Beware of "Green Shoots!" US Committing Economic Suicide?

John Mauldin warns us about the phrase "This Time It's Different" and details exactly why it isn't and may be much, much worse. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.) So, we hear the Obama terminators want to strengthen the Fed and decrease the number of other regulators. This is a joke, right? Well, it's still not a full six months from the Obama/Biden phalanx taking over the reigns of governance, and we do remember what our pal, Joey, warned us would take place in the first six months.

Is the leadership of the U.S. committing suicide or are they exempt? Will "foreign entities soon own everything of value" here? Will they become "the major (or only) source of employment for U.S. citizens?"

Ben Bernanke's career will be analyzed and written about for many years. But the one thing that has caused me the most pain is his bringing of the term "green shoots" into the investment lexicon. These may be the two most overused and annoying words of my investment career. Every possible sign of a recovery is anointed with the phrase.

Of late, there has been a tendency for analysts to see numbers or statistics that are "less bad" and interpret them as signs that we are in recovery or at least almost there. They glance back at previous recoveries and say, "Doesn't this look like the last time? When such and such happens it means that recovery is on the way. We should therefore buy stocks" (or whatever).

That we are condemned to read such musings is part of the investment landscape. But that does not mean we shouldn't take the time to look at what the writer of those words is actually looking at. All too often of late, I find these people grasping at straws or failing to understand the data.

My premise for uttering the heresy "This Time It's Different" is that the fundamental nature of the economic landscape has so changed that comparisons with post-WWII recoveries is at best problematical and at worst misleading.

As we will see next week, we are on a track that looks far more like the Great Depression than the recessions of our lifetimes. To expect a normal recovery cycle, whether it is corporate profits or lending or consumer spending or capital investment or (pick a category) is just not reasonable. This is a period that is fundamentally, in so many ways, different. And the recovery (and there will be one!) will also be of a different warp and woof throughout the entire world economy.

Let me see if I can summarize my thinking before we get into the reasoning behind it.

First, we are at the end of a huge cycle of increasing private debt that ended in an overleveraged society. The process of reducing debt and unwinding leverage is going to take a rather long time. It will not be the typical one or two years and then things get back to an ever-higher normal.

We are, using a phrase coined by my friend Mohammed El Erian at PIMCO, on our way to a new normal. We are hitting a massive reset button on our economic world, taking us to some new and lower level of consumer spending, leverage, etc. No one knows what the new level will be, although admittedly we are closer to it than we were a year ago.

At this new normal, we will not need as many malls or factories or stores or new-car plants or car dealerships or any number of other things to satisfy the new normal of consumer desires. As an example, and jumping ahead to a statistic for one minute, capacity utilization is now approaching 65%. Anything under 80% is anemic. Does anyone really think that businesses (in general) are going to invest more money in expanding capacity, in the face of the lowest level of production relative to potential since the 1930s?

The savings rate has shot up from zero to 6% in just a very short time. It used to be 12%. It would not be all that unusual historically for savings to go to 9% or more in a few years. That means that consumer spending will drop by 9%. Since consumer spending was 70% of GDP, that new lower level will become our new normal. And of course, due to population growth and hopefully increasing incomes, consumer spending will once again grow from whatever that new normal will be. But it is going to take some time for spending to reach the level of our productive capacity of a few years ago. We are going to have to shutter a few factories and businesses.

Read the whole article here (after entering your email address) and read about Peter Bernstein's life and his books at this site too. You won't regret the time spent. Danny Schechter states without stuttering that

A recent study cited by the Editor of the Financial Times argues that we are now in a Depression although no one wants to use the term or face the music.

Recall that it took the National Bureau of Economic Research a full year to recognize the reality of a recession that analysts at investment banks had been acknowledging for as long. Despite everything that has happened, and is continuing to occur on the economic front---a rise in unemployment claims, mounting foreclosures, and escalating bankruptcies—the sense of crisis is being downplayed to stoke confidence and encourage the belief in “green shoots” and an emerging recovery.

John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine, has some unkind words for our change President here.

Yes, of course it’s nice to have a president who speaks in complete sentences. But that they’re coherent doesn’t make them honest.

Chris Hedges says the American Empire is already bankrupt here and Len Hart says it's definitely all over now (baby blue).

A true democracy is the exercise of free choice among real alternatives. A recent US regime change means little to those daring to demand the truth about 911.

That's because real power no longer rests with the office of 'President'. Real power resides with the axis of MIC/K-Street/CIA-NSA. This cabal has good motives for continuing to cover up 911 and suppressing the truth. This cabal is among those who benefited most from 911.What was true of Rome is true of the US. Emperors could rarely be called 'good' - just 'less bad'. By that scale, Bush, like Caligula, is 'most bad', Obama 'much less bad' but not yet really 'good'. A spoon full of sugar does little to sweeten a thousand acres of sheep sour or smelly manure.

Unfortunately, the system by which our leaders are selected exploits this paradigm, the result of the raw power accrued to extremely wealthy and armed interventionists, the merchants of war and plunder. I had hoped the American people deserved a better choice than 'less bad Obama' vs 'most bad Bush'. We can expect surface changes but precious few fundamental reforms.

Nothing said by Bush about 911 is true.

Everything said about 911 by the US government, most prominently the Bush administration, is but a part of the 'big lie'!

The US required a real revolution but got the 'less bad' Obama. That's how the system works. The result is that the people are never adequately or honestly represented by government. It also follows that until 911 is fully investigated and those truly guilty brought to justice, no US government can claim to be legitimate.

The Obama administration will not bring George W. Bush to justice for the crimes of high treason and mass murder called '911'. The office of President is powerless against the entrenched and combined powers of the 'intelligence community', K-Street and the Military/Industrial Complex. The government, the nation no longer belong to the people. Our 'sovereignty', guaranteed us in the US Constitution, is mocked.

That nothing said by the Bush administration about the crimes called 911 is true is good reason to suspect Bushco of high treason and mass murder. That Bushco benefited from 911 is cause to suspect that 911 was an act of mass murder and high treason perpetrated upon the people by its own government! Bush, his administration and enablers had method, motive and opportunity to pull off the crime of the century.

A real revolution would make holding those responsible a high priority. A real revolution would bring them to justice. Tragically, Americans have neither the stomach for nor the means by which a revolution of any sort may be waged. The lesson is this: if you wish to commit mass murder for profit you must first seize control of the government.

Funny, but I'm not feeling so "green shootzy" anymore. Suzan _______________

Don't Like Conspiracy Theories? Secret Wars of CIA and How Truth of 9/11 Could Undo U.S. System Truth Telling

Does it trouble you that the current media-saturation coverage of the "election protesters" in Iran sounds exactly like what hit the media before the CIA toppled the democratically-elected leader (Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh) of Iran in 1953 and ushered in the US-designated Shah and Savak? Whether you love the thought of democracy breaking out spontaneously due to Iranian teen-age cell phone chatting and twittering, or you have a more skeptical take considering the background of recent U.S. threats to invade Iran and/or aid Israel in its continuing efforts to undermine the Iranian government, you've got to admit that probably more is going on there than meets the mainstream media eye.

Many people think Peter Dale Scott's research on deep events is one of the most revealing about what the events in Iran are really about today. He says what I think about the 9/11 mysteries so clearly that it's difficult (for me) to believe that it's not true (and I've been asking these same questions since the buildings fell in a swoosh in 2001). He says "whatever 9/11 was it was not something done by 19 Arabs following the directions of a man with a beard in a cave in Afghanistan." He has worked for almost every investigative effort of what he calls these "deep events" and says that there is far more going on than what you are hearing from the media.

Formerly I've written about the book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" and "The Secret History of the American Empire," by John Perkins (a former Economic Hit Man), which details these machinations worldwide in the last 40 years (since WWII).

Many people are still ignorant of who these actors are and their connection to the Iran-Contra criminality during the Reagan/Bush years.

