anti-terrorism” laws, flag-waving, promotion of militarism and mass recitation of “Pledge of Allegiance” to promote war are common characteristics of xenophobic nationalism in the U.S., Israel, Europe and Australia. The American historian Howard Zinn writes: “ Is not nationalism – hat devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder – one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking–cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on–have been useful to those in power and deadly for those out of power”. Negative nationalism, including “patriotism”, is the greatest danger to civilisation.

In Europe, nationalism – once had plunged Europeans into protracted and barbaric wars –, is on the rise and it is threatening the survival of the European Union itself. It is a deadly virus spreading like fire throughout Europe, while the U.S. looks on happily. As nationalism spread, the fate of minorities is at the mercy of racist and populist sentiments.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights . Human rights are nothing more than pretext to enforce Western domination on the rest of the world. The U.S., Israel and Britain see human rights as an obstacle to their expansionist ideology and no country in the world in contempt of international human rights law than the U.S., Israel and Britain. The U.S. and Israel, in particular, are serial violators of human rights law. When European and U.S. politicians visited the Gaza Concentration Camp in Israel-occupied Palestine, the only prisoner they expressed concern about is an Israeli POW who has been accorded all his human rights under the Geneva Conventions by his Palestinian captors. They totally ignored some 11000 Palestinian prisoners, many of them women and children, who are subjected to gross human rights violations, including torture by the Israeli Gestapo. “Through clever use of propaganda by marginalizing and demonizing those being targeted, the population was brought to accept human rights violations, including torture and sexual abuses. When the abuses were egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation”, writes Laurence. Human rights abuses, including torture, are part of America’s violent history. The U.S. aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan exposed America’s dark history of torture and flagrant abuses of human rights.

Prisoners of war and detainees (many without charges) were incarcerated, abused and tortured in global gulags and concentration camps around the world. From Guantánamo Bay Camp in Cuba to Afghanistan to Iraq and to countless “black sites” prisons, innocent men, women and children have been subjected to injustice, human rights abuses and torture. In Iraq, there are hundreds of known and secret concentration camps and prisons, where innocent Iraqi civilians are being detained under deplorable conditions without being charged with any crime. Tens of thousands have been detained for years and an equal number have disappeared, possibly unlawfully executed. There are no charges, no due process and no justice. The situation in U.S.-NATO-occupied Afghanistan is even worse than in Iraq. Both nations were illegally invaded and have endured oppression, human rights abuses, injustice, torture, rape, and looting. One wonders why the Noble Prize Committee has no concern for Muslim prisoners’ welfare.

It is well-documented that the justice system in the U.S. is a travesty of justice. Guantánamo Bay Camp is considered “outside U.S. legal jurisdiction” despite it is located on a U.S. Navy base in Cuba. This flawed argument designed to deny justice to illegally detained men in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law. The Camp has become as notorious as, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram Base in Afghanistan. Prisoners, including male children are denied their human rights, abused and tortured, and some have been executed. Many have been destroyed mentally, although they have committed no crimes. For example, Omar Khadr, an Afghan-Canadian (child soldier) prisoner of war in Guantánamo Bay Camp since he was 15 years old is a case of naked hypocrisy. Khadr was tortured and coerced (forced to sign a confession) into plea-bargain and sentenced to 40 years in prison for allegedly killing a U.S. soldier on the battlefield while defending his country against an illegal foreign invasion, while U.S. and Western leader who committed heinous war crimes remain free and unindicted.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause . The most common characteristic of fascism is scapegoating of people from minorities. Even before 9/11, Muslims were identified as enemies, accused of ‘taking-over’ Europe. The event of 9/11 was an opportunity to justify attacking the scapegoats, Islam and Muslims. In Europe and many parts of the U.S., Canada and Australia, Muslims are often unfairly depicted as terrorists, anti-women and violent in order to justify racism and injustices. False flag terrorist acts orchestrated by Western governments to justify gross injustice and stirrup xenophobic fear against Muslims.

Most importantly, the rise of Islamophobia in the U.S. and Europe is fuelling the war on Islam and Muslim nations. In all these countries the population are feed (by the media) a daily diet of racism to improve their support for an aggressive war being waged by the U.S. and its allies against the Islam and Muslims. In Australia, anti-Muslims hatred and bigotry have infected every Australian institution. Racial profiling of Muslims has become a cancerous disease speeding rabidly into Australian government agencies, universities and even schools.

In the U.S., the war on Muslims is worsening and provides ammunition to America’s war on Islamic nations abroad. Islamophobia has become a fully-fledged Zionist industry that promotes fear of Muslims as part of U.S. war. The enemies of Israel are the enemies of the ruling élite. “ Much of this bigotry and misinformation can be traced directly to what I am calling the infrastructure of hate, an industry which connects venomous anti-Islamic blogs, wealthy [Jewish] donors, powerful think tanks, and influential media commentators, journalists, and politicians”, writes Frankie Martin, the Ibn Khaldun Chair Research Fellow at American University’s School of International Service in Washington DC ( Washington Post , 27 October 2010) .

Europe has become a bastion of Islamophobia. Clones of Adolf Hitler are sprouting like wild mushrooms all over Europe. Their fascist policies have become part of Europe’s mainstream politics. Many of these small clones have said that they are proud to be compared to Adolf Hitler. Their support is growing alarmingly in countries with an ugly history of collaboration with Nazi Germany. In the so-called “open” and “tolerant” societies of Austria, Belgium, Britain, Croatia, Denmark, France, Holland, Hungry, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland fascist forces are on the rise with a Zionist and militarist agenda.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism . The military industrial complex is the most powerful corporate industry in the U.S. The U.S. military budget is a phenomenal. It is estimated that the U.S. spend $623 billion – not includes $3 billion military aid to Israel – on military in 2008. U.S. military spending exceed the rest of the world’s spending combined. U.S. military feeds on the largest budget and resources, even when more than fifty million Americans are in desperate needs and the country is drowning in debt. Billions of U.S. tax payer dollars are spent on the military every day. As pointed out by Laurence; “The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling élite ”. The U.S. has access to the largest stockpiles of nuclear, biological, and chemical of weapons in the world that Hitler didn’t have. The world’s most militarised society is also ruled by a wealthy Zionist and neo-fascist ruling élite that could blow up the world at any time .

In addition to this giant monster, the world largest military organisation, NATO, is under the control of US generals and remains an instrument of the U.S. militarism. “The alliance itself is an excrescence of the U.S. military-industrial complex. For sixty years, military procurements and Pentagon contracts have been an essential source of industrial research, profits, jobs, Congressional careers, even university funding. The interplay of these varied interests converges to determine an implicit U.S. strategy of world conquest”, writes Diana Johnstone, author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions .  This offensive military “alliance” continues to expand in dangerous direction.

Under the rubric of “Western shared values and common interests”, the U.S. has assembled the biggest imperialist military force in history. Threatened and coerced, regimes from around the world are joining in drove with “slavish devotion” to U.S. wars. As mentioned earlier, fascism protects corporate interests and the ruling élite . It is not difficult to argue why so many regimes are joining U.S. aggressive wars. If they cannot join U.S war because of domestic pressure, they open their nations’ door’ to U.S. military. The U.S. military has more than 1000 fortified military bases (large and small) in countries around the world. They are not only used as launch pads for aggression against other nations, but also protecting hideous and corrupt dictators in most countries where they are based. Most of these bases are installed against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the local populations.

In a recent interview on 29 November 2010, U.S. ADM. James Stavridis, NATO supreme allied commander and U.S. European Command chief, told Defense News : “NATO is ‘a wealthy alliance’ with a $31 trillion collective GDP. It is a ‘big and capable alliance’ with 7 million troops and 3,400 ships”. It is a truly super fascist alliance. Its new concept of “expeditionary operations” means attacking nations beyond NATO territories, known that there is no other nation or groups of nations that pose any serious threat to this super fascist force. The existence of this militarised and “wealthy alliance” depends on unprovoked aggression and manufactured pretexts for war.

Naked Aggression

Militarism and aggression go hand in hand, like a parasite and its host. Nazi Germany, Fascist Japan and Apartheid South Africa were notorious examples. Today, the U.S., Britain and Israel are leading the way. In fact, there are striking similarities between the past three regimes and the current three regimes. Naked aggression has been integrated into U.S.-Western corporate culture.

Since World War Two, the U.S. – supported by the like of Britain, Israel Canada and Australia – has massacred more civilians and destroyed more nations than all past fascist regimes combined. It is rightly argued that every U.S. government (including every U.S. president) since 1945, is guilty of war crimes and flagrant violation of international law . Any nation that refuses to submit to U.S.-Zionist ideology and U.S. dictate is threatened with violence. “You’re either with us or against us”, said George W. Bush. There is no neutrality, and nations’ sovereignty has become obsolete.

Even a great nation like China is threatened. If China “refuses” to submit to Western dictate, we must be prepared to use force (i.e., aggression), said Kevin Rudd, former prime minister (now foreign minister) of Australia, the U.S. “staunch” vassal in Asia-Pacific. You think Rudd, who claims to be an “expert” on China, thinks twice before making such an unwise statement. “Every 10 years or so the U.S. needs to pick up some [defenceless] little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business”, writes Michael Ledeen, a U.S. Zionist propagandist. Every country that has been invaded by the U.S. military was left a shattered graveyard and a humanitarian misery. The aim is to instil fear in the world’s population, dominate the world and force U.S. dictate onto another people.

It is vitally important to highlight few recent examples of U.S. aggression and flagrant violation of international law. The U.S. war on Korea (1950-1953) caused the unnecessary death of some 3 million Koreans and destroyed every city and village in North Korea or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Since 1953, the DPRK has been defending itself against U.S. aggression and ongoing false propaganda. The 1953 armistice designed to justify U.S. military presence in the region and threatened neighbouring nations.

A decade after the aggression against North Korea, the U.S. began another decade-long criminal aggression against the people of Vietnam that caused the death of more than 3 million innocent civilians and contaminated the country with biological and chemical agents, including napalm. Despite its military superiority, unlimited resources and indiscriminate violence, the U.S.-imperialism was defeated by a peasant society. In 1991, the U.S. began a criminal aggression against Iraq to “eradicate” its defeat in Vietnam and remove the so-called the “Vietnam syndrome”.

It is estimated that t he 1990 U.S.-Britain enforced genocidal sanctions caused the death of more than 2 million innocent Iraqi civilians, including the death of more than 600,000 infants under the age of five. On 15 December, 2010, the UN Security Council – chaired by no other than U.S. Vice-President, the Zionist Joe Biden – voted to “end” the sanctions on Iraq after the puppet government accepted U.S. conditions, including long-lasting colonial occupation. According to John Mueller and Karl Mueller, the brutal and inhumane sanctions against the Iraqi people have caused far more deaths over time than the combined use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the two world wars (Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999). Asked whether this was worth the death of half a million children, Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN replied: “We think the price is worth it”. The genocidal sanctions followed by the 2003 criminal U.S.-British aggression. The unprovoked aggression is the most barbaric aggression in the history of barbarism; a supreme international war crime. It was premeditated aggression against a defenceless people under genocidal siege. Despite the suffering inflicted on the Iraqi people, the crimes were covered-up by the media. (For more on U.S. crimes in Iraq, see: Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions , Harvard, 2010).

In 2001, the U.S. began replicating the atrocities in Vietnam are being replicated in Afghanistan. Since 2001, U.S. and NATO force have occupied and terrorise the nation of Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S.-NATO indiscriminate and relentless U.S. aerial bombing and strafing, including the illegal and criminal drone attacks on Afghanistan and Pakistan that caused the death of more than 2000 Pakistani civilians. For the people of Afghanistan, living conditions and security have deteriorated beyond belief under a new form of Western colonialism. Like all U.S. aggressions, the war on Afghanistan is a crime against humanity. It is vitally important to note that; ”all the war crimes the U. S. has committed against other peoples were not planned and carried out by sadistic thugs or xenophobic right-wingers but by ordinary folks who come from solid family backgrounds, are well mannered, display elevated cultural taste, and may even be informed by good intentions, writes Boggs. And the planners of these horrendous crimes are mostly so-called whiz kids liberal, cultured, urbane, visionary government officials and many celebrated academics from the Ivy League Schools”, writes Carl Boggs, a Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles .

According to a report entitled Project for the New American Century authored by a gang of U.S. Zionists and neo-fascists, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Kagan, which was published 2008, the fall of Communism is an opportunity for the U.S. to rule the world militarily and establish a new worldwide empire through aggression and permanent war, using international organisations such as, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to provide cover and legitimacy for U.S. crimes, mostly committed in broad daylight.

In October 2001, then U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney said that U.S. “war on terror” was “different” from other wars: “in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime”. In other words, the U.S. is in perpetual war of aggression against countries and people the U.S. ruling élite deemed to be counters to U.S. imperialism.

5. Rampant sexism . The ruling élite of fascist regimes tend to be male-dominated. Fascism mobilise masculine virile energy in time of war. One of the lies used to justify U.S. aggression against defenceless people is the “liberation” of women. In fascist regimes, women are seen as less aggressive, gay-sympathisers and tend to be anti-abortion, although not all women are anti-abortion. In most U.S.-led Western societies, the political and economic establishments are still very male-dominated. Women are considered less intelligent and lack the ‘ethics’ of strong male leaders. Treated as second-class citizens, women play a secondary role. Violence, including sexual violence, against women is as high as U.S. skyscrapers. The current trends of using women as “seductive” tools to win votes for a particular male-dominated party are a tragedy not an advancement in gender equality.

6. A controlled mass media. The media and the “entertainment” industry important tasks are the coercion and indoctrination of the population from early childhood. Zionist propagandists called this the “intelligent manipulation of the masses”. It is a formidable achievement with truly global results. Just take a look at the tens of thousands of Australians flocked to Sydney Harbour to see Oprah Winfrey.

Objectivity doesn’t exist in corporate media, and “free speech” is free if the ruling élite like it. Today’s propaganda is more superior and more efficient than at any time in history of propaganda. it is a global propaganda rife with distortion, slander, cover-ups and outright lies. The main players are the U.S. government and wealthy U.S. Zionists with a complete monopoly on mainstream media. From TV channels such as, CNN, CBS, Fox News, BBC and print media like Murdoch Press and the New York Times to Internet web sites like Google, Facebook and YouTube, all owned by pro-Israel Zionist Jews. According to Canadian journalist, Eric Walberg; ”Google co-founder and billionaire Sergei Brin is a big supporter financially of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that funds Jewish immigrants to settle in Israel” on Palestinian land. In addition, the U.S. corporate élite and wealthy U.S. Zionists have a total control on the “entertainment” industry, including Hollywood, which plays an important role in spreading pro-U.S. Zionist propaganda.

While the rhetoric of “free media” is prevalent in most Western countries, a culture of censorship is widespread even by the most “independent” and “alternative” media outlets. Journalists and reporters have to abide by and adhere to a one-sided framework that promotes U.S.-Western fascist policies. Because if they deviates from this ‘ doctrinal framework’ or from the line of serving power, they wouldn ‘ t get their work published. Propagandists and apologists (i.e., accomplices in war crimes) are rewarded and elevated to iconic status in the media in order to be perceived by the public as even-handed “intellectuals”. Anyone deviates from this fascist framework risks persecution and character assassination.

The ongoing criminal attacks by Western politicians and the corporate media on WikilLeaks for daring to release a large cache of U.S. “diplomatic” cables. U.S. politicians and commentator in the corporate media have called WikilLeaks a terrorist organisation and are calling for its co-founder, Julian Assange, to be thrown in Guantánamo Bay Camp or killed by Special Forces. A former assistant to Canadian prime minister the extremist Stephen Harper has proposed assassination as the best way to remove Assange. T he primary aim of this violent thinking is to warn and blackmail others. It is also possible that the U.S. and its allies are using WikilLeaks to justify silencing dissident media, particularly in the Internet.

While the WikilLeaks disclosure is a welcome relief, the mainstream and corporate media have selected few cables to promote U.S. war on Iran and North Korea and undermine the impact of the leaked information. As one of the New York Times mindless propagandists, David Brooks writes: “ The Times has thus erected a series of filters between the 250,000 raw documents that WikilLeaks obtained and complete public exposure. The paper has released only a tiny percentage of the cables. Information that might endanger informants has been redacted. Specific cables have been put into context with broader reporting” ( NYT 29 November 2010). Where are the lies used to justify the U.S. aggression against Iraq? Exposure of these lies will strengthen the case of war crimes against the perpetrators of the war and the deaths of more than a million innocent Iraqis . Does WikiLeaks have anything related to Israel’s serious war crimes and terrorist acts? In reality, a lot of the leaked cables are dubious in nature and benefits Israel’s fascist agenda more than and undermining U.S. imperialism and threatening U.S. national security.

7. Obsession with national security . The so-called “war on terrorism” is meaningless. First, it is a manufactured catchall phrase to label and demonise the enemy and protect the ruling élite; and second, it is a pretext to justify aggressive wars and control the population through draconian laws and repressive measures. The Washington Post (20 December 2010) reports that since 9/11 the U.S. “ is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators”. The U.S. claim that it needs the information to protect the population from acts of terrorism is ironic. The U.S. is the world’s biggest exporter of terrorism and a source of instability everywhere. In the new age of “security”, police and security guards littered the streets of Western cities and towns ready for every move. Peaceful protesters are attacked with rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper spray. If arrested, protestors risk criminal charges and imprisonment.

In the U.S., presidential directives allow police and security agents (CIA and FBI) to abduct, kidnap, detain indefinitely and torture people suspected of planning “terrorism”. In February 2010, President Obama signed a one-year extension of three provisions of the Patriotic Act to allow the government “to obtain roving wiretaps over multiple communication devices, seize suspects’ records without their knowledge ” ( Christian Science Monitor , 01 March, 2010). Americans have been told to spy on their neighbours, a despicable act which was used by the Nazis.

