Lessons on Killing the Golden Goose

Wake up, this is important I say!

If you were listening closely on Thursday you might have heard the collective yawn of 300 million Americans as the US Census Bureau released its 2009 report on poverty in America. Meh, so what if 1 in 7 people and 1 in 5 children in the world's richest country are destitute with ever diminishing chances of climbing out of the cesspool of want. 4 million more people than the year before failed to surpass the threshold of despair, there are now more poor people in the US than people in Argentina (look out Tanzania, your next). It kinda reminded me of standing in front of around fifteen 22-year-old Polish university students lecturing about inequality in those same United States. There I was going over chart after chart showing how the distribution of income in the US hasn't been so unequal since the beginning of the last century and trying to get them to come up with ideas about why it was happening and what repercussions it might have. I mean, what was I thinking? Better yet, what we're they thinking? A few possibilities:

"I can't wait to get home and stream last night's Desperate Housewives!"
"Did he just say 'annual stimulus'?"
"I wonder how my tomatoes are growing in Farmville?"

You see, I'd forgotten the golden rule of giving a lecture. Know your audience. These kids are the first generation born and raised from birth completely free of communism. Equality is the last thing they want, all they want is to be living in a country just like America. If they only knew that if we had been in America, most of them wouldn't have the opportunity of sitting in a classroom such as that one. Well, unfortunately what is happening in America isn't happening in isolation and it has repercussions for us all.

Just to be fair, I suppose I should do to my readers as I did to my poor students and put you all through a little inequality 101 primer:

The first decades of the 20th century were a time of crisis for capitalism in America. No one had tried to measure income inequality as measuring income was impossible before the introduction of federal income tax in 1913 but it was clearly a problem. It was the time of the robber barons and Standard Oil. Vanderbilt, Astor, Rockefeller, Carnegie and J.P Morgan showed the world how unrestrained markets led to accumulated wealth, monopolistic behaviour and distorted markets that retarded growth. The ideas of Marx were mixing in a potent cocktail of labour unrest. Something was wrong with capitalism. When in 1915 a statistician at the University of Wisconsin named Willford I. King published The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States he was astounded to find that the top 1% of the population accounted for about 15% of the income. That figure was to climb to a peak of 23.9% in 1928. Coincidentally, the next year saw Black Tuesday as the stock market crashed on October 29th kicking off the Great Depression.

The effects of the depression combined with progressive taxation, the New Deal and World War II to usher in an era of dwindling income disparity, referred to by some economists as the Great Compression. Provided you were a white, Christian male of non-drafting age, this period of time could be viewed by many as the golden age of American life. There was no better time to be a middle-class American and the numbers grew and grew in a virtuous cycle. America had won the war and they were tasked with powering the global economy. Foreign competition was minimal, resources were abundant, each decade added a year to average educational attainment and unions ensured workers earned a salary that allowed them to purchase their employers products. The gap between rich and poor reached it's historic low in the 1970s as the top 1% was taking in about 9% of total income, a little over a third of what it had been 45 years earlier.

Oh, this is the top 0.01%. Not bad!

Then, something happened causing what Paul Krugman has termed the Great Divergence. The trend completely reversed itself and we've seen a growing disparity between rich and poor, rich and richer along with poor and poorer ever since, to the point where the top percentile's income share reached 23.5% in 2008. Notice any similarity between that number and the one eighty years ago, you know, right before the Great Depression? Correlation isn't causation and all that, but do you think the fact that a smaller piece of the pie being available to the majority of the population could have something to do with a slowdown in economic activity? I'm no economist, but...

Ok, so what's my point? Well, that's my point. It's not just my classroom that was bored to tears with these numbers. Imagine Faux 'news' trying to go through these facts with its viewers. Ha! Just mention the word inequality and the next thing you know you'd probably be shouted down for being a socialist-communist-terrorist pedophile with an evil plot to turn the country into a government controlled death camp in preparation for an alien invasion. Or something like that. Americans truly believe that what has made their country great is the independent/innovative/entrepreneurial spirit of its population facilitated by having a small, unobtrusive government. They've been brainwashed into believing that the only economic prescription for tough times is to cut taxes and liberalize the market. Funny they don't seem to remember that it was government policies that created the conditions for growth (and a couple of little World Wars that knocked out the manufacturing capacity of much of the world) seen in the 20th century. Anti-trust legislation, the minimum wage, social security, the 16th and 17th amendments, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Glass-Steagall. Oops, see, we've gotta be vigilant or the next thing you know these things could be gone.