Mousavi, the former hardliner from 81 to 89 during the Iran-Iraq War was involved in the Iran/Contra Affair in 1986. He is connected to the Rafsanjani family clan who contest for power against The Grand Ayatollah, Khameni.

The Rafsanjani clan owns a vast financial empire in Iran, consisting of: land holdings, foreign trade, and the largest network of private universities . . . over 300 branches. Rafsanjani wants to build up an extensive network to oppose Khameni who won power in a contest with Rafsanjani.

Peter Scott warns of deep events which "surface in events like Watergate and 9/11" (that influence new Democratic Presidents negatively and Republican ones positively) as well as the Iran-Contra scandal which has never been fully investigated for its continuing influence on the politics of the Middle East. He also exposes Peter Zelikow, who controlled the investigation and the writing of the report for the 9/11 Commission (and who had been touted as an outsider perfect to lead this Commission), who had written a book with Condoleeza Rice and "as a reward" is now on President Obama's "Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and is a key link between the White House and the ruling establishment of the United States."

It is worth noticing that, ever since the 1950s, dubious events - of the unpublic variety I have called deep events - have marked the last months before a change of party in the White House. These deep events have tended to a) constrain incoming presidents, if the incomer is a Democrat, or alternatively b) to pave the way for the incomer, if he is a Republican."

PREVIOUS GOP DIRTY TRICKS

1. December 1960 - The Bay of Pigs and Laos preparations

2. 1976 - Team B intelligence fabrication to derail President Carter

3. Late 1968 - Kissinger gave secret intelligence to Nixon so that Nixon could secretly obstruct the peace agreement Kissinger had negotiated with the North Vietnamese.

4. 1986 - The October Surprise - which ensured that the Teheran hostages were NOT freed until Reagan was inaugurated.

MORE DIRTY TRICKS

1. From above - the October Surprise. Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States on January 20, 1981. The release of the fifty-two remaining American Teheran embassy hostages was announced twenty minutes after the swearing in of the new president. It is suggested that their release, negotiated and agreed with the departing Carter administration, was delayed by a secret agreement made by a faction within the incoming Reagan team. George H. W. Bush was his vice-president.

2. Sixty nine days later, on March 30, 1981, Reagan was shot by would-be assassin, John Hinckley. George H. W. Bush would have succeeded him if the plot, oops - lone gunmen, had succeeded. By coincidence, his brother Scott Hinckley had been due to have dinner with Bush's son Neal the next evening.

3. Bill Clinton was elected President on November 4, 1992, defeating George H. W. Bush, making him a lame-duck one-term President. George H. W. Bush ordered 25,000 troops into Somalia on December 5 1992. He assured the public that he planned for the troops to be home by Clinton's inauguration. He left office on January 20, 1993 with the troops still stationed in Somalia. On October 3 and 4, 1993, 18 American soldiers died and 73 were wounded after the shooting down of an American helicopter. President Clinton's presidency was badly damaged by the loss of life.

4. Bill Clinton was inaugurated as the 42nd President of the United States on January 20, 1993. George H. W. Bush left the White House. Thirty seven days later, on February 26, 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing occurred.

Peter Dale Scott in The Road to 9/11 is very informative about Ali Mohamed, trainer of the the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Al Qaeda trainer, Egyptian major and FBI, CIA and U.S Army employee.

If you're already tired of hearing about the recurring links between people involved in the current Iran election media fest and the old "deep events," then you won't want to read John Stockwell's comments on his life in the CIA and the reasons for and outcome of the previous and continuing secret wars (another of which appears to be being readied for Iran). (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

John Stockwell is a

former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then-Director of the CIA, George Bush. He spent 13 years in the agency. He gives a short history of CIA covert operations. He is a very compelling speaker and the highest level CIA officer to testify to the Congress about his actions. He estimates that over 6 million people have died in CIA covert actions, and this was in the late 1980's.

(He) is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. Stockwell's book In Search of Enemies, published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.

"I did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making the important decisions, and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done . . . . I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse, date and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we had to do with S. Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the states, would meet their airplanes in Kinshasa and they would take our arms into Angola to distribute to our forces for us . . . . What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver, astronomically graver, than just Angola and Vietnam.

I found that the Senate Church committee has reported, in their study of covert actions, that the CIA ran several thousand covert actions since 1961, and that the heyday of covert action was before 1961; that we have run several hundred covert actions a year, and the CIA has been in business for a total of 37 years.What we're going to talk about tonight is the United States national security syndrome. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. manipulates the press. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. is pouring money into El Salvador, and preparing to invade Nicaragua; how all of this concerns us so directly. I'm going to try to explain to you the other side of terrorism; that is, the other side of what Secretary of State Shultz talks about. In doing this, we'll talk about the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and the Central American war.

Everything I'm going to talk to you about is represented, one way or another, already in the public records. You can dig it all out for yourselves, without coming to hear me if you so chose. Books, based on information gotten out of the CIA under the freedom of information act, testimony before the Congress, hearings before the Senate Church committee, research by scholars, witness of people throughout the world who have been to these target areas that we'll be talking about. I want to emphasize that my own background is profoundly conservative.

We come from South Texas, East Texas . . . . I was conditioned by my training, my Marine Corps training, and my background, to believe in everything they were saying about the cold war, and I took the job with great enthusiasm (in the CIA) to join the best and the brightest of the CIA, of our foreign service, to go out into the world, to join the struggle, to project American values and save the world for our brand of democracy.

And I believed this. I went out and worked hard . . . . What I really got out of these 6 years in Africa was a sense . . . that nothing we were doing in fact defended U.S. national security interests very much. We didn't have many national security interests in Bujumbura, Burundi, in the heart of Africa. I concluded that I just couldn't see the point.

We were doing things it seemed because we were there, because it was our function, we were bribing people, corrupting people, and not protecting the U.S. in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking with this Larry Devlin, a famous CIA case officer who had overthrown Patrice Lumumba, and had him killed in 1960, back in the Congo. He was moving into the Africa division Chief. I talked to him in Addis Ababa at length one night, and he was giving me an explanation - I was telling him frankly, 'Sir, you know, this stuff doesn't make any sense, we're not saving anybody from anything, and we are corrupting people, and everybody knows we're doing it, and that makes the U.S. look bad'.

And he said I was getting too big for my britches. He said, `You're trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big picture, who know what's going on in the world, who have all the secret information, and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have someone in Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should be you, then you should do your job, and wait until you have more experience, and you work your way up to that point, then you will understand national security, and you can make the big decisions. Now, get to work, and stop, you know, this philosophizing.'

And I said, `Aye-aye sir, sorry sir, a bit out of line sir'. It's a very powerful argument, our presidents use it on us. President Reagan has used it on the American people, saying, `If you knew what I know about the situation in Central America, you would understand why it's necessary for us to intervene.'I went back to Washington, however, and I found that others shared my concern. A formal study was done in the State Department and published internally, highly classified, called the Macomber(?) report, concluding that the CIA had no business being in Africa for anything it was known to be doing, that our presence there was not justified, there were no national security interests that the CIA could address any better than the ambassador himself. We didn't need to have bribery and corruption as a tool for doing business in Africa at that time.

I went from ... a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my career, and my life, began to get a little bit more serious. They assigned me a country. It was during the cease-fire, '73 to '75. There was no cease-fire. Young men were being slaughtered. I saw a slaughter - 300 young men that the South Vietnamese army ambushed. Their bodies brought in and laid out in a lot next to my compound. I was up-country in Tayninh. They were laid out next door, until the families could come and claim them and take them away for burial.

I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief. When I reported that he liked to carve people with knives in the CIA safe-house - when I reported this to my bosses, they said (1) The post was too important to close down. (2) They weren't going to get the man transferred or fired because that would make problems, political problems, and he was very good at working with us in the operations he worked on. (3) Therefore if I didn't have the stomach for the job, that they could transfer me.