In the current case of WikilLeaks, a number of U.S. Congressmen and journalists have called for the prosecution of Julian Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act for breaching U.S. security. This is not something out of the blue, but has been used in the past to prosecute American citizens. It is reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s prosecution of people – labelled “traitors” – who criticised the Nazi Party or made joke about the F u ehrer.

In the U.S. and in Europe, communities and entire cities have been subjected to 24-hours camera surveillance – a form of repression. Large metropolitan cities like London, New York and Chicago have become forests of surveillance cameras and by far the most camera-surveilled cities in the world. One quarter of the world’s surveillance cameras are in Britain. Citizens are watched around the clock and their movements are recorded and tracked (through a series of ID cards and credit cards) as they go about their daily business. In addition, many cities in the U.S. have begun using iris scanning technology, an invasive form of identification. Fear is forcing people to make more concessions.

According to civil rights groups and privacy advocates, the growing culture of surveillance posed great threat to civil liberties and personal freedom of citizens. The aim is to have a total control of society by whatever means, and force people to submit to draconian laws. Furthermore, the obsession with national security is also a corporate business that benefits the manufacturers of surveillance cameras, iris scanners and their Congressional lobbyists. Security is simply a pretext for no personal security.

8. Religion and ruling élite tied together . George W. Bush justified his criminal wars as a “message from God”. Hence, opposing Bush’s war crimes was considered an attack on God, Bush’s God. The U.S. is not exceptional, most regimes (even the most unreligious) use religion to rally support for a godless ruling élite .

The U.S is one of the most religious countries in the world, almost fanatical. Successive U.S. regimes attached themselves to the state predominant religion, Christianity. Furthermore, a large segment of the American population, including more than fifty million (and growing) Evangelical Christian-fascists are religious fanatics that form the political base of the Republicans Party.

No other nation uses religion to justify war crimes than the state of Israel in Palestine. The Zionist entity is forcing the rest of the world to recognise it as a “Jewish state”, so it can commit more crimes.

9. Power of corporations protected . Fascism is characterised by a “corporatist approach to economics”, as in the U.S. and major Western states today. Indeed, protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism. It is not secret, what is good for IBM and Boeing is good for the country. According to a new report by the New York Times , even the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is increasingly defending and siding with corporate interests. The ruling élite “have chosen to serve the narrowest possible private minority interests of transnational financial and industrial corporations”, writes Susan George of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Hence, fascism is corporatism. The ruling élite write the rules in ways to benefit the few (owners of corporations) at the expense of the majority. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised.

The ruling élite see the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production, but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic élite were often pampered by the political élite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of the “have-not” citizens. The ruling-corporate élites are so powerful, even if a change in the White House doesn’t lead to a change in policy. The Obama Administration proposal of a two-year pay freeze for all civilian federal workers while leaving Wall Street and corporate CEOs continue to make record profits and bonuses through tax cuts and bail-out is a case in point. In his recent fiscal deal with the Republicans, President Obama cut the net earnings of the lowest-paid workers and passed them to the wealthiest 1 per cent Americans. In other words , Obama agreed to extend George W. Bush tax cut to the wealthiest Americans.

10. Power of labour suppressed or eliminated . Under fascist regimes, unions and organised labour considered enemy of the state. In the U.S, the working-class or public workers have been decimated by successive U.S. regimes on behalf of big wealthy corporations.

In most Western countries striking union workers were attacked and organized labour was crashed by the ruling élite and its corporate allies. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former Australian prime minister, the bigoted John Howard were vicious enemies of unions and the working-class. In Germany, France, Spain and Greece, anti-labour laws are on the rise.

One of the major reasons Western powerful corporations have relocated their export industries off-shore to China and elsewhere is to exploit the labour there and ineffective regulations in host countries. The high profits operations have destroyed organised labour at home, in the U.S., Europe, Japan and South Korea. Economic ‘globalisation’, a variant of U.S. imperialism, has perpetuated workers exploitation.

Local workers (“Third World” workers) are forced to work under criminal and inhumane conditions, and paid poverty-level- wages. If they protested, they will be dealt with severely. The recent case in Chittagong, Bangladesh when police fired on striking garment workers killing 4 workers and injured more than 150 workers is a case in point.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts . “Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes”, writes Laurence. In fascist regimes, ignorance is encouraged while intellectualism and awareness were discouraged. Intellectuals and the arts are promoted and encouraged as far as they provide needed propaganda.

In the U.S., the McCarthyism era was followed by different forms of repression. People who question or doubt the official story of 9/11 are demonised and depicted as anti-American “conspirators”. The event was used as an opportunity for the U.S. government to crackdown on dissent, including students’ protest and academic freedom.

Through tight control of intellectual and academic freedom, universities have turned into right-wing think tanks and racist laboratories of citizens’ indoctrination. Universities have become powerful and privileged corporations that seemed far removed from the daily life of ordinary people. Academics are paid propagandists spreading false propaganda to manipulate the masses.

Terry Eagleton, who was forced to retire from his post as John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University writes: “By and large, academic institutions have shifted from being the accusers of corporate capitalism to being its accomplices? They are intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries”. As Laurence writes; “Politically independent academics harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed”.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment . The U.S. is leading the world in incarceration rate and the prison industry is one of the largest “growth” industries. The U.S. has more prisoners than anywhere on the planet. Nearly 10% of the population or one in 100 adults in the U.S. is in jail or prison. On average, one in every 20 American men is behind bars or “being monitored”. In 2008, about 5.1 million people were on probation or parole. Most of those incarcerated are African-Americans and Latinos caught in an unjust and corrupt justice system. According to the Washington Post (29 February 2008); “ One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group”.

Police power is sacrosanct and promoted to the point of encouraging abuse of people from minorities. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuses. Petty crimes is exaggerated and used and as an excuse for more police power. With the help of the media and Hollywood, crimes have also become an obsession of the majority. The ruling élite like to talk tough every time they talk about crimes, but not their own.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption . The U.S. and Israel are ranked very high amongst the most corrupt nations in the world. The economic and the ruling élite used their positions to enrich themselves and their cronies. “Corruption worked both ways; the ruling élite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic élite , who in turn would gain the benefit of government favouritism”, writes Laurence.

In general, cronyism and corruption are widespread in most Western countries, but it is cleverly covered-up and normalised in the media and in ruling élite circles. For example, in Australia, cronyism and corruption are parts of the Australian culture and deeply embedded in every government, public and private institution. Privileged employment and positions are all in the hands of white Australians and it is a well fenced territory. There is no exception throughout Australia, one state is more corrupt and more prejudice than the other.

The same rampant culture of cronyism and corruption is also exported world-wide, particularly, to countries occupied by Western forces. After the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. authorities began an expensive campaign to promote cronyism and corruption among the ruling élite, the puppet governments. The aim is to demonise the nations and cover-up the crimes of the occupying forces. It is no coincidence that Afghanistan and Iraq are amongst the most corrupt nations in the world today.

14. Fraudulent elections . Former U.S. president George W. Bush was an illegitimate president for two terms having arrived at the White House through well-known rigged elections. In general, U.S. elections are nothing more than a marketing campaign to manipulate and deceive the public because the U.S. is ruled by a powerful unelected ruling class. It is a plutocracy masquerading as democracy. The so-called, two-party system is a fraud. It is a one-party with two branches system that serves corporate interest. It doesn’t matter who occupy the White House.

The U.S. love affair with fraudulent elections in countries ruled by murderous dictators and corrupt despots is not secret. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Kosovo to Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan to Egypt and to Honduras and Haiti, the U.S. record of financing and staging fraudulent elections is staggering. Moreover, U.S. role in “colour revolutions” – in Uzbekistan, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan – produced the kind of despots that the U.S. ruling élite love to support. In reality, the U.S. is a leading exporter of fraudulent elections and an arch enemy of democracy. Throughout the world, the U.S. interference designed to promote instability and exploit local conflicts to expand U.S. imperialism.

In most European countries that pretend to be “liberal democracies”, elections lack transparency and accountability which undermines democracy and gives rise to cynicism and mistrust. They are becoming increasingly authoritarian. It is true, people have to vote, but their votes are meaningless. It is always, the same old wine in new bottle. All over Europe, elections are used to manipulate and con the population. “The European Union is not a democratic entity”, writes Susan George. It is an authoritarian state. “Anti-democratic values are taking hold. We have become stakeholders instead of citizens, consumers instead of sovereign people, we are offered consultation rather than real participation”, she added.

Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1995 , the Italian writer and academic Umberto Eco, also identified fourteen “features that are typical” of what Eco called “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism”. Umberto noted that not all of the fourteen features have to be present at the same time for a regime to be called fascist, and “many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it” . Umberto writes: “Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes [Croatia]. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound [the American expatriate fascist]. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola”. Like the above matchup of fourteen characteristics, Umberto argued that all fourteen features that he identified applied to the U.S. regime to some degree.

Finally, the U.S. and many U.S. allies – Britain and Israel, to name two – have already entered a moment with all the characteristics of fascist regimes. With a complete monopoly on military power, violence and the media, the U.S. is a super fascist state , proliferating and propping-up smaller fascist states . It has become clear that, world order is no longer governed by international law and civilised norms, nor by treaties based on peaceful and multilateral agreements, but is based on the U.S. use of military threat and violence in pursuit of a fascist ideology to dominate the on behalf of U.S. ruling-corporate élite .

It is not difficult to predict the future under U.S. fascist domination. Fascism is not the way to defend freedom, promote democracy and provide security, adherence to the rules of law and civilised norms is. It is the duty of conscious people to dissent together against a U.S.-led super fascism on behalf of humanity.

Ghali Hassan is an independent political analyst living in Australia.

07 December, 2010
TruthDig.com

Innocence, as defined by law, makes us complicit with the crimes of the state. To do nothing, to be judged by the state as an innocent, is to be guilty. It is to sanction, through passivity and obedience, the array of crimes carried out by the state.

To be innocent in America means we passively permit offshore penal colonies where we torture human beings, some of whom are children. To be innocent in America is to acquiesce to the relentless corporate destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. To be innocent in America is to permit the continued theft of hundreds of billions of dollars from the state by Wall Street swindlers and speculators. To be innocent in America is to stand by as insurance and pharmaceutical companies, in the name of profit, condemn ill people, including children, to die. To be innocent in America is refusing to resist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are not only illegal under international law but responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people. This is the odd age we live in. Innocence is complicity.

The steady impoverishment and misery inflicted by the corporate state on the working class and increasingly the middle class has a terrible logic. It consolidates corporate centers of power. It weakens us morally and politically. The fraud and violence committed by the corporate state become secondary as we scramble to feed our families, find a job and pay our bills and mortgages. Those who cling to insecure, poorly paid jobs and who struggle with crippling credit card debt, those who are mired in long-term unemployment and who know that huge medical bills would bankrupt them, those who owe more on their houses than they are worth and who fear the future, become frightened and timid. They seek only to survive. They accept the pathetic scraps tossed to them by the corporate elite. The internal and external corporate abuse accelerates as we become every day more pliant.

Our corrupt legal system, perverting the concept that “all men are created equal,” has radically redefined civic society. Citizens, regardless of their status or misfortune, are now treated with the same studied indifference by the state. They have been transformed from citizens to commodities whose worth is determined solely by the market and whose value is measured by their social and economic functions. The rich, therefore, are rewarded by the state with tax cuts because they are rich. It is their function to monopolize wealth and invest. The poor are supposed to be poor. The poor should not be a drain on the resources of the state or the oligarchic elite. Equality, in this new legal paradigm, means we are all treated alike, no matter what our circumstances. This new interpretation of equality, under which the poor are abandoned and the powerful are unchecked, has demolished the system of regulations, legal restraints and services that once protected the underclass from wealthy and corporate predators.

The creation of a permanent, insecure and frightened underclass is the most effective weapon to thwart rebellion and resistance as our economy worsens. Huge pools of unemployed and underemployed blunt labor organizing, since any job, no matter how menial, is zealously coveted. As state and federal social welfare programs, especially in education, are gutted, we create a wider and wider gulf between the resources available to the tiny elite and the deprivation and suffering visited on our permanent underclass. Access to education, for example, is now largely defined by class. The middle class, taking on huge debt, desperately flees to private institutions to make sure their children have a chance to enter the managerial ranks of the corporate elite. And this is the idea. Public education, which, when it functions, gives opportunities to all citizens, hinders a system of corporate neofeudalism. Corporations are advancing, with Barack Obama’s assistance, charter schools and educational services that are stripped down and designed to train classes for their appropriate vocations, which, if you’re poor means a future in the service sector. The eradication of teachers’ unions, under way in states such as New Jersey, is a vital component in the dismantling of public education. Corporations know that good systems of public education are a hindrance to a rigid caste system. In corporate America everyone will be kept in his or her place.

The beating down of workers, exacerbated by the prospect that unemployment benefits will not be renewed for millions of Americans and that public sector unions will soon be broken, has transformed those in the working class from full members of society, able to participate in its debates, the economy and governance, into terrified people in fragmented pools preoccupied with the struggle of private existence. Those who are economically broken usually cease to be concerned with civic virtues. They will, history has demonstrated, serve any system, no matter how evil, and do anything for a salary, job security and the protection of their families.

There will be sectors of the society that, as the situation worsens, attempt to rebel. But the state can rely on a huge number of people who, for work and meager benefits, will transform themselves into willing executioners. The reconfiguration of American society into a corporate oligarchy is conditioning tens of millions not only to passively accept state and corporate crimes, but to actively participate in the mechanisms that ensure their own enslavement.

“Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1945 essay “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” “it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of hangman.”

Organs of state repression do not rely so much on fanatics and sadists as ordinary citizens who are desperate, who need a job, who are willing to obey. Arendt relates a story of a Jew who is released from Buchenwald. The freed Jew encountered, among the SS men who gave him certificates of release, a former schoolmate, whom he did not address but stared at. The SS guard spontaneously explained to his former friend: “You must understand, I have five years of unemployment behind me. They can do anything they want with me.”

Arendt also quotes an interview with a camp official at Majdanek. The camp official concedes that he has assisted in the gassing and burying of people alive. But when he is asked, “Do you know the Russians will hang you?” he bursts into tears. “Why should they? What have I done?” he says.

I can imagine, should the rule of law ever one day be applied to the insurance companies responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans denied medical care, that there will be the same confused response from insurance executives. What is frightening in collapsing societies is not only the killers, sadists, murderers and psychopaths who rise up out of the moral swamp to take power, but the huge numbers of ordinary people who become complicit in state crimes. I saw this during the war in El Salvador and the war in Bosnia. It is easy to understand a demented enemy. It is puzzling to understand a rational and normal one. True evil, as Goethe understood, is not always palpable. It is “to render invisible another human consciousness.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his book “The Gulag Archipelago” writes about a close friend who served with him in World War II. Solzhenitsyn’s defiance of the Communist regime after the war saw him sent to the Soviet gulags. His friend, loyal to the state, was sent there as an interrogator. Solzhenitsyn was forced to articulate a painful truth. The mass of those who serve systems of terrible oppression and state crime are not evil. They are weak.

“If only there were vile people … committing evil deeds, and if it were only necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

The expansions of public and private organs of state security, from Homeland Security to the mercenary forces we are building in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the burgeoning internal intelligence organizations, exist because these “ordinary” citizens, many of whom are caring fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, have confused conformity to the state with innocence. Family values are used, especially by the Christian right, as the exclusive definition of public morality. Politicians, including President Obama, who betray the working class, wage doomed imperial wars, abandon families to home foreclosures and bank repossessions, and refuse to restore habeas corpus, are morally “good” because they are loyal husbands and fathers. Infidelity, instead of corporate murder, becomes in this absurd moral reasoning the highest and most unforgivable offense.

The bureaucrats who maintain these repressive state organs, who prosecute the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or who maintain corporate structures that perpetuate human suffering, can define themselves as good—as innocent—as long as they are seen as traditional family men and women who are compliant to the laws of the state. And this redefinition of civic engagement permits us to suspend moral judgment and finally common sense. Do your job. Do not ask questions. Do not think. If these bureaucrats were challenged for the crimes they are complicit in committing, including the steady dismantling of the democratic state, they would react with the same disbelief as the camp guard at Majdanek.

Those who serve as functionaries within corporations such as Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil and carry out crimes ask of their masters that they be exempted from personal responsibility for the acts they commit. They serve corporate structures that kill, but, as Arendt notes, the corporate employee “does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity.” At home the corporate man or woman is meek. He or she has no proclivity to violence, although the corporate systems they serve by day pollute, impoverish, maim and kill.

Those who do not carry out acts of rebellion, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, are guilty of solidifying and perpetuating these crimes. Those who do not act delude themselves into believing they are innocent. They are not.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a weekly columnist for Truthdig. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.” On Dec. 16 he, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, Dr. Margaret Flowers and several others will hold a rally across from the White House to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and attempt to chain themselves to the White House fence. More information on the Dec. 16 protest can be found at www.stopthesewars.org.

There will be many bad memories from the summer of 2010. We’ve seen the worst oil disaster in U.S. history, record temperatures across the globe, calving ice chunks the size of Manhattan, record heat waves and wildfires in Russia, and floods in Pakistan submerging one-fifth of the country. These extreme weather events are consistent with scientists’ predictions about global warming, and they portend more catastrophes to come as greenhouse gas pollution spews unchecked from power plants, vehicles, and factories [1].

But as the case for action grew more urgent Big Oil, Dirty Coal, and other energy companies redoubled their efforts to block congressional adoption of global warming pollution reductions. With that effort successful they are now scheming to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from following the law and setting reduction standards for the largest polluters.