So, before figuring a way out, or even if we need to, the first question is, what happened? Economists have variously pointed fingers at race, gender, the breakdown of the nuclear family, immigration, technology, Republicans, the demise of organized labour, globalization, federal policy, and the decline of K-12 education. Well, I blame it on the 1970s. No, not disco (well, a little bit), nor the designated hitter rule, the Big Mac or the Bicentennial. Why were the seventies such a turning point? The oil crisis, Vietnam and Nixon closing the gold window to allow for an unchecked expansion of the money supply led to stagflation. At the same time American corporations were just figuring out that the rebellion against conformity of the previous decade wasn't a threat but in fact their greatest opportunity. Value and lifestyle marketing. It was in the corporations interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. America's (and the developed economies) were rescued by the self-actualizing individuals who became the motor of what became known as the new economy. Consumerism became the path to self-actualization. This was not only observed and practiced in the market for goods and services but politics too. New individualism was leading an attack on fifty years of government interference in people's lives. Well, we know where that led to now. Reagan/Thatcher ushered in an era of deregulation at the same time as the right-wingnut mantra chant became the only correct way to think: Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. Products and false idols allowed people to express what they felt was their individuality. "The generation that once rebelled against the conformity imposed by consumerism now embraced it because it helped them to be themselves." (Do watch the whole series, this is the 3rd of 4 parts)



Middle America's recent embrace of the Tea Party and their populist slogans really isn't that surprising. Anything that allows the mind to shift the burden of blame away from itself is much easier than looking within, finding the errors of one's ways and correcting them. No matter how much they yell and scream about the 'Obamanation' that they see as the cause of their ills, there's no escaping the fact that it is in fact us who are too blame. We allowed the mass marketing gurus to convince us that the road to happiness could be found in the modern day houses of prayer, the strip malls, that sprung up all around them and powered the new economy for 30 years. As the economy grew however, our wages didn't keep pace, the median male worker earns less today than he did in 1980, so we adapted in order to be able to continue to sate our unlimited desire to buy new things. How? Women continued to stream into the workforce making the two-income family the norm. In 1966 only 24% of mothers with young children worked outside the home; by the late nineties that figure had reached 60%. When this wasn't enough, we all worked longer hours, and not just in America - by the middle of the oh-ohs (2000s) the average male worker was working 100 more hours a year than two decades previously (almost 2 more hours a week! - the typical female was working 200 more hours!). Is it any wonder that no one was able to notice what was happening around us? With less and less time people came to rely more and more on opinion instead of news. Why bother to read and learn about a subject when it's much easier and quicker to simply digest what your told to believe as quickly as possible while scanning your iPad/Phone/Blackberry for news and updates on Facebook. Oh internet, you had so much promise! The worse was yet to come for Jack and Jill Average though as they found they still couldn't keep up with the Jones' next door (or at least what all those Lifestyle's of the Rich and Famous types the boob tube kept telling them were so much better than they were). When Jack and Jill found they had charged up their Visa cards over the limit, they discovered they could use their homes as credit cards. Oh, the joy they had in going up the hill, as housing prices always went up, right? So nothing could ever go wrong, could it? From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes leading to a tumble that has broken more than our crown.

Meanwhile their corporate masters took a growing slice of a stagnant pie (untasty!). They allowed the post-Reagan acolytes to dismantle their only defense against this onslaught, the unions, first smashing the air-traffic controllers union in a display of might and power, then slowly removing market stability legislation that had been in place since the New Deal. Today, organized labour is down to about 7% of the private workforce. While the workers were losing their voice, the plutocrats were just finding theirs. With all the hoopla surrounding bankers' pay last year it was somehow missed that this isn't an anomaly but a trend. In 1970 US CEOs were paid 28 times more than the average worker; by the oh-ohs this figure was hovering around 500 to 1, peaking at 548. Do you think their jobs got twenty times more difficult, twenty times more stressful, twenty times more demanding or they did a twenty times better job? Ha! Cough! Yike! The fact is the Friedmans of finance, those gurus of GDP, gods of globalization, have used every crisis over the past few decades to tighten the screws a little bit tighter on Joe Sixpack (yes, Jack and Jill's neighbour whose home is also under water), reducing benefits, outsourcing labour and increasing the profit margin. The rise of lobbyists and PACs has meant that those with the most money have the loudest voice in forming public policy, ensuring that every piece of legislation, from health care to financial reform, will have one intended winner, not the people but the Masters of the Universe. The Citizen United Supreme Court ruling making corporations people will only serve to make a bad situation worse as money becomes not only speech but also the only words those in power will bother to listen to. There's a reason politicians are vastly more responsive to the views of affluent constituents than those of modest means, they know who butters their bread. As Larry Bartels notes in his study on income inequality and political representation, what we are seeing is a "debilitating feedback cycle linking the economic and political realms: increasing economic inequality may produce increasing inequality in political responsiveness, which in turn produces public policies increasingly detrimental to the interests of poor citizens, which in turn produces even greater economic inequality, and so on".

Money poured into "think tanks" and "research centres" in an effort to mold a new and unchallenged economic model. Industrial dynasties have spent not insignificant parts of their fortunes on the conservative agenda. In the1980s , the Olin family, which owns a chemicals-and-manufacturing conglomerate, became known for funding right-leaning thinking in academia, particularly in law schools. And during the nineties Richard Mellon Scaife, a descendant of Andrew Mellon, spent millions attempting to discredit President Bill Clinton. But the real wizards behind the curtain are the Kochs. Only the brothers know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than 48 million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, spent more than 28 million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a 120 million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, Koch has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups.