But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of `moral fiber' to handle working with the sadistic police chief, that I wouldn't get another good job in the CIA, it would be a mark against my career.

So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff that I didn't approve of that kind of activity, and I proceeded to work with him for the next 2 years, pretending that I had reformed him, and he didn't do this sort of thing anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the state department, works with the death squads. They don't meet the death squads on the streets where they're actually chopping up people or laying them down on the street and running trucks over their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs, and the people who run the death squads, and they do liaise with them, they meet them beside the swimming pool of the villas. And it's a sophisticated, civilized kind of relationship. And they talk about their children, who are going to school at UCLA or Harvard and other schools, and they don't talk about the horrors of what's being done. They pretend like it isn't true.

What I ran into in addition to that was a corruption in the CIA and the intelligence business that made me question very seriously what it was all about, including what I was doing . . . risking my life . . . what I found was that the CIA, us, the case officers, were not permitted to report about the corruption in the South Vietnamese army . . . . Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a skeleton army. Colonels would let the troops go home if they would come in once a month and sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could pocket the money. Then he could sell half of the uniforms and boots and M-16's to the communist forces - that was their major supply, just as it is in El Salvador today. He could use half of the trucks to haul produce, half of the helicopters to haul heroin.

And the Army couldn't fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it, and there was no doubt - everybody talked about it openly. We could provide all kinds of proof, and they wouldn't let us report it. Now this was a serious problem because the south was attacked in the winter of 1975, and it collapsed like a big vase hit by a sledgehammer. And the U.S. was humiliated, and that was the dramatic end of our long involvement in Vietnam . . . .I had been designated as the task-force commander that would run this secret war [in Angola in 1975 and 1976] . . . . and what I figured out was that in this job, I would sit on a sub-committee of the National Security Council, this office that Larry Devlin has told me about where they had access to all the information about Angola, about the whole world, and I would finally understand national security.

And I couldn't resist the opportunity to know. I knew the CIA was not a worthwhile organization, I had learned that the hard way. But the question was where did the U.S. government fit into this thing, and I had a chance to see for myself in the next big secret war . . . . I wanted to know if wise men were making difficult decisions based on truly important, threatening information, threatening to our national security interests. If that had been the case, I still planned to get out of the CIA, but I would know that the system, the invisible government, our national security complex, was in fact justified and worth while. And so I took the job . . . . Suffice it to say I wouldn't be standing in front of you tonight if I had found these wise men making these tough decisions.

What I found, quite frankly, was fat old men sleeping through sub-committee meetings of the NSC in which we were making decisions that were killing people in Africa. I mean literally. Senior ambassador Ed Mulcahy... would go to sleep in nearly every one of these meetings . . . . You can change the names in my book [about Angola] [13] and you've got Nicaragua . . . . the basic structure, all the way through including the mining of harbors, we addressed all of these issues. The point is that the U.S. led the way at every step of the escalation of the fighting. We said it was the Soviets and the Cubans that were doing it. It was the U.S. that was escalating the fighting. There would have been no war if we hadn't gone in first.

We put arms in, they put arms in. We put advisors in, they answered with advisors. We put in Zairian para-commando battalions, they put in Cuban army troops. We brought in the S. African army, they brought in the Cuban army. And they pushed us away. They blew us away because we were lying, we were covering ourselves with lies, and they were telling the truth. And it was not a war that we could fight. We didn't have interests there that should have been defended that way.There was never a study run that evaluated the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, the three movements in the country, to decide which one was the better one.

The assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Nathaniel Davis, no bleeding-heart liberal (he was known by some people in the business as the butcher of Santiago), he said we should stay out of the conflict and work with whoever eventually won, and that was obviously the MPLA. Our consul in Luanda, Tom Killoran, vigorously argued that the MPLA was the best qualified to run the country and the friendliest to the U.S.

We brushed these people aside, forced Matt Davis to resign, and proceeded with our war. The MPLA said they wanted to be our friends, they didn't want to be pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union; they begged us not to fight them, they wanted to work with us. We said they wanted a cheap victory, they wanted a walk-over, they wanted to be un-opposed, that we wouldn't give them a cheap victory, we would make them earn it, so to speak. And we did. 10,000 Africans died and they won the victory that they were winning anyway.

Now, the most significant thing that I got out of all of this, in addition to the fact that our rationales were basically false, was that we lied. To just about everybody involved. One third of my staff in this task force that I put together in Washington, commanding this global operation, pulling strings all over the world to focus pressure onto Angola, and military activities into Angola, one third of my staff was propagandists, who were working, in every way they could to create this picture of Cubans raping Angolans, Cubans and Soviets introducing arms into the conflict, Cubans and Russians trying to take over the world.

Our ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, he read continuous statements of our position to the Security Council, the general assembly, and the press conferences, saying the Russians and Cubans were responsible for the conflict, and that we were staying out, and that we deplored the militarization of the conflict.And every statement he made was false. And every statement he made was originated in the sub-committee of the NSC that I sat on as we managed this thing. The state department press person read these position papers daily to the press. We would write papers for him. Four paragraphs. We would call him on the phone and say, `Call us 10 minutes before you go on, the situation could change overnight, we'll tell you which paragraph to read.' And all four paragraphs would be false. Nothing to do with the truth. Designed to play on events, to create this impression of Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola. When they were in fact responding to our initiatives.

And the CIA director was required by law to brief the Congress. This CIA Director Bill Colby - the same one that dumped our people in Vietnam - he gave 36 briefings of the Congress, the oversight committees, about what we were doing in Angola. And he lied. At 36 formal briefings. And such lies are perjury, and it's a felony to lie to the Congress.

He lied about our relationship with South Africa. We were working closely with the South African army, giving them our arms, coordinating battles with them, giving them fuel for their tanks and armored cars. He said we were staying well away from them. They were concerned about these white mercenaries that were appearing in Angola, a very sensitive issue, hiring whites to go into a black African country, to help you impose your will on that black African country by killing the blacks, a very sensitive issue. The Congress was concerned we might be involved in that, and he assured them we had nothing to do with it.

We had in fact formed four little mercenary armies and delivered them into Angola to do this dirty business for the CIA. And he lied to them about that. They asked if we were putting arms into the conflict, and he said 'No,' and we were. They asked if we had advisors inside the country, and he said `No, we had people going in to look at the situation and coming back out.' We had 24 people sleeping inside the country, training in the use of weapons, installing communications systems, planning battles, and he said, we didn't have anybody inside the country.

In summary about Angola, without U.S. intervention, 10,000 people would be alive that were killed in the thing. The outcome might have been peaceful, or at least much less bloody. The MPLA was winning when we went in, and they went ahead and won, which was, according to our consul, the best thing for the country.

At the end of this thing the Cubans were entrenched in Angola, seen in the eyes of much of the world as being the heroes that saved these people from the CIA and S. African forces. We had allied the U.S. literally and in the eyes of the world with the S. African army, and that's illegal, and it's impolitic. We had hired white mercenaries and eventually been identified with them. And that's illegal, and it's impolitic. And our lies had been visible lies.

We were caught out on those lies. And the world saw the U.S. as liars. After it was over, you have to ask yourself, was it justified? What did the MPLA do after they had won? Were they lying when they said they wanted to be our friends? 3 weeks after we were shut down . . . the MPLA had Gulf oil back in Angola, pumping the Angolan oil from the oilfields, with U.S. gulf technicians protected by Cuban soldiers, protecting them from CIA mercenaries who were still mucking around in Northern Angola.You can't trust a communist, can you?

They proceeded to buy five 737 jets from Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. And they brought in 52 U.S. technicians to install the radar systems to land and take-off those planes. They didn't buy [the Soviet Union's] Aeroflot . . . . David Rockefeller himself tours S. Africa and comes back and holds press conferences, in which he says that we have no problem doing business with the so-called radical states of Southern Africa.