Reductions would effectively establish a price on carbon pollution that would increase incentives to invest in clean energy technologies, create jobs, and enhance international competitiveness. The United States needs these investments now more than ever as it falls further behind international competitors like China that are forging ahead with investments in clean energy technologies that create jobs, stimulate economic growth, and increase their international competitiveness.

This occurs while the United States still suffers high unemployment and slow growth as we emerge from the worst recession in eighty years. Clean energy and climate legislation would create jobs and stimulate the growth of clean energy industries as well as hold polluters accountable for their emissions. Unfortunately, the Senate was unable to muster a supermajority of 60 votes to limit the danger of burning fossil fuels after the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act.

This failure is no accident. Big Oil, Dirty Coal, and other special interests like the American Petroleum Institute combined spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers and filling their campaign coffers. So far, these dirty energy corporations have gotten their money’s worth.

Companies and trade associations have two powerful tools to defeat measures they don’t like. They can spend millions of dollars on lobbying to strong arm legislators into opposing measures that they believe will cost them money. And these special interests can bequeath campaign cash to legislators who support their agenda while funding the opponents of those willing to oppose them.

So just how much are these groups spending to defeat climate legislation? We created a preliminary “political pressure” measure that combines the funds companies and trade associations spent on lobbying and on their political action committee donations. This measure, however, significantly underestimates special interests’ total advocacy efforts because there are no public reporting requirements for spending on many traditional pressure tactics such as earned media, polling, rallies, and television advertising (which these companies and associations heavily engage in). Further, companies’ donations to trade associations are kept secret, and the recent Citizens United Supreme Court decision empowers corporations to spend their money to elect or defeat candidates often without any disclosure or reporting requirements.

Lobbying activities ramped up in 2009 as the House of Representatives began debate on the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Senate deliberations began last fall and continued throughout 2010. The entire electric utility industry spent more than $264 million on lobbying alone in 2009 and the first half of 2010. Oil and gas interests spent a record $175 million lobbying in 2009—a 30 percent increase from 2008—and have spent $75 million already in 2010.

The oil, gas, and coal industries have spent over $2 billion lobbying Congress since 1999. These three industries combined spent a whopping $543 million on lobbying in 2009 and the first two quarters of 2010. Meanwhile, alternative energy companies spent less than $32 million on lobbying efforts in 2009 and have only spent $14.8 million this year.

The 20 biggest-spending oil, mining, and electric utility companies shelled out $242 million on lobbying from January 2009 to June 2010 [2]. Trade associations that generally oppose clean energy policies spent another $290 million during this time. This is over $1,800 in lobby expenditures a day for every single senator and representative.

Six of the seven companies with the largest lobbying expenditures are Big Oil companies—ExxonMobil (1), ConocoPhillips (2), Chevron (3), BP (5), Koch Industries (6), and Shell (7). Their 18-month lobbying expenditures total $143 million. Their agenda varies among companies, but generally they oppose most proposals to reduce global warming pollution from oil refineries and transportation fuels. And they seek to limit companies’ liability for oil spills like the BP oil disaster.

Southern Company, a major utility with significant coal-fired power generation, was the fourth-largest lobbying company at nearly $20 million. The company is a longtime opponent of efforts to reduce global warming pollution. American Electric Power, or AEP, was eighth, spending nearly $10 million. AEP played a (somewhat) more positive role by attempting to shape clean energy and global warming legislation to its benefit. But it also supported efforts to prevent EPA from limiting global warming pollutants from the largest sources in the absence of congressional action.

The largest trade association working to defeat clean energy and global warming legislation is the umbrella lobby organization the Chamber of Commerce, which spent nearly $190 million during this year and a half [3]. The Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor owned utilities spent $18 million—a million dollars a month—lobbying on global warming legislation. EEI was occasionally supportive of some proposals, but it strongly advocates halting EPA from reducing global warming pollution.

The American Petroleum Institute, or API—the trade association and lobbying arm for the biggest oil and gas producers—spent $11 million to lobby Congress to defeat pollution reductions and maintain their tax loopholes. The New York Times reported on some of their activities with their story, “Oil and Gas Interests Set Spending Record for Lobbying in 2009.”

API certainly got its money’s worth since no legislation was passed and the tax loopholes are still in place. Their spokesman Bill Bush said: “We had a lot of work to do trying to educate people on these issues…We hope we were successful.”

Lobby reports show that oil companies lobbied on a number of clean energy and global-warming-related issues. These included:
> The Blowout Prevention Act, H.R. 5626, to prevent future oil disasters

> BP federal royalty payments for oil captured from the Deepwater Horizon blow out, Spilled Oil Royalty Collection Act, H.R. 5513

> Clean Air Act pollution reduction requirements

> Efforts to cut global warming pollution: American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454 and the American Power Act

> Opposition to closing tax loopholes that save oil companies $45 billion

> Opposition to a “Community Right to Know” requirement that shale gas producers publicly report on the toxic chemicals they use to “frack” rock to produce natural gas, Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act, H.R. 2766

> Restrictions on the use of oil produced from highly polluting “tar sands

>Increases in energy efficiency and deployment of wind, sun, and other renewable energy sources

> Other public health, job creation, oil reduction, and environmental protection policies

Twenty-first century campaigns are outrageously expensive. Senators and representatives must raise millions of dollars in campaign cash for their contested reelection campaigns. Legislators’ need for money combined with special interests’ access to cash makes campaign contributions a potent weapon in the hunt for votes. Trade associations, businesses, and their employees donate thousands of dollars to legislators willing to do their bidding.

Political action committees, or PACs, from the oil and gas industry gave $6.6 million to federal candidates from January 2009 to June 2010, with two-thirds going to Republicans. The mining industry donated $1.6 million so far, with $3 of every $5 going to Republicans.

The most generous individual energy PACs belong to Koch Industries and ConocoPhillips, who doled out $700,000 and $600,000, respectively. And this does not include Koch’s recent $1 million donation to pass Proposition 23 in California, which would repeal the state’s landmark clean energy and global warming law.

But the lobbying and campaign expenditures capture only part of the influence of spending by the oil, coal, utility, and other traditional energy industries. Many of these companies and trade associations are also spending millions of dollars that need not be reported to run expensive television, radio, and print “message” ads that do not explicitly mention energy or global warming legislation but are still designed to shape legislators and voters’ views.

BP, for example, is spending $5 million a week on advertising to restore its image after its oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Between April and July BP spent $93 million, which is more than three times the amount it spent on ads during the same period last year. Meanwhile, Big Oil and its allies have spent more than $126 million on television ads this year to promote the expansion of offshore oil drilling and defeat efforts to eliminate their tax loopholes.

Companies are not required to report these expenditures like they are for lobbying or campaign spending. API, Koch, and others have also funded Astroturf rallies to spread their anti-global-warming and anti-safety-regulation platforms. These expenses are unreported, too.

The energy interests’ successful efforts to block clean energy investments, oil use reductions, and global warming pollution limits have real costs. It’s not clear, for example, whether or when there will be a declining limit on global warming pollution that establishes a carbon price. This doubt has in turn led investors to husband rather than invest their capital in the research, development, deployment, and commercialization of clean energy technologies. Fewer investments mean fewer jobs.

And while the United States dithers other nations continue to build their clean energy industries to bid for their share of the $1 trillion we’ll see in the worldwide clean energy market by 2030. For instance, China knocked the United States down to second place as the most attractive market for investing in renewable energy according to Ernst and Young’s new “Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Indices.” Ernst and Young cite lack of clean energy policies like a renewable electricity standard and long-term stable incentive structures as reasons for the takeover.

The United States has economic, national security, and environmental imperatives to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy generation, reduce oil use, and cut global warming pollution. What’s more, Americans overwhelmingly support these measures, as many recent opinion polls demonstrate.

Yet the Big Oil and Dirty Coal lobbies are working hard to stop reforms so that they can protect their enormous profits. Legislators must ignore the pleadings of special interests and adopt comprehensive clean energy and global warming policies to enhance our economic competitiveness, safeguard our national security, and protect public health and our environment.

See full data on how much energy companies and trade associations spent on oil lobbying for 2009-2010 (.xls)

Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy, Rebecca Lefton is a Researcher, and Susan Lyon is a Special Assistant for Energy Policy at American Progress.

Endnotes

[1]. See U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Annual Energy Outlook” (2010), p. 4.

[2]. Lobbying and PAC contribution figures from the Center for Responsive Politics at opensecrets.org.

[3]. The Chamber of Commerce undoubtedly spent many of these resources lobbying against the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, and other issues. Lobbying reports do not specify the various amounts per each issue.

See full data on how much energy companies and trade associations spent on oil lobbying for 2009-2010 (.xls)

29 September, 2010
CommonDreams.org

The food crisis of 2008 never really ended, it was ignored and forgotten. The rich and powerful are well fed; they had no food crisis, no shortage, so in the West, it was little more than a short lived sound bite, tragic but forgettable. To the poor in the developing world, whose ability to afford food is no better now than in 2008, the hunger continues.

Hunger can have many contributing factors; natural disaster, discrimination, war, poor infrastructure. So why, regardless of the situation, is high tech agriculture always assumed to be the only the solution? This premise is put forward and supported by those who would benefit financially if their “solution” were implemented. Corporations peddle their high technology genetically engineered seed and chemical packages, their genetically altered animals, always with the “promise” of feeding the world.

Politicians and philanthropists, who may mean well, jump on the high technology band wagon. Could the promise of financial support or investment return fuel their apparent compassion?

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) an initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation supposedly works to achieve a food secure and prosperous Africa. While these sentiments and goals may be philanthropy at its best, some of the coalition partners have a different agenda.

One of the key players in AGRA, Monsanto, hopes to spread its genetically engineered seed throughout Africa by promising better yields, drought resistance, an end to hunger, etc. etc. Could a New Green Revolution succeed where the original Green Revolution had failed? Or was the whole concept of a Green Revolution a pig in a poke to begin with?

Monsanto giving free seed to poor small holder farmers sounds great, or are they just setting the hook? Remember, next year those farmers will have to buy their seed. Interesting to note that the Gates Foundation purchased $23.1 million worth of Monsanto stock in the second quarter of 2010. Do they also see the food crisis in Africa as a potential to turn a nice profit? Every corporation has one overriding interest— self-interest, but surely not charitable foundations?

Food shortages are seldom about a lack of food, there is plenty of food in the world, the shortages occur because of the inability to get food where it is needed and the inability of the hungry to afford it. These two problems are principally caused by, as Francis Moore Lappe’ put it, a lack of justice. There are also ethical considerations, a higher value should be placed on people than on corporate profit, this must be at the forefront, not an afterthought.

In 2008, there were shortages of food, in some places, for some people. There was never a shortage of food in 2008 on a global basis, nor is there currently. True, some countries, in Africa for example, do not have enough food where it is needed, yet people with money have their fill no matter where they live. Poverty and inequality cause hunger.

The current food riots in Mozambique were a result of increased wheat prices on the world market. The UN Food and Agriculture organization, (FAO) estimates the world is on course to the third largest wheat harvest in history, so increasing wheat prices were not caused by actual shortages, but rather by speculation on the price of wheat in the international market.

While millions of people go hungry in India, thousands of kilos of grain rot in storage. Unable to afford the grain, the hungry depend on the government to distribute food. Apparently that’s not going so well.

Not everyone living in a poor country goes hungry, those with money eat. Not everyone living in rich country is well fed, those without money go hungry. We in the US are said to have the safest and most abundant food supply in the world, yet even here, surrounded by an over abundance of food, there are plenty of hungry people and their numbers are growing. Do we too have a food crisis, concurrent with an obesity crisis?

Why is there widespread hunger? Is food a right? Is profit taking through speculation that drives food prices out of the reach of the poor a right? Is pushing high technology agriculture on an entire continent at that could feed itself a (corporate) right?

In developing countries, those with hunger and poor food distribution, the small farmers, most of whom are women, have little say in agricultural policy. The framework of international trade and the rules imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on developing countries, places emphasis on crops for export, not crops for feeding a hungry population.

Despite what we hope are the best intentions of the Gates Foundation, a New Green Revolution based on genetically engineered crops, imported fertilizer and government imposed agricultural policy will not feed the world. Women, not Monsanto, feed most of the worlds population, and the greatest portion of the worlds diet still relies on crops and farming systems developed and cultivated by the indigenous for centuries, systems that still work, systems that offer real promise.

The report of 400 experts from around the world, The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), is ignored by the proponents of a New Green Revolution, precisely because it shows that the best hope for ending hunger lies with local, traditional, farmer controlled agricultural production, not high tech industrial agriculture.

To feed the world, fair methods of land distribution must be considered. A fair and just food system depends on small holder farmers having access to land. The function of a just farming system is to insure that everyone gets to eat, industrial agriculture functions to insure those corporations controlling the system make a profit.

The ultimate cause of hunger is not a lack of Western agricultural technology, rather hunger results when people are not allowed to participate in a food system of their choosing. Civil wars, structural adjustment policies, inadequate distribution systems, international commodity speculation and corporate control of food from seed to table— these are the causes of hunger, the stimulus for food crises.

If the Gates Foundation is serious about ending hunger in Africa, they need to read the IAASTD report, not Monsanto’s quarterly profit report. Then they can decide how their money might best be spent.

Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer and activist from Wonewoc, WI and a WK Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow.

http://www.alternet.org/story/148367/

So…it turns out President Eisenhower wasn’t making up all that stuff about the military-industrial complex.

That’s what you’ll conclude if you read Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s War. (You can read excerpts of it here, here and here.) You thought you voted for change when you cast a ballot for Barack Obama? Um, not when it comes to America occupying countries that don’t begin with a “U” and an “S.”

In fact, after you read Woodward’s book, you’ll split a gut every time you hear a politician or a government teacher talk about “civilian control over the military.” The only people really making the decisions about America’s wars are across the river from Washington in the Pentagon. They wear uniforms. They have lots of weapons they bought from the corporations they will work for when they retire.

For everyone who supported Obama in 2008, it’s reassuring to find out he understands we have to get out of Afghanistan. But for everyone who’s worried about Obama in 2010, it’s scary to find out that what he thinks should be done may not actually matter. And that’s because he’s not willing to stand up to the people who actually run this country.

And here’s the part I don’t even want to write — and none of you really want to consider:

It matters not whom we elect. The Pentagon and the military contractors call the shots. The title “Commander in Chief” is ceremonial, like “Employee of the Month” at your local Burger King.

Everything you need to know can be found in just two paragraphs from Obama’s War. Here’s the scene: Obama is meeting with his National Security Council staff on the Saturday after Thanksgiving last year. He’s getting ready to give a big speech announcing his new strategy for Afghanistan. Except…the strategy isn’t set yet. The military has presented him with just one option: escalation. But at the last minute, Obama tells everyone, hold up — the door to a plan for withdrawal isn’t closed.

The brass isn’t having it:

“Mr. President,” [Army Col. John Tien] said, “I don’t see how you can defy your military chain here. We kind of are where we are. Because if you tell General McChrystal, ‘I got your assessment, got your resource constructs, but I’ve chosen to do something else,’ you’re going to probably have to replace him. You can’t tell him, ‘Just do it my way, thanks for your hard work.’ And then where does that stop?”

The colonel did not have to elaborate. His implication was that not only McChrystal but the entire military high command might go in an unprecedented toppling — Gates; Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command. Perhaps no president could weather that, especially a 48-year-old with four years in the U.S. Senate and 10 months as commander in chief.

And, well, the rest is history. Three days later Obama announced the escalation at West Point. And he became our newest war president.

But here’s the question Woodward doesn’t answer: Why, exactly, can’t a president weather ending a war, even if he has to fire all his generals to do it? It’s right there in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution: The President’s in charge of the military. And so is Congress: the army can’t just march over to the Treasury Department and steal the money for wars. Article I, Section 9 says Congress has to appropriate it.

In the real world, though, the Constitution’s just a piece of paper. In the real world, a President who fired his top military in order to stop a war would be ruined before you could say “bloodless coup.” The Washington Post (filled with ads from Boeing and Northrop Grumman) would scream about how he was the reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain. Fox and CNN (filled with “experts” who work for think tanks funded by Raytheon and General Dynamics) would say he was a girly-man who had to be impeached. And Congress (which experienced its own escalation in lobbying from defense contractors just as the Afghanistan escalation was being decided) might well do it. (By the way, if you want to listen to Lyndon Johnson talk in 1964 about how he might be impeached if he didn’t follow the military-industrial complex’s orders and escalate the war in Vietnam, just go here.)

So here’s your assignment for tonight: Watch Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech. And then start thinking about how we can tame this beast. The Soviet Union had its own military-industrial complex, which is one reason they got into Afghanistan…which is one reason there’s no more Soviet Union. It happened to them.

Don’t think it can happen to us?

Michael Moore is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and author. He directed and produced Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko. He has also written seven books, most recently, Mike’s Election Guide 2008

Posted on May 17, 2010, Printed on May 25, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/146879/

After considering laughably titled solutions like the top hat (a containment dome), the junk shot (a pressurized blast of golf balls and shredded tires) and worse, British Petroleum has proven one thing above all else: When the fossil fool hits the fan, it simply has no plan.

The fact that BP was allowed to drill along the shores of the United States in spite of its unwillingness to plan and prepare for accidents is only stunning to those haven’t been paying attention to the feverish pace of deregulation since the rapacious Reagan conservatives took global culture by blitzkrieg. It certainly isn’t surprising to anyone who has been paying even slight attention to BP, which boasts a decorated resume of spills and screw-ups.