I left the CIA. I decided that the American people needed to know what we'd done in Angola, what we'd done in Vietnam. I wrote my book. I was fortunate - I got it out. It was a best-seller. A lot of people read it. I was able to take my story to the American people. Got on 60 minutes, and lots and lots of other shows.

I testified to the Congress and then I began my education in earnest, after having been taught to fight communists all my life. I went to see what Communists were all about. I went to Cuba to see if they do in fact eat babies for breakfast. And I found they don't. I went to Budapest, a country that even national geographic admits is working nicely. I went to Jamaica to talk to Michael Manley about his theories of social democracy.

I went to Grenada and established a dialogue with Maurice Bishop and Bernard Cord and Phyllis Cord, to see - these were all educated people, and experienced people - and they had a theory, they had something they wanted to do, they had rationales and explanations - and I went repeatedly to hear them.

And then, of course, I saw the U.S., the CIA mounting a covert action against them, I saw us orchestrating our plan to invade the country. 19 days before he was killed, I was in Grenada talking to Maurice Bishop about these things, these indicators, the statements in the press by Ronald Reagan, and he and I were both acknowledging that it was almost certain that the U.S. would invade Grenada in the near future.

I read as many books as I could find on the subject - book after book after book. I've got several hundred books on the shelf over my desk on the subject of U.S. national security interests. And by the way, I urge you to read. In television you get capsules of news that someone else puts together what they want you to hear about the news. In newspapers you get what the editors select to put in the newspaper. If you want to know about the world and understand, to educate yourself, you have to get out and dig, dig up books and articles for yourself. Read, and find out for yourselves. As you'll see, the issues are very, very important.

I also was able to meet the players, the people who write, the people who have done studies, people who are leading different situations. I went to Nicaragua a total of 7 times. This was a major covert action. It lasted longer and evolved to be bigger than what we did in Angola. It gave me a chance, after running something from Washington, to go to a country that was under attack, to talk to the leadership, to talk to the people, to look and see what happens when you give white phosporous or grenades or bombs or bullets to people, and they go inside a country, to go and talk to the people, who have been shot, or hit, or blown up . . . . We're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions [the CIA has performed since 1961]. What I found was that lots and lots of people have been killed in these things . . . . Some of them are very, very bloody.

The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who was in that area division, and had documents on his desk, in his custody about that operation. He said that one of the documents concluded that this was a model operation that should be copied elsewhere in the world. Not only did it eliminate the effective communist party (Indonesian communist party), it also eliminated the entire segment of the population that tended to support the communist party - the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese. And the CIA's report put the number of dead at 800,000 killed. And that was one covert action. We're talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these things.

Two of these things have led us directly into bloody wars. There was a covert action against China, destabilizing China, for many, many years, with a propaganda campaign to work up a mood, a feeling in this country, of the evils of Communist China, and attacking them, as we're doing in Nicaragua today, with an army that was being launched against them to parachute in and boat in and destabilize the country.

And this led us directly into the Korean war. U.S. intelligence officers worked over Vietnam for a total of 25 years, with greater and greater involvement, massive propaganda, deceiving the American people about what was happening. Panicking people in Vietnam to create migrations to the south so they could photograph it and show how people were fleeing Communism. And on and on, until they got us into the Vietnam war, and 2,000,000 people were killed.

Read the rest here and also Part II.

Also take a look at the Axis of Logic which has just been referred to me with its CIA prescription: take two every morning and nothing worse will happen to you during the day.

Suzan ____________

Health Care Sellout at White House Gulch

I thought I'd do the neighborly thing and publicize a great blog post from the Earth-Bound Misfit. He is more than worth your time to read today as he spells out the sellout on health care at White House gulch (by our progressives, no less). (Emphasis marks were added - Ed.)

one thing struck me about the Senate's proposal, so far: All it does is mandate that everybody buy health insurance and for those who can't afford it, some paltry assistance with paying for it will be made available.

That's basically it. The bill looks out for the health insurance companies before anyone else. Yet the hard reality of the situation is that this country spends more, per capita, on health care than virtually any other nation and what we get for it is a system that is corrupt at its very core.

It is grossly inefficient. First, there are a number of health insurance companies, all with their own forms, their own authorization protocols and their own billing procedures. Any medical establishment, from a solo-practitioner to a major hospital, has to be able to deal with all of them.

Second, the system is geared towards encouraging that everyone buy the most super-duper machinery without any consideration as to demand so they can advertise "Bushwa County Hospital has a new, state-of-the-art, dilithium-quark imaging system". Of course, running someone through that shiny new DQIS costs three times as much as a PET Scan, four times as much as a MRI, six times as much as a CAT scan and twenty times as much as taking an X-ray.

Third, everybody tries to do everything. A sensible system would have all hospitals set up to stabilize whoever came in the door and then a regional system for specialty cases. If you needed a hip replacement, you'd go to one place, brain surgery, another and so on. By concentrating cases, the doctors who work on those would have enough to do to be thoroughly proficient; a mechanic who rebuilds transmissions every day is likely to be far better at it than one who does it every six months and the same is true for doctors. The current system rewards inefficiency.

But the biggest obstacle to fixing the health insurance mess is the health insurance industry, as any serious reform would threaten their rice bowls. Our current systems costs too much for what it delivers. The current system saddles employers with huge costs that increasingly make them non-competitive. But since the health insurance companies are able to get the best Senators that money can buy, don't look for anything to change anytime soon.

It looks like the Massachusetts system is set to go nationwide (with even bigger profits for the insurance industry!). Visit his site and read his prose here. It's hard but ya gotta love those lobbyist protectors (mafia?). I guess in a major downturn someone has to look out for the big guys too.

Joe Conason tells us how (and the Leninist scare caused by use of a fake quote by the AMA when President Truman proposed a national health plan in 1948). Susan ______________

Dan Froomkin Fired by WaPo - Krugman

According to Paul Krugman in this afternoon's online New York Times:

the Washington Post has fired Dan Froomkin, of the White House Watch blog.

This is no surprise to those of us of the conspiratorialist persuasion, but it is to Professor and Nobel Prize winner Krugman who exposes with this blog post the almost unbelievable lie that has been told everyday in the media to the citizens of the United States. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

On the face of it, it’s a puzzling decision. Aside from the excellence of Froomkin’s work, he’s popular with readers. On sheer business grounds, why drop him?

OK, I have no idea about the actual decision process. But I have a theory about the general mindset of the people who made this decision. Here’s how I see things: many people in the news media, especially at the managerial level, decided a long time ago that movement conservatism was The Future — and that the sensible thing, whether or not you yourself were a conservative, was to go with the wave. That meant treating right-wing politicians and media figures with great respect, while ridiculing the opposition as the Incredible Shrinking Democrats or the Incredibly Shrinking Democrats, or whatever.

And anyone who didn’t treat the right with great respect, who didn’t get with the program, was a flake, a moonbat. The way Iraq war skeptics were frozen out of the prewar discussion was only the most conspicuous example; pretty much the same thing happened in early 2005 to anyone questioning the push for Social Security privatization.

Now, you might think that the way things turned out — the total failure of movement conservatism in government, and the abrupt, humiliating end to the Permanent Republican Majority — would lead to some soul-searching. But that’s not how human nature works. Instead, it became more urgent than ever to assert that those who didn’t get with the program were flakes and moonbats, not worthy of being listened to, while those who believed in the right to the bitter end were “serious”. Thus we still live in an era in which you have to have been wrong to be respectable. You’re not considered serious about national security unless you were for invading Iraq; you’re not considered a serious political analyst unless you spent the last 3 years of the Bush administration predicting a Republican comeback; you’re not considered a serious economic analyst unless you dismissed the idea that the Bush Boom, such as it was, rested on a housing bubble.

That’s why the firing of Dan Froomkin now makes a perverse sort of sense. As long as the right was in power, he was in effect the Post’s designated moonbat, someone who attracted readers but didn’t threaten the self-esteem of the self-perceived serious people at the paper. But now he looks like someone who was right when the serious people were wrong — and that means he has to go.

And so he went (and this is why Bush and Cheney (and all the rest of the criminal conspiracy of the last eight years) are given respectful TV puppet show appearances as they lie and lie and lie to the American electorate).

Watch out for that Iran puppet show on your TV stations now!

Suzan _____________

As Geithner Attempts to Defend the Indefensible - We're Making Sure We'll Never Be Able to Choose Single-Payer

This is the same Fed that didn't investigate Madoff or anyone else properly for the last eight years. And this is the same Tim Geithner who presided over the New York Fed when everything went to hell. Right? Even Mish gets into the act. Read it and weep.

Blueprint For A Power Grab Obama and Geither call this "reform". It's not. Abolishing the Fed would be reform. Giving the Fed more authority is a power grab, not reform. Obama's Blueprint for Reform Concentrates Still More Power in Hands of the Fed. Fed Uncertainty Principle In Action Inquiring minds are taking another look at the Fed Uncertainty Principle.

Read on.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner defended the administration’s proposal to give the Federal Reserve increased powers in his first public tussle with lawmakers skeptical whether the central bank is up to the job. Advocating for President Barack Obama’s regulatory overhaul on Capitol Hill, the Treasury chief faced repeated questions from senators who cited previous regulatory failures at the Fed and potential conflicts with its monetary-policy duties. “The Federal Reserve is best positioned” to oversee the biggest financial companies, Geithner told the Senate Banking Committee in Washington, adding that the Obama plan gives the Fed only “modest additional authority.” Most central banks around the world have some responsibility for monitoring systemic risks, he said. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, quoted one critic’s view that giving the central bank more power was like awarding a son a “bigger, faster car right after he crashed the family station wagon.” He added that he hadn’t made a conclusion on the issue. Geithner said that the Fed has “greater knowledge and feel for broader market developments” than any other U.S. banking agency. He added that giving those powers to a council of regulators wouldn’t work. “You don’t convene a committee to put out a fire,” he said. The president’s announcement yesterday marks the beginning of what promises to be a political battle that’s likely to alter the administration plan, with some lawmakers opposing any expansion of the Fed’s power. Obama, who has called the “sweeping overhaul” of regulation one of his top domestic priorities, said he wants to sign legislation by year-end.

Susie Madrak brings up the obvious after viewing Sebelius' (Obama's) health care plan.

You know, I'm not a Democrat to protect our politicians. As far as I'm concerned, they're little more than tools to execute the policies I support. But I know not everyone else feels that way, and that's why it really makes me furious to see them use people by promising one thing and delivering something completely different - you know, like this expensive mishmosh of a healthcare "reform." The Kathleen Sebeliuses of the world, those timid souls who can be found out in the middle of the road hugging the center line with the rest of the road kill, can go take a flying leap if they think we're going to support backward thinking like this: As lawmakers on Capitol Hill hammer out legislation to overhaul the nation's health care system this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says that a single-payer option is not on the table. "This is not a trick. This is not single-payer," Sebelius told Steve Inskeep. She added: "That's not what anyone is talking about — mostly because the president feels strongly, as I do, that dismantling private health coverage for the 180 million Americans that have it, discouraging more employers from coming into the marketplace, is really the bad, you know, is a bad direction to go." [...] Republicans have also raised the specter that a public option could evolve into a single-payer health care system where funding comes from one source — usually the government. The GOP says that such a system would lead to health care rationing and long delays in treatment. Asked if the administration's program will be drafted specifically to prevent it from evolving into a single-payer plan, Sebelius says: "I think that's very much the case, and again, if you want anybody to convince people of that, talk to the single-payer proponents who are furious that the single-payer idea is not part of the discussion." Sebelius says such concerns are unfounded because a single-payer plan is not under consideration, and these "draconian" scenarios have muddled the conversation over the president's proposal for a public option. If Obama does, in fact, include language to prevent the public health plan from becoming a single-payer option, we might as well kiss this Democratic majority goodbye. Because, as history shows, given the choice between a fake Republican and a real one, people will pick the real one every time! (You can let the Secretary know how you'd feel about that. HHS - 202-619-0257. Better still, Democracy for America, Health Care for America Now and Open Left join Stand With Dr. Dean in a project to pin down the politicians on where they stand.) Send an email asking the following four questions: Do you support a public healthcare option as part of healthcare reform?

If so, do you support a public healthcare option that is available on day one?

Do you support a public healthcare option that is national, available everywhere, and accountable to Congress?

Do you support a public healthcare option that can bargain for rates from providers and big drug companies? The goal is to remove all hedges and dodges. We want to know where they stand on the public option. Add your responses to the form at Stand With Dr. Dean.

Now there's a plan. Thanks Susie! Suzan ________________

Iran Election Follies (Brought to You by Right Wing Media!)

If you get your info from Faux Snooze-type sources, you might not have been aware that amidst the mainstream propaganda about the Iranian election being close, stolen, et al., (and how closely covered was this election when seen in light of the ones that occurred in India, Russia, etc.?) what the real news is. And notice the "high tech" campaign of our new Western hero Mousavi. Wonder who ran his campaign?

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei won a resounding victory. The grey cardinal of Iranian politics Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been dealt a crushing defeat. Is the curtain finally ringing down on the tumultuous career of the "Shark", a nickname Rafsanjani acquired in the vicious well of the Iranian Majlis (parliament) where he used to swim dangerously as a political predator in the early years of the Iranian Revolution as the speaker/sperm whale of immense, premeditated ferocity and stamina in Herman Melville's epic novel Moby Dick. Rafsanjani is going down, deeply wounded by the harpoon, into the cold oblivion of the sea of Iranian politics. But you can never quite tell. . . . Who is Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmedinejad's main opponent in the election? He is an enigma wrapped in mystery. He impressed the Iranian youth and the urban middle class as a reformer and a modernist. Yet, as Iran's prime minister during 1981-89, Mousavi was an unvarnished hardliner. Evidently, what we have seen during his high-tech campaign is a vastly different Mousavi, as if he meticulously deconstructed and then reassembled himself.

Read all about it here. And as further proof of U.S. concern over stolen elections in other countries:

Without any evidence, many U.S. politicians and “Iran experts” have dismissed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection Friday, with 62.6 percent of the vote, as fraud. They ignore the fact that Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election, when he trounced former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The shock of the “Iran experts” over Friday’s results is entirely self-generated, based on their preferred assumptions and wishful thinking. Although Iran’s elections are not free by Western standards, the Islamic Republic has a 30-year history of highly contested and competitive elections at the presidential, parliamentary and local levels. Manipulation has always been there, as it is in many other countries.

I'm not issuing an apology for Iranian politics, of course, but following the debacles in the U.S. of the 2000 and 2004 elections, they seem like so much icing. Here's another tasty bite:

Like much of the Western media, most American “Iran experts” overstated Mir Hossein Mousavi’s “surge” over the campaign’s final weeks. More important, they were oblivious — as in 2005 — to Ahmadinejad’s effectiveness as a populist politician and campaigner. American “Iran experts” missed how Ahmadinejad was perceived by most Iranians as having won the nationally televised debates with his three opponents — especially his debate with Mousavi. Before the debates, both Mousavi and Ahmadinejad campaign aides indicated privately that they perceived a surge of support for Mousavi; after the debates, the same aides concluded that Ahmadinejad’s provocatively impressive performance and Mousavi’s desultory one had boosted the incumbent’s standing. Ahmadinejad’s charge that Mousavi was supported by Rafsanjani’s sons — widely perceived in Iranian society as corrupt figures — seemed to play well with voters.