According to recent revelations, a blowout preventer that could have halted the Deepwater Horizon clustergush failed a crucial pressure test hours before the April 20 explosion, and was never tested by the government engineer who approved BP’s drilling operation. Those kinds of safety lapses are standard operating procedure, an oil industry whistleblower told the Huffington Post, saying he routinely witnessed 100 such shortcuts on BP rigs and others throughout 18 years of service in the sector. The fallback plan, a relief well, won’t be finished until after the summer, by which there will be little reason left to live in New Orleans. Great. 

But if you’ve been railing for decades against the fossil fuel sector for everything from deliberately removing safeguards that could have prevented what will likely end up being the worst U.S. oil disaster in history to its lethal emissions that could, in the extreme, end up warming planet Earth to the point that human habitation is an impossibility, well, this is all old, sad news. 

Cold Oil Turkey 

“While this is a horrible disaster, it occurs to me that Americans cannot accept the fact that getting oil out of the earth is dirty, difficult, hazardous work, with great risks for society,” said James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and Geography of Nowhere. “We don’t want to know about it, as long as we can drive comfortably to the strip mall, enjoy NPR and an iced beverage. When something happens to prick our bubble of unreality, we’re indignant.” 

The counter-argument to Kunstler’s hard-eged realism — which is thankfully gaining steam every day the Deepwater Horizon disaster gushes hundreds of thousands, if not a million, gallons of crude into the Gulf — is that further regulation and safety enforcement could put at least a partial stop to the fossil foolishness. Which means legally proving that BP, Halliburton and Transocean deliberately obviated what safety requirements existed so that the United States can conduct criminal proceedings which could then levy heftier damages than $75 million cap on liability under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which itself was hastily enacted by Congress under President George H.W. Bush shortly after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

It also means exacting deeper regulation on the nation’s compromised Minerals Management Service, which the Department of the Interior is considering splitting into two separate agencies. From taking drugs and having sex with energy company reps to being exempted from delivering detailed environmental analyses, the MMS is a controversy-soaked frat house. And its parent agency at Interior is the same hot mess. It’s obvious that, when it comes to America’s oil regime, the lunatics are drilling the asylum into the bedrock. So it’s probably no surprise that neither agency returned several calls for comment. 

But add it up and it’s one hell of a cleanup for a country with an unceasing appetite for hyperconsumption but little stomach for hard work. Which is why the blame-game theory, while it makes for good theater and hopefully better punitive damages, is still a red herring distracting us from the environmental disaster’s prime suspect: All of us.

“BP, Haliburton and Transocean will all be financially punished for this, and they, along with other oil companies, will say, ‘Screw you, America, we’re moving our operations to Angola,’” added Kunstler. “All of this shucking and jiving over blame is a Chinese fire drill concealing the fact that we are all complicit in this disaster, and refuse to even consider changing our underlying behavior.” 

But this is what most junkies do, when the drugs start to wear off and run out: Keep tapping that vein. A new Associated Press/GfK poll on the spill released in mid-May supports that madness. While 42 percent of respondents felt that the Obama administration is properly prosecuting the spill, even more, 50 percent to be exact, are cool with further coastal drilling for oil and gas. In spite of all that has happened, they’d rather drill for what’s left of our domestic oil supply than prepare, plan and proselytize for our inevitable post-oil future. Itinerant laziness is the true culprit in this spill. BP, MMS and other alphabet nightmares are monsters of our own consumptive creation. 

“In the most general terms, I think the answer to drilling problems is better regulation and taxes to fund cleanup efforts,” explained Mother Jones and Washington Monthly journalist Kevin Drum, who like Kunstler is a peak oil theorist. “Because the plain fact is that drilling is going to happen one way or another, as long as we’re addicted to oil. And the answer to that is unrelated to drilling at all.” 

When it comes to killing addiction, the first stage is always acknowledging one. Optimistic estimations of peak oil theory explain that global supply will start dwindling in 2020, a clear-sighted metaphor if there ever was one. Even without factoring in the always reliable underestimation that leads to disasters like Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, that’s only a decade to get our heads and engines together. In other words, a light-speed snapshot of time compared to the insane workload. 

“The administration needs to take this opportunity to explain the multiple hidden costs to our addiction to fossil fuels,” argued Center for American Progress climate analyst Joseph Romm, the author of Straight Up: America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions. “As we’re finding out with Goldman Sachs, you just can’t let the industry regulate itself. But ultimately we have to get off the addiction. If the administration doesn’t help us do that, it will be an incomprehensible missed opportunity.” 

“We need a serious carbon tax and serious climate legislation to reduce our reliance,” said Drum. “I care a lot more about that than I do about the specific issues related to oil rig safety.” 

Infinite Step Recovery 

The prospects for such serious campaigns against carbon are practically dead in the water, just like the collateral damage washing up in Louisiana and elsewhere in the Gulf. The current climate legislation drafted by senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman is a capitulation to the fossil fuel industry, offering concessions like increased offshore drilling and a doubtlessly unregulated cap-and-trade derivatives market in exchange for greenhouse gas limits. This mind-numbing arrogance and collusion between the energy sector and rich nations is precisely what led to the failure of last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen, according to ex-World Bank economist Sir Nicholas Stern, who crunched the numbers in 2006 and decided that doing nothing about global warming would end up costing the world around $5 trillion dollars and rising.

The prospects for this year’s retreat in Cancun similarly suck. The Obama administration’s special climate envoy Todd Stern admitted in May that the United States will probably have no climate bill in place by the time it gets to Mexico. Factor in robust public support for further coastal drilling in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and it becomes clear that the political will to change our energy game is weak.  

But the political capital to be reaped by anger over the spill is strong. On May 13, senators Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, Dianne Feinstein, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell and Jeff Merkley introduced legislation to ban offshore oil drilling along the West Coast. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger withdrew support for a drilling operation off the coast of Santa Barbara. On the other side of the country, Florida representative Corrine Brown has proposed similar legislation, while governor Charlie Crist has suggested a possible constitutional amendment mandating the same. 

Yet the Obama administration is openly supporting not an outright ban on offshore drilling, but Kerry and Leiberman’s weak-kneed concessions. Their bill does include provisions that allow states to ban operations within 75 miles of their coastlines, as well as a sweetener that allows them to siphon off larger revenue from those operations. But they should already have that anyway. And the Deepwater Horizon clustergush occurred over 40 miles offshore; Kerry and Lieberman’s bill would have bought the Gulf coast a few extra days before it was soaked in oil. Plus, fisheries and other natural environments utterly necessary to the economic and civic health of the entire country aren’t strictly on the coastline; some are miles offshore, closer to the rigs than you or I. 

Take a look at what the Department of the Interior calls “President Obama’s comprehensive energy plan for the country,” and it’s clear that we’re in for much more, not less, offshore drilling. The color-coded graphics tell it all: Exploration and production plans to cruise northeastward up from the Western and Central Gulf of Mexico to its Eastern region and up into the South and mid-Atlantic. Same goes for the comparatively oily Alaskan region. According to the World Wildlife Fund, Shell Oil starts  drilling in Alaska’s cold Chuchki and Beaufort seas starting in July. 

“The Arctic region is, in nearly every respect, the exact opposite of the temperate conditions of the Gulf of Mexico,” said WWF president and CEO Carter Roberts. “Technology simply does not exist to clean up a spill in Arctic waters. And, unlike the Gulf with its robust response apparatus close at hand, the Coast Guard lacks the capacity to adequately respond to a spill in the Arctic.” 

While the West Coast is currently off-limits, the Interior reminds, especially given the new legislation from Boxer and company, it’s just a matter of diminishing supply until we start tapping that vein. If not for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, we might already have. But with public support and White House support fully behind further offshore drilling, and the paranoid specters of foreign terrorism rearing their fear-inducing heads up in Times Square and Arizona, it’s probably going to be a long time before the United States does anything substantial about the Deepwater Horizon incident, much less greater oil exploration or even climate change.  

But one thing is most likely certain: We won’t be ready as a nation to mandate change until the peak oil gong rings in 2020, or earlier. And by then, it could be too late. 

“Big Oil has obviously funded major disinformation campaigns to mislead the public about the threat of global warming, and the worst-case scenarios for a spill,” Romm said. “But at some point, the painful reality of warming will be so clear that we will be desperate and start to do things differently. But what we need to do first and foremost is pass a climate and clean-energy bill. That is our top priority: Get off the unsafe dirty fuels of the 20th century and get on the safe fuels of the 21st century like wind and solar, which never run out.”

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

23 May, 2010
Culturechange.org

As the U.S. continues the incredibly wasteful misallocation of resources known as car production and everything that goes with it, the externalized costs in terms of global warming, oil spills, and human isolation as consumers, only mount.

Who is in charge of this mad policy of ecocide? We all are, but we did elect a president named Barack Obama. He was supposed to be the answer to the blatantly destructive and incompetent George W. Bush. But Lo and Behold, Obama’s allegiance proved to be the status quo. Got recession? More cars! Oil spill a la Chernobyl in the U.S. Gulf? Keep on producing cars and using oil!

So, having fooled ourselves again with an election, ignoring the warning by The Who in their landmark song Won’t Get Fooled Again (1970), we look to the driver of our vehicle to see that he is a nut case with his accelerator pedal pushed to the floor. Global peak in oil supply? Pedal to the metal! What’s that above him? A helicopter gunship mowing down people on the other side of the world, in the name of democracy and freedom.

Obama’s calm, intelligent face, our multiracial darling Obama, is on the whole a maniacal puppet. And he’s wearing a mask, whether he knows it or not. Who or what is underneath?

Some who look beyond elections say the problem is essentially one of corporatism: that Obama is just another representative of the corporate elite, as were the Bushes, McCain and the Clintons. True, but is U.S. culture salvageable by targeting corporate rule?

The lateness of the hour tells us the answer is No. Although the modern large corporation is the most virulent form of exploitation of people and the Earth, and needs to be abolished, U.S. culture has gone way too far in its alienation, oppression and general distortion of human values to be cured or transformed by even a major reform.

What, then, are the implications for a nation and people who don’t even have a hope today of getting out from under the car (that’s pinning them down on the bloody, oily pavement)? Ideally, even Tea Party activists realize that significant change or relief from economic and social pressures does not come from another election or series of elections.

What, then — revolution? Is that the real goal of anyone wishing for fundamental change? What would this revolution entail? Would it be political, cultural, or both?

A series of goals or wishes by enough people amounts to a social movement or a coup. It has happened before, and the threat of this feels real to those who find the U.S. to still be somewhat benign. To them, the possibility of a worse form of government and loss of our already diminished freedoms looms large enough that one’s priority becomes that of somehow maintaining the status quo, while hoping for positive developments such as clean energy, an end to oil wars, and a roll-back of the Patriot Act.

However, the time for political change to re-chart the course of a nation is past. Collapse and disintegration have been assured, due in large part to dependence on cheap oil. When the dust settles there will be a proliferation of local cultures. Meanwhile, the extreme state of a society hard wired to consume its way to eco-hell is unchangeable.

This is a blind culture that cannot see its own true roots. Who came to North America to conquer and set up a foreign culture, and what was the prime objective? Sky-god fearing, private-property obsessed, master-slave opportunists: the antithesis of the indigenous nature-revering, communal, more egalitarian, diverse cultures that had found the key to surviving and thriving for a thousand generations.

This does not imply there was nothing good in the newcomers or in their exploits (Jefferson, Tom Paine, or their successors in great thought such as Thoreau and Muir). Indeed, the courageous new Americans loved their small farms, the amazing scenery, and the soul of the land that spawned perhaps the greatest new forms of music the world has ever seen.

How can the goodness of U.S. Americans and the land they inhabit (and have changed irrevocably) be safeguarded and turned into a force for positive change at a time of runaway destruction at the hands of ecocidal, greedy corporations and their tools in political power?

There is no political answer, but there is a cultural-change answer.

By abandoning a way of living that denies our true needs for healthy nature and human closeness, taking steps to conserve the land, air and water, we cannot help but find ourselves cutting the umbilical cord to the terminally ill host. What would we be losing? For one thing, car dependency: we can’t afford it anyway, financially or ecologically. We would then be looking to our neighbors and family for solutions to daily living, losing the isolation of total reliance on shopping and technology.

Organizing household and neighborhood composting, gardening and home repairs are more first steps toward restoring real community and socioeconomic resilience.

Human potential is unlimited. Those who believe deep change is not possible in the foreseeable future, while it is our only choice if we are to turn back the worst of petrocollapse that has clearly been unleashed, will be shocked by the upheaval to come in their own lives and throughout the modern world.

Such a revolution, with eventual political outcomes of a more local-based and nature-respecting basis than the conventional top-down growth-maximizing sort, is within us now, waiting to spread and flower.

Aleksandr Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.

These communities, if they retreat into a pure survivalist mode without linking themselves to the concentric circles of the wider community, the state and the planet, will become as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the corporate forces arrayed against us. All infrastructures we build, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours. Resistance will be reduced to small, often imperceptible acts of defiance, as those who retained their integrity discovered in the long night of 20th-century fascism and communism.

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.

My analysis comes close to the analysis of many anarchists. But there is a crucial difference. The anarchists do not understand the nature of violence. They grasp the extent of the rot in our cultural and political institutions, they know they must sever the tentacles of consumerism, but they naïvely believe that it can be countered with physical forms of resistance and acts of violence. There are debates within the anarchist movement – such as those on the destruction of property – but once you start using plastic explosives, innocent people get killed. And when anarchic violence begins to disrupt the mechanisms of governance, the power elite will use these acts, however minor, as an excuse to employ disproportionate and ruthless amounts of force against real and suspected agitators, only fueling the rage of the dispossessed.

I am not a pacifist. I know there are times, and even concede that this may eventually be one of them, when human beings are forced to respond to mounting repression with violence. I was in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia. We knew precisely what the Serbian forces ringing the city would do to us if they broke through the defenses and trench system around the besieged city. We had the examples of the Drina Valley or the city of Vukovar, where about a third of the Muslim inhabitants had been killed and the rest herded into refugee or displacement camps. There are times when the only choice left is to pick up a weapon to defend your family, neighborhood and city. But those who proved most adept at defending Sarajevo invariably came from the criminal class. When they were not shooting at Serbian soldiers they were looting the apartments of ethnic Serbs in Sarajevo and often executing them, as well as terrorizing their fellow Muslims. When you ingest the poison of violence, even in a just cause, it corrupts, deforms and perverts you. Violence is a drug, indeed it is the most potent narcotic known to humankind. Those most addicted to violence are those who have access to weapons and a penchant for force. And these killers rise to the surface of any armed movement and contaminate it with the intoxicating and seductive power that comes with the ability to destroy. I have seen it in war after war. When you go down that road you end up pitting your monsters against their monsters. And the sensitive, the humane and the gentle, those who have a propensity to nurture and protect life, are marginalized and often killed. The romantic vision of war and violence is as prevalent among anarchists and the hard left as it is in the mainstream culture. Those who resist with force will not defeat the corporate state or sustain the cultural values that must be sustained if we are to have a future worth living. From my many years as a war correspondent in El Salvador, Guatemala, Gaza and Bosnia, I have seen that armed resistance movements are always mutations of the violence that spawned them. I am not naïve enough to think I could have avoided these armed movements had I been a landless Salvadoran or Guatemalan peasant, a Palestinian in Gaza or a Muslim in Sarajevo, but this violent response to repression is and always will be tragic. It must be avoided, although not at the expense of our own survival.

Democracy, a system ideally designed to challenge the status quo, has been corrupted and tamed to slavishly serve the status quo. We have undergone, as John Ralston Saul writes, a coup d’état in slow motion. And the coup is over. They won. We lost. The abject failure of activists to push corporate, industrialized states toward serious environmental reform, to thwart imperial adventurism or to build a humane policy toward the masses of the world’s poor stems from an inability to recognize the new realities of power. The paradigm of power has irrevocably altered and so must the paradigm of resistance alter.

Too many resistance movements continue to buy into the facade of electoral politics, parliaments, constitutions, bills of rights, lobbying and the appearance of a rational economy. The levers of power have become so contaminated that the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant. The election of Barack Obama was yet another triumph of propaganda over substance and a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by the mass media. We mistook style and ethnicity – an advertising tactic pioneered by the United Colors of Benetton and Calvin Klein – for progressive politics and genuine change. We confused how we were made to feel with knowledge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand for an experience. Obama, now a global celebrity, is a brand. He had almost no experience besides two years in the senate, lacked any moral core and was sold as all things to all people. The Obama campaign was named Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a marketer’s dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertisers want because of how they can make you feel.

We live in a culture characterized by what Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics.” Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It always personalizes issues rather than clarifying them. It eschews real debate for manufactured scandals, celebrity gossip and spectacles. It trumpets eternal optimism, endlessly praises our moral strength and character, and communicates in a feel-your-pain language. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes, “meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage.”

The cultural belief that we can make things happen by thinking, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength or by understanding that we are truly exceptional is magical thinking. We can always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking, preached to us across the political spectrum by Oprah, sports celebrities, Hollywood, self-help gurus and Christian demagogues, is largely responsible for our economic and environmental collapse, since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as “negative.” This belief, which allows men and women to behave and act like little children, discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporate state are never seriously questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. And it has perverted the way we view ourselves, our nation and the natural world. The new paradigm of power, coupled with its bizarre ideology of limitless progress and impossible happiness, has turned whole nations, including the United States, into monsters.

We can march in Copenhagen. We can join Bill McKibben’s worldwide day of climate protests. We can compost in our backyards and hang our laundry out to dry. We can write letters to our elected officials and vote for Barack Obama, but the power elite is impervious to the charade of democratic participation. Power is in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls who are ruthlessly creating a system of neo-feudalism and killing the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And appealing to their better nature, or seeking to influence the internal levers of power, will no longer work.