Glenn Greenwald serves up the coup de grace:

I'm going to leave the debate about whether Iran's election was "stolen" and the domestic implications within Iran to people who actually know what they're talking about (which is a very small subset of the class purporting to possess such knowledge). But there is one point I want to make about the vocal and dramatic expressions of solidarity with Iranians issuing from some quarters in the U.S. Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country - actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People.

During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran. The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary's Norman Podhoretz entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran," and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he "hopes and prays" that the U.S. "bombs the Iranians." John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol -- with typical prescience -- hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected. Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.

Imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way - just as those who paraded around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at least. Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is. Advocating a so-called "attack on Iran" or "bombing Iran" in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many - obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives. The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it's some abstract decision in a video game.

After The Wall St. Journal published the Podhoretz war dance demanding that Iran be bombed, and after Podhoretz casually called for England to "bomb the Iranians into smithereens" if their sailors weren't immediately returned, I wrote:

In this week's Newsweek, Michael Hirsh has a worthwhile article reporting on his observations during his visit to Iran. While listing the internally repressive measures taken by the Iranian government, Hirsh describes Tehran as "bustling, "as "traffic crowds the streets and boulevards," filled with the "chic" Iranian women and the meterosexual" Iranian males who seek greater economic security and prosperity. That is what Norm Podhoretz and his friends hungrily want to annihilate.

Matt Yglesias, in a recent post about the administration's "debate" over whether to bomb Iran, wisely included a random photograph of an Iranian street with civilians walking on it. These are the people Norm Podhoretz and his comrades want to slaughter. (See photo here.) Our ability to render invisible the people we kill when cheering on our wars is one of the primary mechanisms which make it so easy to embrace that option. Perhaps the scenes unfolding in Iran, our Enemy Du Jour, will make those dehumanization efforts - the linchpin of our militarism and state of perpetual war - more difficult in the future.

I doubt this, but it is nice to see the bloodthirsty prevaricators come out for a bow isn't it? Suzan ______________

Search for Scapegoats Goes Into High Gear (AIG Scandal Misunderstood)

And try not to forget that Hank is Charlie Rose's bestest friend! Yes, I covered this mountain of lies from his first interview on how poorly Hank was treated.

A lawyer for American International Group Inc. (AIG) (AIG) has told a jury that AIG's former top executive plundered a company retirement program of billions of dollars because he was angry at being forced out.

Attorney Theodore Wells told a jury in Manhattan Monday that former AIG CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg improperly took $4.3 billion in stock from the company in 2005.

Wells spoke during opening statements in a federal civil trial resulting from a lawsuit AIG brought against Starr International Co., a private investment firm run by Greenberg.

The embattled insurer is trying to reclaim the money from Starr it says was wrongly pocketed through stock sales by Greenberg.

Greenberg was ousted in 2005.

I have to admit I've been waiting for this story to be told. I'm guessing this is just the first installment. My further thought is that every single one of the investment groups from Goldman Sachs on down will trot out scapegoats for our continuing entertainment as we continue the march to serfdom. Madoff was the first. Suzan _________________

Paul Krugman Responds (on Vacation!) to Rethuglican Whinings (B(oe)ay(ner)ing)

The B(oe)ay(ner)ings continue but Professor Krugman nails them to the wall with the undeniable facts. Read on for the data on the Reagan tax cuts' (but not his huge military spending increases, which came later) prompt effectiveness (not for the rich obviously as they were always quite effective there). Now it may be true that the Rethugs hear what they please, but the chart doesn't lie, although the commenter below might. Read on for the humor content at least.

Dr. K, Your chart shows one of the problems that modern “liberal” macro-economics suffers from-the concept of time. EVERYONE knows that Reagan’s 1981 tax cut’s didn’t kick in until Clinton’s second term creating the boom of the 1990’s. And that the rising unemployment in the Reagan graph starting in 1981, when Reagan’s tax cuts went into effect, was caused by JFK in 1962. It’s true I saw it on Fox News. — J.H.

I swear I believe I saw that on FAUX Snooze too! Suzan ____________

Richard Dawkins on Human History - "High Noon for the Republican Party"

I am deeply in love with Richard Dawkins whom I consider my mentor and guiding light (and he's really cute and witty). Whenever I get depressed over the events that currently govern our economic and political lives (and the evidence of our rule by barbarians) I think of his calm, rational voice as he explains evolution and natural selection - and how long bacteria ruled the world (which tells me everything that I need to know in order to carry on). He explicates the vastness of geological time and our place in it in this video. It's not but a few minutes long. Watch it. I guarantee that you will enjoy it. Harpers Magazine has done us a service by publishing an essay by Kevin Baker, Kevin P. Phillips, Luke Mitchell, Scott McConnell and Thomas F. Schaller on why it should be "High Noon for the Republican Party" and "Why the GOP Must Die" like all the dinosaurs and bacteria before them. Although it's not comedy, I could not help smiling throughout. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

George Washington, the United States’ first and last unaffiliated president, warned that political parties, should they take root in the new republic, would make government “the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans.” Parties sprang up immediately, of course, but for many years they were short-lived, forming and collapsing according to a natural life cycle. No longer. Our current two-party system has become a shadow constitution, based largely on a system of legal bribery, that makes a mockery of the founders’ republican intentions.

Increasingly it seems that the political parties themselves are among the greatest obstacles to civic renewal. Eight years of Republican rule have led to economic chaos, ruinous war, and unprecedented despair. Every electoral indicator points to a massive defeat. Yet few believe that the Democratic Party possesses the strength of purpose to drive the Republicans into the well-deserved oblivion of the Anti-Masons and the Know-Nothings. Mindful of the Democrats’ shortcomings, Harper’s Magazine gathered together a panel of political thinkers to consider how the deed might be accomplished, and what might be the consequences of failure.

1. Deadlock

LUKE MITCHELL: We seem today to be involved in a kind of trench war, in which the two sides battle in election after election over just a few inches of ground — say, Ohio and Florida — with no real long-term results other than the further degradation of democracy. How did we reach this impasse?

KEVIN BAKER: Well, obviously the two-party system has always had problems. The founders thought the entire notion of having political parties was a bad idea, at least at first. They worried that parties would come to care more about themselves than the state, maybe even invite other countries in, other kings in.

SCOTT MCCONNELL: Unfortunately, it’s not easy to run a republic without some kind of party system. It’s inevitable that a nation is going to have different class and sectional interests, and parties allow those factions to channel their disagreements relatively peacefully. This is especially true in a democracy that is, at least in theory, answerable to large groups of people.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: The problem today, though, is entrenchment and atrophy. The Democrats and the Republicans are now among the oldest parties in the world. Their origins bear no relation to much of anything today, and as a result they are mostly interested in the people who give them money.

MITCHELL: Is that a new development?

PHILLIPS: Being interested in people who give you money? No! That goes way back. But the entrenchment you couldn’t do until you had a mass electorate, a large and venal Washington, wall-to-wall lobbies, and all of the other things that make the current party system tick.

THOMAS SCHALLER: The founders’ expectation was that regions would nominate many candidates, each representing very parochial interests. They expected such a glut of sectional parties that they created the electoral college—not in order to make any kind of final selection but simply to winnow the choices down to a couple of finalists. They assumed the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, with the result that an elite institution would pick the ultimate winner. But in fact the system has been funded and redistricted and gerrymandered into a sort of muscle-bound duopoly. It’s nonresponsive. It’s like the difference between punching me in the stomach and punching George Foreman in the stomach. You can knock me over pretty easily, whereas George Foreman is going to laugh it off.

PHILLIPS: Well, the public showed that it can produce a significant swing in 2006, in electoral terms. But the issues on which they supposedly voted are not being addressed. How do you vote to get everybody out of Iraq, for example? Vote for the Democrats? That hasn’t worked so far.