We will not, especially in the United States, avoid our Götterdämmerung. Obama, like Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the other heads of the industrialized nations, has proven as craven a tool of the corporate state as George W. Bush. Our democratic system has been transformed into what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin labels inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, a free press, parliamentary systems and constitutions while manipulating and corrupting internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington, Ottawa or other state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. Mass culture, owned and disseminated by corporations, diverts us with trivia, spectacles and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics – and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”

Inverted totalitarianism wields total power without resorting to cruder forms of control such as gulags, concentration camps or mass terror. It harnesses science and technology for its dark ends. It enforces ideological uniformity by using mass communication systems to instill profligate consumption as an inner compulsion and to substitute our illusions of ourselves for reality. It does not forcibly suppress dissidents, as long as those dissidents remain ineffectual. And as it diverts us it dismantles manufacturing bases, devastates communities, unleashes waves of human misery and ships jobs to countries where fascists and communists know how to keep workers in line. It does all this while waving the flag and mouthing patriotic slogans. “The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed,” Wolin writes.

The practice and psychology of advertising, the rule of “market forces” in many arenas other than markets, the continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the saturation by mass media and propaganda of every household and the takeover of the universities have rendered most of us hostages. The rot of imperialism, which is always incompatible with democracy, has seen the military and arms manufacturers monopolize $1 trillion a year in defense-related spending in the United States even as the nation faces economic collapse. Imperialism always militarizes domestic politics. And this militarization, as Wolin notes, combines with the cultural fantasies of hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility to sever huge segments of the population from reality. Those who control the images control us. And while we have been entranced by the celluloid shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, these corporate forces, extolling the benefits of privatization, have effectively dismantled the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services and public housing) and rolled back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. The proponents of globalization and unregulated capitalism do not waste time analyzing other ideologies. They have an ideology, or rather a plan of action that is defended by an ideology, and slavishly follow it. We on the left have dozens of analyses of competing ideologies without any coherent plan of our own. This has left us floundering while corporate forces ruthlessly dismantle civil society.

We are living through one of civilization’s great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all “inevitable” utopian visions, is being exposed as a fraud. The power elite, perplexed and confused, clings to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the looming political and economic vacuum. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs led industrial nations to sacrifice other areas of human importance – from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution – on the altar of free trade. It left the world’s poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits – which can never be repaid – in human history. The massive bailouts, stimulus packages, giveaways and short-term debt, along with imperial wars we can no longer afford, will leave the United States struggling to finance nearly $5 trillion in debt this year. This will require Washington to auction off about $96 billion in debt a week. Once China and the oil-rich states walk away from our debt, which one day has to happen, the Federal Reserve will become the buyer of last resort. The Fed has printed perhaps as much as two trillion new dollars in the last two years, and buying this much new debt will see it, in effect, print trillions more. This is when inflation, and most likely hyperinflation, will turn the dollar into junk. And at that point the entire system breaks down.

All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators walk away with millions. The elite will retreat, as Naomi Klein has written in The Shock Doctrine, into gated communities where they will have access to services, food, amenities and security denied to the rest of us. We will begin a period in human history when there will be only masters and serfs. The corporate forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the rage at the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to ruthlessly extinguish opposition movements. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross. Totalitarianism, George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith but an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote. “That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Our elites have used fraud. Force is all they have left.

Our mediocre and bankrupt elite is desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved. More importantly, they are trying to save themselves. All attempts to work within this decayed system and this class of power brokers will prove useless. And resistance must respond to the harsh new reality of a global, capitalist order that will cling to power through ever-mounting forms of brutal and overt repression. Once credit dries up for the average citizen, once massive joblessness creates a permanent and enraged underclass and the cheap manufactured goods that are the opiates of our commodity culture vanish, we will probably evolve into a system that more closely resembles classical totalitarianism. Cruder, more violent forms of repression will have to be employed as the softer mechanisms of control favored by inverted totalitarianism break down.

It is not accidental that the economic crisis will converge with the environmental crisis. In his book The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi laid out the devastating consequences – the depressions, wars and totalitarianism – that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolves, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism – and a Mafia political system – which is a good description of our financial and political structure. A self-regulating market, Polanyi wrote, turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The free market’s assumption that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market allows each to be exploited for profit until exhaustion or collapse. A society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. This is what we are undergoing.

If we build self-contained structures, ones that do as little harm as possible to the environment, we can weather the coming collapse. This task will be accomplished through the existence of small, physical enclaves that have access to sustainable agriculture, are able to sever themselves as much as possible from commercial culture and can be largely self-sufficient. These communities will have to build walls against electronic propaganda and fear that will be pumped out over the airwaves. Canada will probably be a more hospitable place to do this than the United States, given America’s strong undercurrent of violence. But in any country, those who survive will need isolated areas of land as well as distance from urban areas, which will see the food deserts in the inner cities, as well as savage violence, leach out across the urban landscape as produce and goods become prohibitively expensive and state repression becomes harsher and harsher.

The increasingly overt uses of force by the elites to maintain control should not end acts of resistance. Acts of resistance are moral acts. They begin because people of conscience understand the moral imperative to challenge systems of abuse and despotism. They should be carried out not because they are effective but because they are right. Those who begin these acts are always few in number and dismissed by those who hide their cowardice behind their cynicism. But resistance, however marginal, continues to affirm life in a world awash in death. It is the supreme act of faith, the highest form of spirituality and alone makes hope possible. Those who carried out great acts of resistance often sacrificed their security and comfort, often spent time in jail and in some cases were killed. They understood that to live in the fullest sense of the word, to exist as free and independent human beings, even under the darkest night of state repression, meant to defy injustice.

When the dissident Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken from his cell in a Nazi prison to the gallows, his last words were: “This is for me the end, but also the beginning.” Bonhoeffer knew that most of the citizens in his nation were complicit through their silence in a vast enterprise of death. But however hopeless it appeared in the moment, he affirmed what we all must affirm. He did not avoid death. He did not, as a distinct individual, survive. But he understood that his resistance and even his death were acts of love. He fought and died for the sanctity of life. He gave, even to those who did not join him, another narrative, and his defiance ultimately condemned his executioners.

We must continue to resist, but do so now with the discomforting realization that significant change will probably never occur in our lifetime. This makes resistance harder. It shifts resistance from the tangible and the immediate to the amorphous and the indeterminate. But to give up acts of resistance is spiritual and intellectual death. It is to surrender to the dehumanizing ideology of totalitarian capitalism. Acts of resistance keep alive another narrative, sustain our integrity and empower others, who we may never meet, to stand up and carry the flame we pass to them. No act of resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a Tobin tax, working to shift the neoclassical economics paradigm, revoking a corporate charter, holding global internet votes or using Twitter to catalyze a chain reaction of refusal against the neoliberal order. But we will have to resist and then find the faith that resistance is worthwhile, for we will not immediately alter the awful configuration of power. And in this long, long war a community to sustain us, emotionally and materially, will be the key to a life of defiance.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that the exclusive preoccupation with personal concerns and indifference to the suffering of others beyond the self-identified group is what ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust possible: “The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.”

The indifference to the plight of others and the supreme elevation of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion. We will have to continue to battle the mechanisms of the dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door. Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems seek to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain alive. And for now this is the only victory possible.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Reprinted from AlterNet.

Countercurrents.org

Ideologically it believes governments must provide for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It opposes concentrated wealth, demagogy, and despotism, and supports democracy, human and civil rights, and social justice – an ideology the 19th century People’s Party and 20th century Progressive Party endorsed without majorities.

Until recently, faint echoes remained, sadly silenced after Senator Bernie Sanders and sole House populist capitulated.

Former Kucinich for president consultant, David Swanson, said “he gave in to the power of a false narrative, and that he ought to have said so….I think the corporate media has instilled in people the idea that presidents should make laws and the current president is trying to make a law that can reasonably be called ‘healthcare reform’ or at least ‘health insurance reform.’ ” I don’t excuse Kucinich flipping….I just want to find the right explanation for it.”

The web site singlepayeraction.org, (“everybody in. nobody out.”) called the Democrats (like Republicans) “a corporate party, rotting from the core.”

SPA called Kucinich’s “flameout….spectacular” in support of a bill he and progressive Democrats strongly opposed until they flipped, including Congressman Danny Davis, representing this writer’s 7th Illinois District.

Kucinich said “I’ve taken a detour supporting this bill.” For SPA, it’s one “that will condemn millions of Americans to ongoing suffering and death” because insurers make money by denying care, why real reform requires their removal and assuring everyone of universal single-payer coverage. Everyone in. Nobody out. What your senator and House representative get, you get. What congressional Democrats won’t enact.

On March 17, Rep. Dennis Kucinich announced the following:

“I have carried the banner of national health care in two presidential campaigns, in party platform meeting, and as co-author of HR 676, Medicare for All. I have worked to expand the health care debate beyond the current for-profit system, to include a public option and an amendment to free the states to pursue single payer.”

On November 7, 2009, despite enormous pressure, he voted against HR 3962: Affordable Health Care for America Act,” asking “Is this the best we can do” in a prepared text titled, “Why I Voted No,” saying:

“We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care.” Passing “legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry (exacerbates) the very source of the problem….Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution.”

On March 17, he reversed himself, saying:

“….after careful discussions with President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Elizabeth my wife and close friends, I have decided to cast a vote in favor of the legislation.

As this bill passes, I will renew my effort to help those state organizations which are aimed at stirring a single payer movement….I have taken a detour through supporting this bill, but I know the destination I will continue to lead, for as long as it takes, whatever it takes to an America where health care will be firmly established as a civil right.”

He later said that not supporting the bill “would destroy Obama’s presidency,” a nonsensical view given Bill Clinton’s success despite his health care program failure and efforts to impeach him. He survived, served two terms, and left office with a 68% approval rating, matching Franklin Roosevelt at the end of his presidency.

On Democracy Now (March 18), Ralph Nader referred to “the latest chapter of corporate Democrats crushing progressive forces both inside their party and against third parties.” It’s nothing new. It happens every time reform is proposed.

Current legislation doesn’t “provide universal, comprehensive or affordable care to the American people. It shovels hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money (to predators that) created the problem: the Aetnas, CIGNAs” and other insurers. It requires no contractual accountability or other benefits for people denied coverage under a “pay-or-die system that is the disgrace of the Western world.”

For the drug cartel, “it’s a bonanza” heading right to their bottom line, including no government negotiated discounts, lengthy new drug patent protection periods to impede cheaper generic competition, and no reimportation of lower-priced foreign drugs to keep prices high and affordability low.

Further, there’s no public option, and the legislation mostly doesn’t kick in until 2014. It means “180,000 Americans….will die between now and (then) and hundreds of thousands of injuries and illnesses” will go untreated. “There’s (also) no free choice of doctor and hospital under this. There’s all kinds of exploit(ive provisions to let) health insurance (and drug) companies continue their ravenous ways over people who are (the) most vulnerable….when they’re sick or injured.” Who in Washington represents them when the few progressives side with the others.

It’s a sad moment when liberal Democrats caved. “They’ve all caved. They’ve all been put into line by the (House) majority rulers.” It’s a shameless, but predictable climb-down. They want to perpetuate a system that costs double per capita (about $7,600) of other Western states and provides worse coverage. In America, about 800 people die weekly because they can’t afford insurance, enough of it, or insurers deny or delay their claims.

Will new legislation fix this? Not at all because providers, especially insurers, are notorious for gaming the system, and 2,500 pages of legislation contain loopholes, ambiguities, and legal interpretations that experts can easily manipulate to their advantage or create a process so onerous to contest that it amounts to the same thing.

Former CIGNA vice president, Wendell Potter, explained, saying Obamacare lets insurers shift costs to consumers, offer inadequate or unaffordable access, force Americans to pay higher deductibles for less coverage, and even scam subsidized consumers.

“What worries me,” he said, “is that people who are forced to buy coverage and all they can afford to buy is a high deductible. (So) if they get really sick, they have to pay so much out of their own pockets that they’re going to be filing for bankruptcy or (lose) their homes.”

Potter especially dislikes the Senate bill that will force many people to buy insurance only covering about 60% of costs if they’re sick. Many people have no insurance because it’s unaffordable. “They certainly couldn’t afford premiums plus the out-of-pocket expenses in today’s market” that keeps hiking costs higher.

At best, Potter believes Obamacare will move millions of uninsured to underinsured, making them vulnerable to serious illness costs, the main cause of personal bankruptcies. When it happens, no Obamacare provision protects them from losing their homes.

As for prohibiting pre-existing conditions, the Senate bill especially gives insurers “all the flexibility they need” to prevent people from accessing coverage. Health history and age will determine premiums, so the chronically ill and aged will pay far more than the already unaffordable high rates.

The so-called medical-loss ratio is another problem. It determines what percent of premiums cover medical costs. The less restricted, the more profits (in the billions of dollars), and less care for policyholders.

Nader points out that even with more people covered, prices aren’t regulated, “junk insurance policies” will be offered, and there’s nothing to stop insurers “from taking this papier-mache bill and lighting a fire to it and making a mockery of it.” They’re unhindered by controls, and no facility will “create a national consumer health organization” to give people “their own non-profit consumer lobby (in) Washington. This is really a disaster.”

Obamacare forces coverage on consumers, assesses penalties for noncompliance, empowers the IRS to collect them, protects corporate profits, rations care, and dumps millions of Americans (insured and millions left uninsured) in the scrap heap to fend for themselves. It’s not a step forward. It’s a full-scale retreat.

Obama is like Bush. He froze out dissenters, single-payer advocates, and surrounded himself with corporate hacks and warmongers. It’s the same old, same old, the people getting scammed and harmed because no one in Washington represents them. Unless they act on their own, they’ll get no help from politicians delivering the best reform money can buy, with no restrictions on spending amounts for it.

In June 2009 on a visit to Gaza, Jimmy Carter said “the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than like human beings.” So will millions of Americans under Obamacare, a sellout scheme to provide less than they now have and charge more for it.

Kucinich said his constituents urged him to do something, rather than nothing even if it meant passing a bad bill. Unfortunately, most people don’t know the tawdry fine print, that insurance giant Wellpoint wrote the Baucus bill, that corporations write virtually all legislation, that Obamacare gives America’s healthcare system to predatory insurers and Big PhRMA, something Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, other progressive Democrats understand, but capitulated anyway. Why so?

Despite his stated reasons, only Kucinich knows for sure, but here’s a guess. Washington is notorious for pressuring, intimidating, and/or bribing members of Congress for support. Kucinich may have been told, either vote yes or face a well-funded fall primary challenge that could succeed given the power of deep pockets and deceptive ads. It’s a prospect no member of Congress relishes. They could also take away his Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations.

Whatever the reason, he may have tipped the balance with House, then Senate votes, imminent, perhaps as early as Sunday, March 21. Going first, it’s believed the House will use a controversial “self-executing rule” for a package of Senate bill fixes to “deem and pass” the entire bill that would otherwise fail. The Senate will then consider the revised bill through “reconciliation,” requiring a simple majority to pass. Self-executing has been used many times before, but never for a bill impacting health care for everyone, amounting to one-sixth of the economy.

It also bypasses the 1985 Byrd Rule that restricts reconciliation to budget revisions according to provisions under Section 313(b)(1) of the 1974 Congressional Budget Act.

What’s at stake? Plenty!

House and Senate bills will ration care, enrich providers, and make a dysfunctional system worse. Hundreds of billions of Medicare cuts will harm seniors. Most others will pay more, get less, and millions will remain uninsured. According to an earlier AMA estimate, those covered “will face higher premiums, deductibles, copayments and coinsurance, effectively reducing the scope of their coverage,” what Wendell Potter explained above.

Business Week magazine acknowledged it last August saying, “No matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall (or now), the insurance industry (and drug cartel) will emerge more profitable.” Quoting an unnamed Senate Finance Committee staffer, “The bottom line is that health reform (will) lead to increased revenues and profits,” and for doubters, check current insurance and drug company stock prices for confirmation.

Relevant International Law

Adequate health care is a human right, not a commodity for those who can afford it.

Article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states:

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care….”

Article 12 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights (ICESCR) states:

“The State Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health (including universally ensuring) medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness…. government(s) must ensure all citizens have (affordable) access to basic health services.”

Under international law, UDHR and ICESCR form the backbone of the right to health for everyone. The UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR) developed guidelines to implement it, including a “minimum floor” below which no country may fall, that for health ensures it, in terms of availability, accessibility, acceptability, quality, and universality without discrimination.

America’s Low Healthcare Delivery Ranking among Industrialized Nations

Of all industrialized countries, America is the only one that doesn’t recognize the right to health and a way to provide it. In fact, in Maher v. Roe (1977), the Supreme Court declared it unnecessary for Congress to require minimum health care standards. The closest to it are Medicare and Medicaid.

Removing middleman insurers would save over $400 billion annually, enough to cover all the uninsured and provide quality care at lower overall cost. Letting corporate predators game the system ensures the opposite, a problem Obamacare exacerbates.

In 1943, Franklin Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights, declaring “freedom from want” an essential liberty necessary for security, including “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve good health.” Predatory insurers deny it. Focusing on outcomes consistent with internationally-recognized standards is vital, not the right of business to commodify a human right, charge what they want, and deny access for those who can’t afford it.

Obamacare will worsen the current system. It’s about profits, not people, especially the nation’s poor, most vulnerable, and disadvantaged on society’s fringes, most hurt by all congressional measures, including one this vital.

What the 1913 Federal Reserve Act did for bankers, Obamacare may do for the insurance and drug cartels.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://prognewshour.progressiveradionetwork.org/

http://lendmennews.progressiveradionetwork.org/

Vdare.com

The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/ Cheney/ Obama /neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper’s website for the past three days was the “Inside the Beltway” report, “Explosive News,” [By Jennifer Harper, February 22, 2010]about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.

I was even more surprised that the news report treated the press conference seriously.

How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust? How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires? “A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7,” reports the Washington Times.

The paper reports that the architects and engineers have concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology provided “insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction” and are “calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.”

The newspaper reports that Richard Gage, the spokesperson for the architects and engineers said: “Government officials will be notified that ‘Misprision of Treason,’ U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382) is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act. The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial.”

There is now an organization, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth. At the main press conference in San Francisco, Erik Lawyer, the head of that organization, announced the firefighters’ support for the architects and engineers’ demands. He reported that no forensic investigation was made of the fires that are alleged to have destroyed the three buildings and that this failure constitutes a crime.

Mandated procedures were not followed, and instead of being preserved and investigated, the crime scene was destroyed. He also reported that there are more than one hundred first responders who heard and experienced explosions and that there is radio, audio and video evidence of explosions.

Also at the press conference, physicist Steven Jones presented the evidence of nano-thermite in the residue of the WTC buildings found by an international panel of scientists led by University of Copenhagen nano-chemist Professor Niels Harrit. Nano-thermite is a high-tech explosive/pyrotechnic capable of instantly melting steel girders.

Before we yell “conspiracy theory,” we should be aware that the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists offer no theory. They provide evidence that challenges the official theory. This evidence is not going to go away.

If expressing doubts or reservations about the official story in the 9/11 Commission Report makes a person a conspiracy theory kook, then we have to include both co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission and the Commission’s legal counsel, all of whom have written books in which they clearly state that they were lied to by government officials when they conducted their investigation, or, rather, when they presided over the investigation conducted by executive director Philip Zelikow, a member of President George W. Bush’s transition team and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a co-author of Bush Secretary of State Condi “Mushroom Cloud” Rice.

There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them. Despite expensive wars that threaten Social Security and Medicare, wars based on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, non-existent Saddam Hussein connections to al Qaida, non-existent Afghan participation in the 9/11 attacks, and the non-existent Iranian nukes that are being hyped as the reason for the next American war of aggression in the Middle East, more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.

Moreover, it doesn’t matter to these Americans how often the government changes its story. For example, Americans first heard of Osama bin Laden because the Bush regime pinned the 9/11 attacks on him. Over the years video after video was served up to the gullible American public of bin Laden’s pronouncements. Experts dismissed the videos as fakes, but Americans remained their gullible selves. Then suddenly last year a new 9/11 “mastermind” emerged to take bin Laden’s place, the captive Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the detainee waterboarded 183 times until he confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attack.

In the Middle Ages confessions extracted by torture constituted evidence, but self-incrimination has been a no-no in the U.S. legal system since our founding. But with the Bush regime and the Republican federal judges, whom we were assured would defend the U.S. Constitution, the self-incrimination of Sheik Mohammed stands today as the only evidence the U.S. government has that Muslim terrorists pulled off 9/11.

If a person considers the feats attributed to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, they are simply unbelievable. Sheik Mohammed is a more brilliant, capable superhero than V in the fantasy movie, “V for Vendetta.” Sheik Mohammed outwitted all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies along with those of all U.S. allies or puppets, including Israel’s Mossad. No intelligence service on earth or all of them combined was a match for Sheik Mohammed.

Sheik Mohammed outwitted the U.S. National Security Council, Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, the State Department, NORAD, the U.S. Air Force, and Air Traffic Control.

He caused Airport Security to fail four times in one morning. He caused the state-of-the-art air defenses of the Pentagon to fail, allowing a hijacked airliner, which was off course all morning while the U.S. Air Force, for the first time in history, was unable to get aloft interceptor aircraft, to crash into the Pentagon.

Sheik Mohammed was able to perform these feats with unqualified pilots.

Sheik Mohammed, even as a waterboarded detainee, has managed to prevent the FBI from releasing the many confiscated videos that would show, according to the official story, the hijacked airliner hitting the Pentagon.

How naive do you have to be to believe that any human, or for that matter Hollywood fantasy character, is this powerful and capable?

If Sheik Mohammed has these superhuman capabilities, how did the incompetent Americans catch him? This guy is a patsy tortured into confession in order to keep the American naifs believing the government’s conspiracy theory.

What is going on here is that the U.S. government has to bring the 9/11 mystery to an end. The government must put on trial and convict a culprit so that it can close the case before it explodes. Anyone waterboarded 183 times would confess to anything.

The U.S. government has responded to the evidence being arrayed against its outlandish 9/11 conspiracy theory by redefining the war on terror from external to internal enemies. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on February 21 that American extremists are now as big a concern as international terrorists. Extremists, of course, are people who get in the way of the government’s agenda, such as the 1,000 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The group used to be 100, now it is 1,000. What if it becomes 10,000?

Cass Sunstein, an Obama regime official, has a solution for the 9/11 skeptics: Infiltrate them and provoke them into statements and actions that can be used to discredit or to arrest them. But get rid of them at all cost.

Why employ such extreme measures against alleged kooks if they only provide entertainment and laughs? Is the government worried that they are on to something?

Instead, why doesn’t the U.S. government simply confront the evidence that is presented and answer it?

If the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists are merely kooks, it would be a simple matter to acknowledge their evidence and refute it. Why is it necessary to infiltrate them with police agents and to set them up?

Many Americans would reply that “their” government would never even dream of killing Americans by hijacking airliners and destroying buildings in order to advance a government agenda. But on February 3, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that the U.S. government can assassinate its own citizens when they are overseas. No arrest, trial, or conviction of a capital crime is necessary. Just straight out murder.

Obviously, if the U.S. government can murder its citizens abroad it can murder them at home, and has done so. For example, 100 Branch Davidians were murdered in Waco, Texas, by the Clinton administration for no legitimate reason. The government just decided to use its power knowing that it could get away with it, which it did.

Americans who think “their” government is some kind of morally pure operation would do well to familiarize themselves with Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was a plot drawn up by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff for the CIA to commit acts of terrorism in American cities and fabricate evidence blaming Castro so that the U.S. could gain domestic and international support for regime change in Cuba. The secret plan was nixed by President John F. Kennedy and was declassified by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. It is available online in the National Security Archive. There are numerous online accounts available, including Wikipedia. James Bamford’s book, Body of Secrets, also summarizes the plot:

“Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman [Gen. Lemnitzer] and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.”

Prior to 9/11 the American neoconservatives were explicit that the wars of aggression that they intended to launch in the Middle East required “a new Pearl Harbor.”

For their own good and that of the wider world, Americans need to pay attention to the growing body of experts who are telling them that the government’s account of 9/11 fails their investigation. 9/11 launched the neoconservative plan for U.S. world hegemony. As I write the U.S. government is purchasing the agreement of foreign governments that border Russia to accept U.S. missile interceptor bases. The U.S. intends to ring Russia with U.S. missile bases from Poland through central Europe and Kosovo to Georgia, Azerbaijan and central Asia. [See Impending Explosion: U.S. Intensifies Threats To Russia And Iran, by Rick Rozoff, Global Research, February 19, 2010] U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke declared on February 20 that al Qaida is moving into former central Asian constituent parts of the Soviet Union, such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Holbrooke is soliciting U.S. bases in these former Soviet republics under the guise of the ever-expanding “war on terror.”

The U.S. has already encircled Iran with military bases. The U.S. government intends to neutralize China by seizing control over the Middle East and cutting China off from oil.

This plan assumes that Russia and China, nuclear armed states, will be intimidated by U.S. anti-missile defenses and acquiesce to U.S. hegemony and that China will lack oil for its industries and military.

The U.S. government is delusional. Russian military and political leaders have responded to the obvious threat by declaring NATO a direct threat to the security of Russia and by announcing a change in Russian war doctrine to the pre-emptive launch of nuclear weapons. The Chinese are too confident to be bullied by a washed up American “superpower.”

The morons in Washington are pushing the envelope of nuclear war. The insane drive for American hegemony threatens life on earth. The American people, by accepting the lies and deceptions of “their” government, are facilitating this outcome.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

Silly me. Here I had thought that world leaders would want to keep their nations from collapsing. They must be working hard to prevent currency collapse, financial system collapse, food system collapse, social collapse, environmental collapse, and the onset of general, overwhelming misery—right? But no, that’s not what the evidence suggests. Increasingly I am forced to conclude that the object of the game that world leaders are actually playing is not to avoid collapse; it’s simply to postpone it a while so as to be the last nation to go down, so yours can have the chance to pick the others’ carcasses before it meets the same fate.

I know, that sounds unbearably cynical. And in fact it may not accurately describe the conscious attitudes of leaders of some smaller nations. But for the U.S. and China, arguably the countries most likely to lead the way for the rest of the world, actions speak louder than words. (Mental health advisory: readers with a low tolerance for bad news should turn back now; there are lots of cheerier articles on the Internet and this might be a good time to find and enjoy one.)

For these two nations, avoiding collapse would require solving a range of enormous problems, of which at least four are non-negotiable: climate change; peak fossil fuels (in effect, stagnating and, soon, declining energy supplies); the inherent instability of growth-based financial systems; and the vulnerability of food systems to factors like fresh water scarcity and soil erosion (in addition to global warming and fuel scarcity). If they fail to address any one of these, societal collapse is inevitable—in a few decades certainly, but perhaps in just the next few years.

So how are our contestants doing? There’s not much to report on the climate score—just vague promises for future action. So their apparent strategy in this case is to delay (not to delay the impacts, mind you, but to delay efforts to address the problem).

Likewise, there is little positive action occurring regarding food systems: the assumption appears to be that conventional industrial agriculture—which is responsible for most of the global food system’s enormous and growing vulnerabilities—will somehow shoulder the task of feeding seven to nine billion humans. We just need to continue with what we are already doing, but on a larger scale and using more gene-engineered crop varieties.

Officially, peak energy is not even a concern, so evidently the strategy being adopted here is denial. We’ll see how that works out.

How about the financial mess? Here the U.S. and China are in situations so different that a more extended discussion seems justified.

China Surges to the Lead!

The U.S. is in debt up to its eyeballs and has mortgaged the paychecks of every generation approximately until hell freezes over in order to bail out its “too-big-to-fail” banks. In contrast, China has piles of cash (resulting from its enormous trade surpluses) and has bought a mountain of U.S. debt in order to keep its main customer’s currency from losing value. It would seem that, in this department, one nation is set to flag while the other is poised to leap into first place as world economic superpower.

And that happens to be the conventional wisdom on the subject. It’s not hard to find commentators who say the United States is a has-been for a variety of reasons. In addition to its huge debt burden, the U.S. also suffers from a shrinking manufacturing base, a big trade deficit, eroding quality of education, and a foreign policy that serves the interests of arms manufacturers while undermining the long-term interests of the nation. Regarding the last of these items, a 2006 World Public Opinion poll showed large majorities in four leading ally nations (Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, and Indonesia), together accounting for a third of the Muslim world’s population, believe the U.S. is determined to destroy or undermine Islam. Within those countries, most people surveyed support attacks on American targets. And it just so happens that most of the world’s future oil supplies will be coming from Muslim nations. Brilliant.

By contrast, China is enjoying springtime on amphetamines. It now has the biggest car market in the world. And, according to Stuart Staniford in a recent fact-filled article, “if present trends continue, the Chinese expressway system will likely grow larger than the U.S. interstate highway system within the next couple of years, and Chinese car ownership will exceed U.S. car ownership by somewhere in the neighborhood of 2017.” As of 2010 China is the leading producer of hydroelectric and solar power and by 2011 will be the top producer of wind power. China’s smart grid investments dwarf those of the U.S. by 200 to one. The Chinese are also investing heavily in nuclear energy. Staniford goes on: “Oversimplifying greatly, it’s as though the U.S. borrowed a pile of money from China in order to fight a war to free up oil supply in Iraq in order that China could become the greatest industrial power the world has ever seen.”

China’s foreign policy consists largely of buying friends by purchasing rights to oil, gas, coal, and other resources (in Canada, Australia, Venezuela, Iraq, Kazakhstan, and throughout Africa), while the U.S. spends money it doesn’t have rooting out bad guys and making more enemies in the process.

In an October, 2009 lecture, George Soros showed refreshing candor about the seriousness of the continuing global financial crisis: “What differentiated [the recent economic crisis] from the Great Depression is that this time the financial system was not allowed to collapse, but was put on artificial life support. In fact [however], the magnitude of the credit and leverage problem we have today is even greater than the 1930s.” Soros then went on to discuss the relative positions of the U.S. and China:

In the short term, all countries were negatively affected. But in the long term, there will be winners and losers. . . . To put it bluntly, the U.S. stands to lose the most, and China is poised to emerge as the greatest winner. . . . China has been the primary beneficiary of globalization, and it has been largely insulated from the financial crisis. For the West, and the U.S. in particular, the crisis was an internally-generated event [that] led to the collapse of the financial system. For China, it was an external shock [that] has hurt exports, but left the financial, political, and economic system unscathed.

China Stumbles!

But remember: without solutions to climate change, peak energy, and the looming food crisis, winning the financial contest is only temporary solace. Consider just the energy conundrum: China may be building nukes and windmills, but there’s no way it can maintain 8 percent annual growth for long with flat or declining energy from coal. China and India, between them, are currently planning to build 800 new coal-fired power plants by 2020. Where will the coal come from? Both countries are already experiencing domestic production shortfalls and are starting to import the fuel. But coal-exporting countries will be unable to keep up with their growing combined demand.

Moreover, there is a school of thought that says China’s apparently unstoppable economic miracle is a bubble waiting to burst. Beijing’s housing market is overheated, like that of Las Vegas circa 2006. Last year, the Chinese economy enjoyed 9 percent GDP growth—on paper. But in order to achieve that goal, the government and banks had to loan out 30 percent of China’s GDP (the rate of growth in loans accelerated during the latter part of the year; at year-end rates, banks were on track to loan out an amount equal to the nation’s entire GDP in 2010). In any case, much of that growth probably occurred through speculation on real estate and questionable stocks.

Generally, China is at a Wild West stage of economic development: it is a collection of powerful local capitalist power bases unaccountable to anyone, all jockeying to create and inflate assets and credit. While the central government has recently exerted control over the banks, its ability to halt regional Ponzi schemes is still limited.

In January the Chinese banking regulatory commission attempted to rein in lending in order to slow the rapid increase in real estate and stock market values. (On the other hand, during the same month, China’s cabinet agreed to permit margin trading and short selling of stocks and to launch a stock futures index.) Significantly, there is evidence that China’s central bank’s attempts to harmlessly deflate the housing and stock market bubbles may be going badly. The sudden suspension in lending has, according to Joe Weisenthal in Business Insider, “caught importers, along with many other companies, by surprise and could cause turbulence in China’s import orders. Letters of credit (LoC) suddenly became unavailable, despite previous agreements. We believe that this will inevitably lead to delays or cancellations in China’s imports. Import orders for commodities and machineries could be affected most.” Translation: the government was faced with the options of letting a rapidly growing bubble burst, taking the economy down; or deliberately deflating the bubble, risking taking the economy down by another route. The central bank chose the latter, and the risked takedown may be unfolding.

Meanwhile Google and the Obama Administration have been exerting external pressure on China to relax its censorship of electronic communications—moves that some see as reducing the central government’s options for controlling both information flow and the economy.

In a recent op-ed, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman countered worries about a bursting of the China bubble with a robust display of confidence in Beijing’s unstoppable expansionary momentum. Given Friedman’s record (remember his columns in 2003 extolling the benefits that would flow to America from an invasion of Iraq?), this alone should be cause to doubt whether the Chinese locomotive can stay on its tracks much longer.

What Does It Mean to “Win”?

In his book Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, Dmitry Orlov discusses the “collapse gap” between the United States and the old Soviet Union: the latter, he argues, was in effect much better prepared for economic crisis and the fall of its central government; when the U.S. eventually goes the way of the U.S.S.R., the pain and suffering of its citizens will be much greater. (I can’t adequately summarize Orlov’s evidence and reasoning here, but they are persuasive; if you haven’t read the book, do yourself a favor.)

So: How is the U.S. doing today in terms of collapse preparedness as compared to China?

After six decades of nearly uninterrupted economic growth, Americans have developed unrealistic expectations about the future. They are urbanized consumers whose manufacturing capability has shriveled and whose practical survival skills are in most cases vestigial. The Chinese, in contrast, have less of a steep fall ahead of them. Most still dwell in the countryside, and many who live in the cities are only one generation removed from subsistence agriculture and can still draw on their own, or their parents’, practical skills learned during decades of poverty and immersion in a traditional farming culture.

Both nations face fierce political challenges. In the U.S., the central government has reached nearly complete paralysis: it is evidently incapable of solving even relatively minor problems, and confidence in it among the citizenry has largely evaporated. Political leaders have succeeded in polarizing the people geographically with “hot-button” issues, few of which have anything to do with the factors currently undermining the nation’s ability to survive. The Chinese central government appears far more capable of acting decisively and strategically, but it is confronted with nasty facts of geography and history: there is an extreme and growing economic and social division between the wealthy coastal cities and the poor, rural interior; and a demographic schism between those 40 years old or younger who have high economic expectations, and the older generation who grew up under Mao, with an ethic of collectivism and self-sacrifice. The young, especially, have accepted a trade-off between civil freedoms and economic prosperity. If the latter is not delivered, there will be shrill demands for the former. These divisions are so deep and profound that they could tear society apart if expectations are dashed—and the leaders know this.

Thus, in the event of collapse, both nations face the possibility of a breakdown in their political systems, entailing widespread violence (uprisings and crackdowns).

China still maintains a crucial advantage in one key area: its food system. Far more of its citizens still grow food, even taking into account recent trends toward rapid urbanization (in the U.S., full-time farmers make up only about two percent of the population and the average farmer is approaching retirement age). This is not to say that China will have the capacity to feed all its people; it is already moving in the direction of being a major net food importer. Meanwhile, the U.S. remains a significant food exporter. The key difference has to do with the resiliency of the two nations’ respective food systems: that of the United States is more centralized, more highly fuel dependent, and therefore probably more vulnerable.