MCCONNELL: And it cuts both ways. The people who have been voting Republican for the past thirty years on cultural rather than class issues — i.e., culturally conservative Reagan Democrats — have gotten nothing for their votes either. But there is no evidence whatsoever that they are going to stop voting Republican.

BAKER: It’s like you have this weird inversion of Tammany. They don’t get you out of jail, they don’t give you a turkey at Christmas, they don’t do anything for you, and yet somehow they keep winning.

SCHALLER: The irony is that today the government has far more power than in the past. It is a much larger part of the economy, and so when it moves a lever, it can expect a dramatic effect.

PHILLIPS: And yet people increasingly seem to believe that their votes don’t matter, that these parties aren’t any different from each other. It’s all just a big game. Democrats are the not-Republicans and Republicans are the not-Democrats. And if None of the Above could be on the ballot, it would scare the bejesus out of everybody. What a choice that would be!

BAKER: The situation is not unique to the United States either. In Italy, the 2006 election was a near stalemate, at least in terms of votes, and within a couple of years Silvio Berlusconi was back in power. The French socialists actually fell out of the top two in the 2002 election, and Nicolas Sarkozy, another conservative, shows up in 2007, also for a win. I think this has to do with a strange global capital consensus whereby the elites of all of the controlling parties have accepted what they feel are the limits of globalization, which will inevitably drive down wages and realign all kinds of economic forces. This consensus creates a huge disassociation between what is being promised and what is being delivered, and that really frustrates people. Why vote for the left when even they don’t believe in liberalism?

I could leave this discussion at that last sentence (and please read the rest of the essay here), but thought you might enjoy Dawkins' reception in Oklahoma and his gift back to them (and the (hilarious) discussion of "diversity of thinking"). Enjoy your Sunday! Suzan ________________

I Love Dennis Kucinich and What He Stands For

Why is this man not President? How can Charlie Rose and Bill Maher hold up their heads ever again after their encounter with a truly honorable man? I have to admit, however, that I worry about Dennis' health in times like these. Watch the crowd on its feet cheering to Dennis's words at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. His words are as true today as they were then. Suzan ___________________

Saturday's Dirty Laundry - Wall Street’s Toxic Message (Exposed!)

Professor Joseph Stiglitz (yeah, that one) says in Vanity Fair that "While there may be no winners in the current economic crisis, there are losers, and among the big losers is support for American-style capitalism. This has consequences we’ll be living with for a long time to come." And if you didn't study your world history, here's an opportunity to make up for that loss. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Free-market ideology turned out to be an excuse for new forms of exploitation. “Privatization” meant that foreigners could buy mines and oil fields in developing countries at low prices. It meant they could reap large profits from monopolies and quasi-monopolies, such as in elecommunications. “Liberalization” meant that they could get high returns on their loans—and when loans went bad, the I.M.F. forced the socialization of the losses, meaning that the screws were put on entire populations to pay the banks back. It meant, too, that foreign firms could wipe out nascent industries, suppressing the development of entrepreneurial talent. While capital flowed freely, labor did not — except in the case of the most talented individuals, who found good jobs in a global marketplace. This picture is, obviously, painted with too broad a brush. There were always those in Asia who resisted the Washington consensus. They put restrictions on capital flows. The giants of Asia — China and India — managed their economies their own way, producing unprecedented growth. But elsewhere, and especially in the countries where the World Bank and the I.M.F. held sway, things did not go well. And everywhere, the debate over ideas continued. Even in countries that have done very well, there is a conviction among the educated and influential that the rules of the game have not been fair. They believe that they have done well despite the unfair rules, and they sympathize with their weaker friends in the developing world who have not done well at all.

Talk about long-term consequences being ignored in the race to riches at the expense of the now.

These guys deserve to be under the jail (for ever) and not raking in bonuses.

The economic debate takes on particular potency in the developing world. Although we in the West tend to forget, 190 years ago one-third of the world’s gross domestic product was in China. But then, rather suddenly, colonial exploitation and unfair trade agreements, combined with a technological revolution in Europe and America, left the developing countries far behind, to the point where, by 1950, China’s economy constituted less than 5 percent of the world’s G.D.P. In the mid–19th century the United Kingdom and France actually waged a war to open China to global trade. This was the Second Opium War, so named because the West had little of value to sell to China other than drugs, which it had been dumping into Chinese markets, with the collateral effect of causing widespread addiction. It was an early attempt by the West to correct a balance-of-payments problem. Colonialism left a mixed legacy in the developing world — but one clear result was the view among people there that they had been cruelly exploited. Among many emerging leaders, Marxist theory provided an interpretation of their experience; it suggested that exploitation was in fact the underpinning of the capitalist system. The political independence that came to scores of colonies after World War II did not put an end to economic colonialism. In some regions, such as Africa, the exploitation — the extraction of natural resources and the rape of the environment, all in return for a pittance — was obvious. Elsewhere it was more subtle. In many parts of the world, global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came to be seen as instruments of post-colonial control. These institutions pushed market fundamentalism (“neoliberalism,” it was often called), a notion idealized by Americans as “free and unfettered markets.” They pressed for financial-sector deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization. The World Bank and the I.M.F. said they were doing all this for the benefit of the developing world. They were backed up by teams of free-market economists, many from that cathedral of free-market economics, the University of Chicago. In the end, the programs of “the Chicago boys” didn’t bring the promised results. Incomes stagnated. Where there was growth, the wealth went to those at the top. Economic crises in individual countries became ever more frequent—there have been more than a hundred severe ones in the past 30 years alone. Not surprisingly, people in developing countries became less and less convinced that Western help was motivated by altruism. They suspected that the free-market rhetoric — “the Washington consensus,” as it is known in shorthand — was just a cover for the old commercial interests. Suspicions were reinforced by the West’s own hypocrisy. Europe and America didn’t open up their own markets to the agricultural produce of the Third World, which was often all these poor countries had to offer. They forced developing countries to eliminate subsidies aimed at creating new industries, even as they provided massive subsidies to their own farmers.

And poor Hotel California. The wages of sin (see Gov. Schwarzenegger having summer fun here) coming home to roost (and beginning the tidal wave that is destined to swamp the rest of the country). It's summertime! Is it hot where you are? It's 100 degrees here (and humid!). Suzan ______________

So GreatGrandchildren's Money Now Even More Pledged to the Bloated Military

Wouldn't you know it? After that astounding victory for progressives at the polls, sure enough . . . With no enemies other than shadows in mountain ranges and consortiums we have yet to pay off well enough, we learn that:

The global arms madness continues. A new report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (one of my favorite think tanks) confirms that worldwide military expenditure is again on the up and up, with spending having increased by 4 percent in 2008. “All regions and subregions have seen significant increases since 1999, except for Western and Central Europe,” says the report (available at www.sipri.org). The United States loomed large over all other countries, with a whopping $607 billion swallowed up by the military in 2008, nearly 10 percent more than the previous year. And SIPRI is being very conservative here, because the total U.S. expenditure was roughly $1 trillion when you add military-related costs that are not in the Pentagon budget. (See my column) Sadly, the change of Administration has not reversed the trend. The Obama Administration has asked for $663 billion for the military for fiscal year 2010, including supplemental funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Although some wasteful big-ticket boondoggles have been cut and the budget is more transparently honest, the Pentagon is still being showered with money, even in our current parlous economic condition.

Additionally, President Obama has appealed for an additional $83.4 billion for fiscal year 2009 for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bizarrely enough, some of the U.S. media coverage of the SIPRI report has been focused on the faster increase in Chinese military spending.

Duh: It’s called playing catch up. The United States accounts for nearly half of global military spending, and China’s double-digit increase was only slightly more than that of the United States. The U.S.-China rivalry is a strategic game about who can project power most forcefully. And, here, the United States has, by far, the upper hand. The section of the SIPRI report that gave me the biggest heartburn was the one on international arms transfers. The United States, Russia, Germany, France and United Kingdom continued their gleeful dominance of the arms racket, while China and India, oblivious to the needs of their people, were the biggest importers of weapons.