The Geopolitics of Collapse

It’s easy to see the advantage of collapse preparedness for the citizenry—with better preparation, more will survive. But does a higher survival rate during and after collapse translate to some sort of geopolitical advantage?

The process of collapse will be determined by many factors, some hard to predict, and so it is difficult to know the size or scope of the political power structure that might re-emerge in either country. It’s possible that one nation, or both, could devolve into smaller political units squabbling among themselves and unable to engage much in global jockeying for resources. All new political units emerging within the present territories of China or the U.S. would be immediately beset with enormous practical problems, including poverty, hunger, environmental disasters, and mass migrations.

Presumably some potent weaponry from the age of global warfare would remain intact and usable, so it is possible in principle that one or another of these smaller political entities could assert itself on the world stage as a short-lived, bargain-basement empire of limited geographic scope. But even in that case “winning” the collapse race would be small comfort.

The possibility of armed conflict between the two powers prior to mutual collapse is not to be entirely excluded if, for example, U.S. efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions were to set off a deadly chain reaction of attacks and counter-attacks possibly involving Israel, with world powers being forced to choose sides; or if the U.S. were to persist in arming Taiwan. But neither the U.S. nor China wants a direct mutual military confrontation, and both nations are highly motivated to avoid one. Thus all-out nuclear war—still the worst-case imaginable scenario for homo sapiens and planet Earth—seems thankfully unlikely, though in the few decades ahead the use of some of these weapons, on some occasions, by one nation or another, is probable.

Trade wars are another matter, and we might even see one this year, according to Michael Pettis at Financial Times, who notes that

. . . trade imbalances are more necessary than ever to justify increased investment in surplus countries [i.e., China], but rising unemployment makes them politically and economically unacceptable in deficit countries [i.e., the U.S.]. Rising savings in the U.S. will collide with stubbornly high savings in China. Unless a long-term solution is jointly worked out immediately, trade conflict will worsen and it will become increasingly hard to reverse offensive policies. Most importantly, if deficit countries demand structural change faster than surplus countries can manage, we will almost certainly finish with a nasty trade dispute that will . . . poison relationships for years.

How likely is the prospect for the last nation standing to be able to, as I put it in the first paragraph above, “pick the carcasses” of its competitors? Such a scenario presupposes that one nation will be able to stay on its feet for at least a few years after others fall. But this may not be possible. Recall the prophetic words of Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988):

“A nation today can no longer unilaterally collapse, for if any national government disintegrates, its population and territory will be absorbed by some other [or bailed out by international agencies]. . . . Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse.”

When the U.S.S.R. crashed, the U.S. and various multinational corporations were able to sweep in and gobble up some of the treasure left lying around. One example: U.S. nuclear power plants have for many years been using uranium fuel cannibalized from old Soviet missile warheads. Soon, international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF helped organize new financial structures for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia, and the other nations born from Soviet political and economic disintegration, so as to limit and reverse the process of social disintegration that had already passed beyond its early stages.

But now the game has changed. A collapse of the U.S. would leave China devastated. Not only would Beijing lose its main customer, but the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of treasury notes it has accumulated would be rendered worthless. If China were internally stable, such impacts could be absorbed with difficulty. But in light of China’s own simmering social and financial predicaments, a U.S. collapse would almost certainly be enough to tip Beijing’s economy into a tailspin, resulting in both social and political crises.

A collapse of China would similarly devastate the U.S. Obviously, the loss of a source of cheap consumer products would discomfit WalMart shoppers, but the shock soon would go much deeper. The Treasury would lose its main foreign buyer of government debt, which means that the Fed would be forced to step in and monetize that debt (in common parlance, “turn on the printing presses”), undermining the dollar’s value. The result: a hyperinflationary economic crash. Such a crash is probably inevitable at some point anyway, but a collapse of the Chinese system would hasten and worsen it.

In neither instance would international institutions be capable of preventing substantial social and political fall-out. The last nation standing would not stand for long. We have reached the stage where, as Tainter says, “World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

The Transition Marathon

Okay, so there is no serious effort on the part of U.S. or Chinese leaders to avoid collapse in the long run (say, over the next 10 to 20 years). Perhaps this is because they have concluded that it is impossible to do so—there are just too many trends leading in the same direction, and actually dealing with any of those trends head-on would entail huge, immediate political risks. In reality, however, it is much more likely that they simply refuse seriously to think about these trends and their implications, because they do have another option—to postpone collapse through deficit spending, bailouts, and more financial bubbles, while enacting their parts in a climate-policy kabuki play and engaging in resource geopolitics. This way blame will at least fall on the next set of leaders. Postponing collapse is itself a big job, enough so as to take all of one’s attention away from having to contemplate the awfulness and inevitability of what is being postponed.

Do these short-term efforts in any way reduce the risk of dissolution? Hardly. In fact, the longer the reckoning is delayed, the worse it will be.

What would make more sense than just trying to put off the inevitable is quite simply to build resilience throughout society, re-localizing basic social systems involving food, manufacture, and finance. There is no need to rehearse the existing discourse about this strategy: readers who are not familiar with it can find plenty of useful pointers at www.transitiontowns.org, or in the books and articles of authors such as Rob Hopkins, Albert Bates, David Holmgren, Pat Murphy, and Sharon Astyk (and in some of my own writings, including Museletter #192).

It is understandably hard for national politicians to think along those lines. Building societal resilience means disregarding the dictates of economic efficiency; it means systematically reducing the power of the central government and national/global commercial institutions (banks and corporations). It also means questioning the central dogma of our modern world: the efficacy and possibility of unending economic growth.

So if the best outcome lies in a strategy of resilience and re-localization, and our national leaders can’t even contemplate such a strategy, that means those leaders are, in one sense at least, irrelevant to our future.

Some blog readers are so in tune with this line of thinking that they no longer see any point in paying attention to the global scene. They may even think this article is a waste of time (and I expect to get an email or two to that effect). But following world events is more than a matter of infotainment: when and how China and the U.S. come apart at the seams is a question of far greater consequence than that of whether the New Orleans Saints or the Indianapolis Colts will win the Superbowl. The reality is that no nation, and no community will be able to completely protect itself from the sudden, harsh winds that will rush to fill the vacuum left by an implosion of either superpower.

By the way, my apologies to the other 190 or so nations of the world, large and small: my singling out of the U.S. and China for discussion does not signify that other countries are unimportant, or that their destinies will not be as unique as their cultures and geographies; merely that those destinies will probably unfold in the context of a global collapse spreading from the two nations we have been discussing. For any nation—India, Bolivia, Russia, Brazil, South Africa—and for any community or family, survival will require some comprehension of the direction of large events, so as to get out of the way when debris is flying and to anticipate opportunities to regroup.

So: Pay attention to the weather reports from Washington and Beijing, but meanwhile build local resilience wherever you are. If the roof needs mending, don’t dawdle.

Meanwhile, after a long day of organizing neighborhood Transition gardens, you may want to get a foretaste of post-collapse America by reading James Howard Kunstler’s A World Made by Hand; or savor an entertainingly erudite discussion of collapse as an extended process (which it will likely be), rather than as a sudden, all-out event, by reading John Michael Greer’s books The Long Descent and The Ecotechnic Future.

Just because the sky is falling, that doesn’t mean it’s time to stop thinking.

Countercurrents.org

Project Censored’s top 2010 story was “US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street,” highlighting that since 2001, “eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates and the Republican and Democratic parties.” It’s no surprise that they own them, what Wall Street Watch.org showed in a March 2009 Essential Information and Consumer Education Foundation report titled,”Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America.”

The accompanying press release said:

Over the past decade, “$5 billion in political contributions bought Wall Street freedom from regulation, (and) restraint.” From 1998 – 2008, “Wall Street investment firms, commercial banks, hedge funds, real estate companies and insurance conglomerates (the FIRE sector)” spent over $1.7 billion in political contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists, in return for which:

– they were freed from regulation;

– could speculate on financial derivatives and an alphabet soup of securitized garbage, including asset-backed securities (ABSs), mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), collateralized bond obligations (CBOs), credit default swaps (CDSs), and collateralized fund obligations (CFOs) – combined, sliced, diced, packaged, repackaged, and sold in tranches to sophisticated and ordinary investors, many unwittingly through mutual funds, 401(k)s, pensions, and the like;

– could merge commercial and investment banking and insurance operations;

– bilk investors and the public through fraudulent schemes; and

– get trillions of bailout dollars when the economy crashed.

For decades, Wall Street and successive governments colluded to defraud the public, using various schemes to transfer wealth from them to the privileged. Carter spearheaded deregulation Nixon and Ford began by hiring Alfred Kahn to head the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). The 1978 Airline Deregulation Act followed. It dissolved the CAB, removed industry restraints, eased consolidation, and subsequent bills deregulated trucking and railroads – the 1980 Motor Carrier Act and 1980 Staggers Rail Act, following the 1976 Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act.

Carter also phased out interest rate deposit ceilings, and gave the Fed more power through the 1980 Depository Institutions and Monetary Control Act, removing New Deal restraints and enabling subsequent administrations to go further.

Under Reagan, energy deregulation followed, notably oil and gas, then electric utilities under GHW Bush and Clinton, the result being high prices, brownouts, and Enron-like scandals. In the 1980s, the 1982 Alternative Mortgage Transactions Parity Act led to exotic feature mortgages with adjustable rates or interest-only. They carry low “teaser” rates for several years, after which they’re adjusted much higher, often making loans unaffordable, especially for low-income, high-risk borrowers using subprime and Alt-A loans.

The 1982 Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act deregulated thrifts and fueled fraud, so much that the Savings and Loan crisis followed, hundreds of banks failed, and taxpayers got stuck with most of the $160 billion cost. In 1987, the Government Accountability Office (GOA) declared the S & L deposit insurance fund insolvent because of mounting bank failures.

In 1988, global regulators imposed minimum bank capital requirements, known as the Basel Accord or Basel I, enforced in the G-10 countries.

In 1989, the Financial Institutions Reform and Recovery Act abolished the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and FSLIC, transferring them to the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and FDIC. It also created the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) to liquidate troubled assets, assume Federal Home Loan Bank Board insurance functions, and clean up a troubled system.

Clinton era telecommunications deregulation let media and telecommunication giants consolidate, gave new digital television broadcast spectrum space to current TV station owners, and let cable companies increase their local monopoly positions.

His 1994 Reigle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act let bank holding companies operate in more than one state. In 1996, the Fed reinterpreted Glass-Steagall to let bank holding companies earn up to 25% of their revenue from investment banking. The 1998 Citicorp-Travelers merger followed, combining a commercial/investment bank with an insurance company ahead of the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, also called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) authorizing it.

Some Background

During the Great Depression, the Bank Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall) created the FDIC, insuring bank deposits up to $5,000 and separating commercial from investment banks and insurance companies, among other provisions to curb speculation. Senator Carter Glass was its prime mover and got Senator Henry Steagall to go along by including his amendment to protect deposits. Glass believed banks should stick to lending, not speculate, deal, or hold corporate securities. He blamed them for the 1929 crash, subsequent bank failures, and the Great Depression. The Bank Act of 1933 passed quickly to curb them.

No Longer since the Neoliberal 1990s

Later weakened, it still curbed abusive practices until GLBA repealed it, let commercial and investment banks and insurance companies combine, and facilitated consolidated power, fraud and abuse that followed. Other deregulatory rules permitted off-balance sheet accounting to let banks hide liabilities.

In 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) passed, legitimizing swap agreements and other hybrid instruments, at the heart of today’s problems by ending regulatory oversight of derivatives and leveraging that turned Wall Street more than ever into a casino.

In her book “It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street,” former insider Nomi Prins explained CFMA as follows:

“That act ushered in tremendous growth of unregulated commodity trades through its “Enron Loophole (for its Enron On-Line, the first Internet-based commodity transactions system to let companies) trade energy and other commodity futures on unregulated exchanges.”

“It also sparked growth in the unregulated credit derivatives trades that bet on defaults of corporations or loans, which became the main ingredient in the hot new Wall Street financial gumbo. Credit derivatives were a type of insurance contract written against not just one corporation or loan but on investments that scarfed up bunches of subprime loans (junk) and stuffed them into the unregulated CDOs that imploded and hastened the greater lending crisis.”

Credit default swaps became the most widely traded credit derivative. As unregulated insurance bets between two parties on whether or not a company’s bonds would default, financial writer Ellen Brown asked in her April 11, 2008 article titled, “Credit Default Swaps: Evolving Financial Meltdown and Derivative Disaster Du Jour:”

What if “the smartest guys in the room designed their credit default swaps (but) forgot to ask one thing – what if the parties on the other side of the bet don’t have the money to pay up?” In late 2007, when the financial crisis hit, they didn’t, causing a “supersized bubble” to deflate.

New Deal reforms were enacted to prevent it. Deregulatory madness made it inevitable and the subsequent global economic fallout that continues – compounded by what Danny Schechter explained in his book, titled “The Crime of Our Time,” calling the financial collapse “a crime story (involving) high status white-collar crooks.” Their schemes included:

– “Fraud and control frauds;

– Insider trading;

– Theft and conspiracy;

– Misrepresentation;

– Ponzi schemes;

– False accounting;

– Embezzling;

– Diverting funds into obscenely high salaries and obscene bonuses;

– Bilking investors, customers and homeowners;

– Conflicts of interest;

– Mesmerizing regulators;

– Manipulating markets;

– Tax frauds;

– Making loans and then arranging that they fail;

– Engineering phony financial products: (and)

– Misleading the public.”

Worst of all, they got away with it, still do, and got trillions of dollars in bailout money as a bonus, free money from the Fed plus interest on Fed held reserves.

The Absence of Regulatory Oversight

Earlier New Deal reforms were long gone, but for the most part worked when in place. The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 followed the Securities Act of 1933, requiring offers and security sales to be registered, pursuant to the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause. Previously, they were governed by state laws, so-called “blue sky laws” to protect against fraud.

The 1934 law regulated secondary trading of financial securities and established the SEC under Section 4 to enforce the new Act, later under the 1939 Trust Indenture Act, the 1940 Investment Company Act, the Investment Advisors Act the same year, Sarbanes-Oxley of 2002, and the 2006 Credit Rating Agency Reform Act.

The SEC was established to enforce federal securities laws, the security industry, the nation’s financial and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets and instruments unknown in the 1930s, including derivatives and other forms of speculation. In principle, it’s charged with uncovering wrongdoing, assuring investors aren’t swindled, and keeping the nation’s financial markets free from fraud and other abuses.

That was then, but no longer. Under George Bush, the SEC was more facilitator than enforcer, a paper tiger, not a guardian of the public trust. It:

– turned a blind eye to fraud and abuse;

– protected Wall Street, not investors;

– neutered its enforcement staff’s authority;

– adopted voluntary regulation;

– let investment banks hold less reserve capital;

– freely use leverage;

– incur much higher debt levels; and

– pretty much do what they pleased, only occasionally punishing an offender with a wrist-slap.

Financial fraud prosecutions dropped sharply, practically never against powerful, well-connected firms, the Bernie Madoff exception because he confessed to his sons, and they turned him in for running what he called a “giant Ponzi scheme.”

Obama exacerbated the worst bad practices. Wall gets a free ride. Foxes guard the hen house. Inmates run the asylum. Regulators don’t regulate. Investigations aren’t conducted. Criminal fraud is ignored. Nothing is done to curb it, and except for Madoff, only small fries need worry. Washington protects the big ones, Obama assigning Mary Schapiro the task as his SEC chief.

She’s a consummate insider, spent years promoting Wall Street self-regulation, headed the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), was the National Association of Securities Dealers’ (NASD) chairman, president, and CEO, ran the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and is expert at quashing fraud investigations. Except for high profile cases too big to hide (like Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo and Texas financier Robert Allen Sanford), she’s treaded lightly on the rich and powerful, is doing nothing to curb insider trading, front-running, market manipulation, and other abuses.

Even the Wall Street Journal, commenting on her appointment, said her regulatory record “shows she has infrequently pursued tough action against big Wall Street firms.” A year later, her job performance proves it, made easier by decades of deregulation.

In 2003, the Controller of the Currency, John Hawke, Jr. preempted state predatory lending laws (in violation of the 10th Amendment), meaning nationally chartered banks (including the nation’s biggest) would come under federal standards, not more stringent state ones. According to former New York Attorney General and Governor, Eliot Spitzer:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”

In 2004, Basel II replaced Basel I with more comprehensive guidelines, ostensibly to ensure banks hold capital reserves appropriate to their lending and investment practices. In other words, the more risk, the greater the reserves, but given lax regulatory oversight, banks pretty much do what they want, and Obama gives them free reign, all the easier with trillions in bailout dollars.

In 2007, the Fed’s Term Auction Facility extended loans to depository institutions with no public disclosure, unlike its discount window operations. In addition, global regulators let commercial banks set their own capital requirements, based on internal “risk-assessment models.”

Regulators ignored predatory lending practices. They:

– overrode state consumer protection laws to curb exploitive lending and other abuses;

– prevented victims from suing predatory loan issuing firms;

– freed Fannie, Freddie and giant Wall Street players to operate recklessly;

– let them hide toxic assets by off-balance sheet accounting; Financial Accounting Standards Board rules allow it, and the Security Industry and Financial Markets Association and the American Securitization Forum have lobbied furiously to keep them unchanged; in other words, to deceive the public by letting insolvent institutions look healthy;

– let them eliminate some of their own (Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch) to remove competition;

– abandoned antitrust and other regulatory principles;

– created too-big-to-fail institutions; and

– let them do anything they wished, free from meaningful oversight.

Credit rating agencies played their part as well because of their relationship with issuers. They ignored high-risk financial instruments, rated them highly, and duped investors to believe they were safe. The SEC could have intervened but didn’t. The 2006 Credit Rating Agencies Reform Act requires regulators to establish clear guidelines to determine which ones qualify as NRSROs (Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations).

The SEC is supposed to monitor their internal record-keeping and prevent conflicts of interest, but can’t regulate their methodology and must approve their standards even knowing they’re flawed.

One hand thus feeds the other. Conspiratorially, the regulator and credit agencies turn a blind eye to abuses, cry foul when it’s too late, then promise greater diligence next time. Change, of course, never comes, so next time is like last time until so extreme the whole system collapses, harming ordinary people the most.

After the 2008 Bear Stearns collapse, special lending facilities opened the discount window to investment banks, accepting a broad range of asset-backed securities, principally toxic ones, as collateral – what economist Michael Hudson called “cash for trash.” Numerous other programs followed, including:

– the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (ESSA) establishing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to trade bad assets for good ones;

– the 2008 New York Fed administered Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) to lend up to $1 trillion on a non-recourse basis to holders of certain AAA-rated asset-backed securities (ABS) backed by newly and recently originated consumer and small business loans;

– Fed purchases of money market instruments;

– the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) to subsidize toxic asset purchases with government guarantees; and

– trillions of dollars in bank bailouts; according to Neil Barofsky, the Special Treasury Department’s TARP Inspector General, banks got or were pledged up to $23.7 trillion, or the equivalent of an $80,000 liability for every American; in March 2009, Bloomberg reported that the Treasury and Fed “spent, lent, or committed $12.8 trillion” up to that point, and more was available for the asking, besides other free money at near zero percent rates plus interest on reserves held by the Fed.

Wall Street never had it so good. For the public, hard times are worsening as America sinks deeper into depression, a protracted one according to some experts hitting the needy and disadvantaged hardest. The land of the free is now the most callous, the result of what former Wall Street and government insider Catherine Austin Fitts calls a “financial coup d’etat.”

She explains the “pump(ing) and dump(ing) of the entire American economy,” duping the public, fleecing trillions of dollars, and it’s more than just “a process (to destroy) the middle class. (It’s) genocide (by other means) – a much more subtle and lethal version than ever before perpetrated by the scoundrels of our history texts.”

The scheme includes abusive market manipulation, “fraudulent housing (and other bubbles), pump and dump schemes, naked short selling, precious metals price suppression, and active intervention in the markets by the government and central bank” along with insiders trading on privileged information unavailable to the public. It’s part of a government – business partnership for enormous profits through “legislation, contracts, regulat(ory laxness), financing, (and) subsidies” – a conspiratorial plot to transfer household wealth to powerful special interests.

Here’s a taste of the consequences, courtesy of economist David Rosenberg on February 16.

He reported that “credit contraction continues unabated,” and the numbers are staggering:

– $30 billion in the past week;

– $100 billion in the first six weeks of 2010, “a historic 16% annualized decline;”

– since the crisis erupted in fall 2007, $740 billion, “a record 10% decline;” and

– “The fact that credit has dropped at a 16% annual rate since the turn of the year is testament to how the credit contraction is actually accelerating.”

And it’s broad-based:

– consumer loans down at a 12% annual rate year to date;

– real estate down 13.5% annualized;

– commercial and industrial loans down at a 19.3% annual rate; and

– short-term business credit down $14 billion year to date.

Rosenberg calls it “alarming,” especially “since the bulk of the fiscal and US dollar stimulus is behind us, not ahead of us….The era of the ‘green shoots’ is officially dead.”

Europe is mired in recession. Britain faces a possible 2010 sovereign debt crisis, spiking yields and raising borrowing costs, according to Morgan Stanley. Eastern European nations teeter on the brink of debt default. So do Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland. A January 14 George Magnus Financial Times article titled, “Sovereign default risks loom” said:

“There is no peacetime precedent for the current speed and scale of public debt accumulation….The spectre of sovereign default, therefore, has returned to the rich world,” sparking fears of nonpayment, paying less than face amount, inflation, capital controls, special taxes that break private contracts, and/or currency devaluations, measures also threatening America given its crushing debt burden.

Yet according to Rosenberg, “the consensus community has no clue as to what the future holds,” forecasting rosy scenarios while Rome burns.

In fact, “the depression is ongoing even if the most recent recession has faded; and in our view, the next one is not too far away especially now that the stimulus is soon to subside.” The contagion will be global, the fallout catastrophic because the worst is yet to come, what economist Michael Hudson foresaw in early 2009 saying:

“The (US) economy has reached its debt limit and is entering its insolvency phase. We are not in a cycle but (at) the end of an era. The old world of debt pyramiding to a fraudulent degree cannot be restored,” only delayed for a more painful day of reckoning. It’s coming according to Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881 – 1973) because:

“There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion.” It’s only a matter of sooner “or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”

Expect a deepening global depression; protracted economic, political, social, and institutional upheaval; mass unemployment, poverty, homelessness, and hunger; and severe repression to curb public anger. Blame it on decades of political influence buying yielding unprecedented returns for the privileged, but economic wreckage and catastrophic life changes for the rest. The price of excess is pain, lots of it for the world’s disadvantaged, the ones who always pay for rich peoples’ sins.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Lendman News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday – Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.

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Aleksandr Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.

These communities, if they retreat into a pure survivalist mode without linking themselves to the concentric circles of the wider community, the state and the planet, will become as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the corporate forces arrayed against us. All infrastructures we build, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours. Resistance will be reduced to small, often imperceptible acts of defiance, as those who retained their integrity discovered in the long night of 20th-century fascism and communism.

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.

My analysis comes close to the analysis of many anarchists. But there is a crucial difference. The anarchists do not understand the nature of violence. They grasp the extent of the rot in our cultural and political institutions, they know they must sever the tentacles of consumerism, but they naïvely believe that it can be countered with physical forms of resistance and acts of violence. There are debates within the anarchist movement – such as those on the destruction of property – but once you start using plastic explosives, innocent people get killed. And when anarchic violence begins to disrupt the mechanisms of governance, the power elite will use these acts, however minor, as an excuse to employ disproportionate and ruthless amounts of force against real and suspected agitators, only fueling the rage of the dispossessed.

I am not a pacifist. I know there are times, and even concede that this may eventually be one of them, when human beings are forced to respond to mounting repression with violence. I was in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia. We knew precisely what the Serbian forces ringing the city would do to us if they broke through the defenses and trench system around the besieged city. We had the examples of the Drina Valley or the city of Vukovar, where about a third of the Muslim inhabitants had been killed and the rest herded into refugee or displacement camps. There are times when the only choice left is to pick up a weapon to defend your family, neighborhood and city. But those who proved most adept at defending Sarajevo invariably came from the criminal class. When they were not shooting at Serbian soldiers they were looting the apartments of ethnic Serbs in Sarajevo and often executing them, as well as terrorizing their fellow Muslims. When you ingest the poison of violence, even in a just cause, it corrupts, deforms and perverts you. Violence is a drug, indeed it is the most potent narcotic known to humankind. Those most addicted to violence are those who have access to weapons and a penchant for force. And these killers rise to the surface of any armed movement and contaminate it with the intoxicating and seductive power that comes with the ability to destroy. I have seen it in war after war. When you go down that road you end up pitting your monsters against their monsters. And the sensitive, the humane and the gentle, those who have a propensity to nurture and protect life, are marginalized and often killed. The romantic vision of war and violence is as prevalent among anarchists and the hard left as it is in the mainstream culture. Those who resist with force will not defeat the corporate state or sustain the cultural values that must be sustained if we are to have a future worth living. From my many years as a war correspondent in El Salvador, Guatemala, Gaza and Bosnia, I have seen that armed resistance movements are always mutations of the violence that spawned them. I am not naïve enough to think I could have avoided these armed movements had I been a landless Salvadoran or Guatemalan peasant, a Palestinian in Gaza or a Muslim in Sarajevo, but this violent response to repression is and always will be tragic. It must be avoided, although not at the expense of our own survival.

Democracy, a system ideally designed to challenge the status quo, has been corrupted and tamed to slavishly serve the status quo. We have undergone, as John Ralston Saul writes, a coup d’état in slow motion. And the coup is over. They won. We lost. The abject failure of activists to push corporate, industrialized states toward serious environmental reform, to thwart imperial adventurism or to build a humane policy toward the masses of the world’s poor stems from an inability to recognize the new realities of power. The paradigm of power has irrevocably altered and so must the paradigm of resistance alter.

Too many resistance movements continue to buy into the facade of electoral politics, parliaments, constitutions, bills of rights, lobbying and the appearance of a rational economy. The levers of power have become so contaminated that the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant. The election of Barack Obama was yet another triumph of propaganda over substance and a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by the mass media. We mistook style and ethnicity – an advertising tactic pioneered by the United Colors of Benetton and Calvin Klein – for progressive politics and genuine change. We confused how we were made to feel with knowledge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand for an experience. Obama, now a global celebrity, is a brand. He had almost no experience besides two years in the senate, lacked any moral core and was sold as all things to all people. The Obama campaign was named Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a marketer’s dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertisers want because of how they can make you feel.

We live in a culture characterized by what Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics.” Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It always personalizes issues rather than clarifying them. It eschews real debate for manufactured scandals, celebrity gossip and spectacles. It trumpets eternal optimism, endlessly praises our moral strength and character, and communicates in a feel-your-pain language. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes, “meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage.”

The cultural belief that we can make things happen by thinking, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength or by understanding that we are truly exceptional is magical thinking. We can always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking, preached to us across the political spectrum by Oprah, sports celebrities, Hollywood, self-help gurus and Christian demagogues, is largely responsible for our economic and environmental collapse, since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as “negative.” This belief, which allows men and women to behave and act like little children, discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporate state are never seriously questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. And it has perverted the way we view ourselves, our nation and the natural world. The new paradigm of power, coupled with its bizarre ideology of limitless progress and impossible happiness, has turned whole nations, including the United States, into monsters.

We can march in Copenhagen. We can join Bill McKibben’s worldwide day of climate protests. We can compost in our backyards and hang our laundry out to dry. We can write letters to our elected officials and vote for Barack Obama, but the power elite is impervious to the charade of democratic participation. Power is in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls who are ruthlessly creating a system of neo-feudalism and killing the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And appealing to their better nature, or seeking to influence the internal levers of power, will no longer work.

We will not, especially in the United States, avoid our Götterdämmerung. Obama, like Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the other heads of the industrialized nations, has proven as craven a tool of the corporate state as George W. Bush. Our democratic system has been transformed into what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin labels inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, a free press, parliamentary systems and constitutions while manipulating and corrupting internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington, Ottawa or other state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. Mass culture, owned and disseminated by corporations, diverts us with trivia, spectacles and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics – and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”

Inverted totalitarianism wields total power without resorting to cruder forms of control such as gulags, concentration camps or mass terror. It harnesses science and technology for its dark ends. It enforces ideological uniformity by using mass communication systems to instill profligate consumption as an inner compulsion and to substitute our illusions of ourselves for reality. It does not forcibly suppress dissidents, as long as those dissidents remain ineffectual. And as it diverts us it dismantles manufacturing bases, devastates communities, unleashes waves of human misery and ships jobs to countries where fascists and communists know how to keep workers in line. It does all this while waving the flag and mouthing patriotic slogans. “The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed,” Wolin writes.

The practice and psychology of advertising, the rule of “market forces” in many arenas other than markets, the continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the saturation by mass media and propaganda of every household and the takeover of the universities have rendered most of us hostages. The rot of imperialism, which is always incompatible with democracy, has seen the military and arms manufacturers monopolize $1 trillion a year in defense-related spending in the United States even as the nation faces economic collapse. Imperialism always militarizes domestic politics. And this militarization, as Wolin notes, combines with the cultural fantasies of hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility to sever huge segments of the population from reality. Those who control the images control us. And while we have been entranced by the celluloid shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, these corporate forces, extolling the benefits of privatization, have effectively dismantled the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services and public housing) and rolled back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. The proponents of globalization and unregulated capitalism do not waste time analyzing other ideologies. They have an ideology, or rather a plan of action that is defended by an ideology, and slavishly follow it. We on the left have dozens of analyses of competing ideologies without any coherent plan of our own. This has left us floundering while corporate forces ruthlessly dismantle civil society.

We are living through one of civilization’s great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all “inevitable” utopian visions, is being exposed as a fraud. The power elite, perplexed and confused, clings to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the looming political and economic vacuum. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs led industrial nations to sacrifice other areas of human importance – from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution – on the altar of free trade. It left the world’s poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits – which can never be repaid – in human history. The massive bailouts, stimulus packages, giveaways and short-term debt, along with imperial wars we can no longer afford, will leave the United States struggling to finance nearly $5 trillion in debt this year. This will require Washington to auction off about $96 billion in debt a week. Once China and the oil-rich states walk away from our debt, which one day has to happen, the Federal Reserve will become the buyer of last resort. The Fed has printed perhaps as much as two trillion new dollars in the last two years, and buying this much new debt will see it, in effect, print trillions more. This is when inflation, and most likely hyperinflation, will turn the dollar into junk. And at that point the entire system breaks down.

All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators walk away with millions. The elite will retreat, as Naomi Klein has written in The Shock Doctrine, into gated communities where they will have access to services, food, amenities and security denied to the rest of us. We will begin a period in human history when there will be only masters and serfs. The corporate forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the rage at the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to ruthlessly extinguish opposition movements. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross. Totalitarianism, George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith but an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote. “That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Our elites have used fraud. Force is all they have left.

Our mediocre and bankrupt elite is desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved. More importantly, they are trying to save themselves. All attempts to work within this decayed system and this class of power brokers will prove useless. And resistance must respond to the harsh new reality of a global, capitalist order that will cling to power through ever-mounting forms of brutal and overt repression. Once credit dries up for the average citizen, once massive joblessness creates a permanent and enraged underclass and the cheap manufactured goods that are the opiates of our commodity culture vanish, we will probably evolve into a system that more closely resembles classical totalitarianism. Cruder, more violent forms of repression will have to be employed as the softer mechanisms of control favored by inverted totalitarianism break down.

It is not accidental that the economic crisis will converge with the environmental crisis. In his book The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi laid out the devastating consequences – the depressions, wars and totalitarianism – that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolves, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism – and a Mafia political system – which is a good description of our financial and political structure. A self-regulating market, Polanyi wrote, turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The free market’s assumption that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market allows each to be exploited for profit until exhaustion or collapse. A society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. This is what we are undergoing.

If we build self-contained structures, ones that do as little harm as possible to the environment, we can weather the coming collapse. This task will be accomplished through the existence of small, physical enclaves that have access to sustainable agriculture, are able to sever themselves as much as possible from commercial culture and can be largely self-sufficient. These communities will have to build walls against electronic propaganda and fear that will be pumped out over the airwaves. Canada will probably be a more hospitable place to do this than the United States, given America’s strong undercurrent of violence. But in any country, those who survive will need isolated areas of land as well as distance from urban areas, which will see the food deserts in the inner cities, as well as savage violence, leach out across the urban landscape as produce and goods become prohibitively expensive and state repression becomes harsher and harsher.

The increasingly overt uses of force by the elites to maintain control should not end acts of resistance. Acts of resistance are moral acts. They begin because people of conscience understand the moral imperative to challenge systems of abuse and despotism. They should be carried out not because they are effective but because they are right. Those who begin these acts are always few in number and dismissed by those who hide their cowardice behind their cynicism. But resistance, however marginal, continues to affirm life in a world awash in death. It is the supreme act of faith, the highest form of spirituality and alone makes hope possible. Those who carried out great acts of resistance often sacrificed their security and comfort, often spent time in jail and in some cases were killed. They understood that to live in the fullest sense of the word, to exist as free and independent human beings, even under the darkest night of state repression, meant to defy injustice.

When the dissident Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken from his cell in a Nazi prison to the gallows, his last words were: “This is for me the end, but also the beginning.” Bonhoeffer knew that most of the citizens in his nation were complicit through their silence in a vast enterprise of death. But however hopeless it appeared in the moment, he affirmed what we all must affirm. He did not avoid death. He did not, as a distinct individual, survive. But he understood that his resistance and even his death were acts of love. He fought and died for the sanctity of life. He gave, even to those who did not join him, another narrative, and his defiance ultimately condemned his executioners.

We must continue to resist, but do so now with the discomforting realization that significant change will probably never occur in our lifetime. This makes resistance harder. It shifts resistance from the tangible and the immediate to the amorphous and the indeterminate. But to give up acts of resistance is spiritual and intellectual death. It is to surrender to the dehumanizing ideology of totalitarian capitalism. Acts of resistance keep alive another narrative, sustain our integrity and empower others, who we may never meet, to stand up and carry the flame we pass to them. No act of resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a Tobin tax, working to shift the neoclassical economics paradigm, revoking a corporate charter, holding global internet votes or using Twitter to catalyze a chain reaction of refusal against the neoliberal order. But we will have to resist and then find the faith that resistance is worthwhile, for we will not immediately alter the awful configuration of power. And in this long, long war a community to sustain us, emotionally and materially, will be the key to a life of defiance.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that the exclusive preoccupation with personal concerns and indifference to the suffering of others beyond the self-identified group is what ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust possible: “The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.”

The indifference to the plight of others and the supreme elevation of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion. We will have to continue to battle the mechanisms of the dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door. Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems seek to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain alive. And for now this is the only victory possible.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, is the author of several books including the best sellers War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and his latest, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. He is married to the Canadian actress Eunice Wong. They have a son, Konrad, who is also a Canadian.