“Together [the top five arms exporters] accounted for 79 per cent of the volume of exports for 2004–2008,” SIPRI states. “They have been the top five suppliers since the end of the cold war and have accounted for at least three-quarters of all exports annually.” Boeing, BAE Systems (British), Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon were the largest producers of death, with arms profits for Boeing itself topping $4 billion. U.S. companies have almost a monopoly on the production of weapons in the big leagues, with almost two-thirds of the total arms manufactures of the top 100 companies being U.S. based. Perhaps my all-time favorite quotation is by General Dwight David Eisenhower. (I even have a T-shirt with the first sentence printed on it.): “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” This is such a simple, graspable truth that it penetrated the consciousness of even a career military man like Ike.

What will it take for the current crop of leaders around the world to comprehend it?

Is there anything we can we do to correct this snafu for our increasingly indentured children and grandchildren? As voting doesn't seem to count. Suzan P.S. And we think we're free. ________________

Losses Total $1.33 Trillion So Far (Green Shoots Sprouting! Recession Almost Over)

The AP reports the following figures (so far this year) for loss of wealth due to the stock market manipulations. My question is: "What's the gain of those who orchestrated and benefitted from this magnificent deception and how much are the energy greedsters making right now?" We know that Alan Greenspan, John Paulson and the rest of the Dirty Dozen made out handsomely, but what are the figures for the rest of that mythic upper 1%?

American households lost $1.33 trillion of their wealth in the first three months of the year as the recession took a bite out of stock portfolios and dragged down home prices.

The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that household net worth fell to $50.38 trillion in the January-March quarter, the lowest level since the third quarter of 2004. The first-quarter figure marked a decline of 2.6 percent, or $1.33 trillion, from the final quarter of 2008.

Net worth represents total assets such as homes and checking accounts, minus liabilities like mortgages and credit card debt.

The damage to wealth in the first quarter came from the sinking stock market. The value of Americans' stock holdings dropped 5.8 percent from the final quarter of last year.

Another hit came from falling house prices. The value of household real-estate holdings fell 2.4 percent.

The latest snapshot of Americans' balance sheets was contained in the Fed's quarterly report called the flow of funds.

Despite the drop, the speed at which net worth shrunk slowed to start the year. During the recession's deepest point in the October-December period, Americans' net worth fell 8.6 percent, according to revised figures.

Aren't you feeling sad for the rich who lost so much of their holdings that we hear about (constantly) everyday on CNBC and the rest of the faux financial news channels? We definitely gotta get that part of the market cranking again. Right, Tim? And is there any chance at all that the real culprit/malefactor/ hellhound of the American Terror Visitation will be a focus of the Senate intelligence committee's investigation of torture? Don't bet on it. Suzan ____________

Interest Rates to Zoom? Impeach Obama! Already? Our Israeli "Friends" Clamp Down

Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com is never far behind the curve and he proves it today when he notes that "the quid pro quo is all-too-well understood" and that "anti-Americanism is on the rise in Israel." He details the known facts about what most are afraid to even contemplate when considering our friendly relations.

Obama gets tough with the Israelis – or, rather, talks about getting tough – and hilarity ensues: "In a sign of growing concern in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government over U.S. President Barack Obama’s Middle East policies, Minister-without-Portfolio Yossi Peled proposed Israeli sanctions on the U.S. in a letter to cabinet ministers on Sunday. "In the 11-page letter, obtained by the Jerusalem Post from a minister on Monday, Peled recommends steps Israel can take to compensate for the shift in American policy, which he believes has become hostile to Israel." According to Peled, the Obama administration will eventually come to realize the error of its ways, but for now the U.S. president seems intent on exerting "intensive pressure to stop building in settlements, remove outposts, and advance the formation of a Palestinian state" – all steps previously agreed to by Israeli leaders, by the way, and now thrown in the trash bin by the far-Right nutballs who have captured the Israeli government.

"But in the interim," the Post reports, "the minister suggests reconsidering military and civilian purchases from the U.S., selling sensitive equipment that Washington opposes distributing internationally, and allowing other countries that compete with the U.S. to get involved with the peace process and be given a foothold for their military forces and intelligence agencies."

The irony of someone "reconsidering military and civilian purchases" which are being made, or will be made, with our money is a real hoot – but the laughs are just starting!

There’s just one conceivable answer to the suggestion that Israel should start "selling sensitive equipment that Washington opposes distributing internationally": when did they ever stop? The Israelis have been stealing U.S. technology and selling it to the Chinese – for one example – for years, much to Washington’s chagrin. So does this mean they’re going to be doing it openly, instead of sneaking around and doing it on the sly?

As for the idea of giving "other countries that compete with the U.S." a military foothold – go for it, Yossi! I can hardly wait until the Venezuelan army arrives to guard the Wall of Separation. And no doubt the Chinese – grateful for all the high-tech weaponry you’ve stolen on their behalf – will be more than happy to guard the illegal settlements you’re building (with our tax dollars).

And although the French would be grateful, I’m sure, if the Israelis switched from Boeing to Airbus – as Peled suggests – they probably wouldn’t want to get involved militarily. The most you can expect is that they’ll displace Jerry Lewis from their national pantheon of comedic culture heroes and install this guy in his place.

Oh, but we haven’t even gotten to the best part of this "news from Bizarro World" item:

"In what may be his most controversial suggestion, Peled recommends intervening in American congressional races to weaken Obama and asking American Jewish donors not to contribute to Democratic congressional candidates. He predicted that this would result in Democratic candidates pressuring Obama to become more pro-Israel."

Israel intervene in U.S. politics – why, what a novel idea! If Peled hadn’t suggested it, it would never – ever – have occurred to me.

Okay, now that you’ve stopped laughing, just consider: look at all the pro-Israel money that has flowed into the coffers of U.S. congressional candidates, and you have to wonder – is it really enough? Surely the Israelis can afford to ship a few million of those billions we give them directly back to Washington. And, when you think about it, isn’t this a way for the Israelis to make up for their boycott of Boeing and other U.S. providers – by pumping extra millions into the U.S. economy, via the campaign chests of our elected officials? They don’t call it a "special relationship" for nothing.

The reality, of course, is that the Israelis and their American amen corner are already buying up U.S. politicians by the dozen – no, AIPAC doesn’t do it directly, they do it through a complex network of local and regional political action committees. As for the idea of Israel and its American friends exerting pressure on a U.S. official in exchange for under-the-table favors – like, say, intervening in an espionage case – well, it is absolutely unheard of…

Or is it?

You really can’t make this stuff up, and, what’s more, you don’t have to bother. Because the last two times the Israelis went in and slaughtered a few thousands of their neighbors, the U.S. Congress voted to hail them as heroes. When it become clear that our president wouldn’t be catering to the Israelis’ each and every whim, AIPAC circulated a letter demanding that the White House not "pressure" Tel Aviv - and more than three-quarters of the U.S. Senate signed it, along with the vast majority of House members.

Congress is already "Israeli-occupied territory," as one wag famously put it, so Peled’s suggestion is redundant, to say the least. What I suggest, however, is that they start a campaign to impeach Obama, and, once they’ve succeeded, they should finance and run their own candidate for the White House. After all, look how they got rid of Cynthia McKinney and filled her seat with a suitable replacement.

Yes, the laughs just keep on coming:

Read the rest here.

And the reality is this: Israel has been a burden, not a benefit, to the U.S. and its national interests abroad. By giving the Jewish state our unconditional support, we have, ironically, set ourselves up for some "blowback" from Israel’s direction – and it isn’t pretty, is it?

Sheesh! I mean you know this, but it's tough when you see it explicated so well. Thanks, Justin! Suzan