Have you heard of the Cato Institute? Heritage Foundation? The Hudson Institute? The Independent Women’s Forum (seriously!)? The Mercatus Center (yeah, part of George Mason Univerity, publicly funded but fighting to end public funding)? Citizens For a Sound Economy? Citizens For the Environment (with no citizen membership)? Economic Education Trust or Triad Management? Remember the climategate kerfuffle over the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia. Wonder why formaldehyde isn't listed as a "known carcinogen to humans" substance by the EPA? Confused as to why “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community”? All are Koch created or funded, their main purpose helping ensure the maintenance of the status quo, the one that enriches them while raping the planet. Their activities and goals dovetail menacingly with the secret 1971 memo that then Virginia attorney Lewis Powell wrote two months before being nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors such as Dow Chemical and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society" - intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.

Convincing people to oppose action to save the world!

Um, did I mention so what? Why should we care that equality is not only increasing, but set to get worse even faster. Simple. Inequality is/was the major cause of the Great Recession. No, I'm not only pointing to the fact that income inequality was at similar levels just prior to the Great Depression and it's less powerfully named sibling, the Great Recession. After all, then I'd have commentators screaming that correlation is not causality. There's too much else going on here. Bank failures tend to coincide (notice the influence of financial deregulation) with times of growing income inequality. The growth of household debt has followed a pattern strikingly similar to the growth in income inequality. Finally, inequality has a substantial negative impact on overall consumption by creating a drag on effective demand. This is intuitive as well as scientific as it is obvious that the rich spend a lower percentage of their income than the rest of us thus robbing the economy of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs. Worse yet, the rich don't necessarily spend their earnings and savings on and in their own country, being far more likely to spend it where they will get the highest returns, whether in a tax haven such as the Caymans or a holiday on the French Riviera. Remember that top 1% of earners? Well from 1980 to 2005 they took in more than 80% of the total increase in Americans' income. 80%! Leaving 20% to add to the spending power of the rest of us. Is there any wonder WalMart is so big?

You like graphs? We've got 'em!

A rising tide lifts all boats? What was once true is simply no longer the case. If you're born in rags, you're more likely to die in those same rags than those born in previous generations. Let's take a look at the most obviously method of perpetuating a plutocratic society. Estate taxes had been used for much of the century to help distribute wealth from top to bottom. There's no question that it should be everyone's right to pass on what they have created in their lifetime to their children. The question is how much is enough while trying to encourage a society in which members can move up and down the social ladder based on their knowledge, contribution and a little bit of luck. Once upon a time, this movement, let's call it social mobility, was fluid in the United States. Over the past 30 years however (why does that number keep coming up?) we have seen a dramatic calcification of this process. No matter, if you have a lot of money, you're happy with the new reality and therefore want your children to carry the mantle, after all meritocracy is so overrated. We need to eliminate the estate tax. Enter the right-wingnut spin doctor. Abracadabra, alakazam, poof - the estate tax becomes a 'death tax'. Fun with words! "No one likes a death tax! Let's get rid of it". And it was so, a one year moratorium that Republicans now want to make permanent, give to the rich and pass the costs on to the rest. Never mind that the estate tax was the most progressive and meritocratic tax in the country with the first $3.5 million being tax free impacting only the richest 0.3% of estates. We can always continue to misquote Alexis de Toqueville: "America is the best country in the world to be poor". That way we can delude ourselves into believing that Horatio Alger still exists. Sorry folks, "It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Finally, income inequality is one of the worst diseases a society can have. People in more equal societies simply live longer, healthier, and happier lives than people in more unequal societies. And not just poor people in these societies - all people. In a project intended to solve the reason why health within a population gets progressively worse the further one moves down the social scale, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett accidentally made a discovery big enough to change political thinking. It is no wonder rightwingnuts have been so vehement in their condemnation and more fantastical than usual in their attempts to discredit Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. What they found was that in states and countries where there is a big gap between the incomes of rich and poor, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, obesity and teenage pregnancy are more common, the homicide rate is higher, life expectancy is shorter, and children's educational performance and literacy scores are worse. Unsurprisingly, the Scandinavian countries and Japan consistently come at the positive end of this spectrum having the smallest differences between higher and lower incomes and the resultant best record of psycho-social health. Those nations with the widest gulf between rich and poor come out worse and have the most health and social problems - Portugal, Great Britain and of course the United States of America. Oh, it's not only the poor who suffer from the negative effects, everyone does. For example, rates of mental illness are five times higher across the whole population in the most unequal societies.

Instead of facing reality and looking in the mirror, the rich will attempt to keep the the status quo while trying to maintain the belief of the plebs in the false gods of market liberalization and tax cuts by stoking the populist anger at the heart of groups such as the Tea Party. Their success has been breathtaking, twisting the truth to suit their purposes. From climate change to death panels and tax policy, misinformation has been the key to their success in controlling the media's agenda. Take the economic stimulus package, instead of acknowledging its limited success, limited by the fact it was too small, the right-wingnuts have managed to turn it into a dirty word. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it reduced unemployment by somewhere between 0.8 and 1.7 per cent in recent months. Economists at various Wall Street houses suggest that it boosted GDP by more than two per cent. And a recent study by Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder, economists from, respectively, Moody’s and Princeton, argues that, in the absence of the stimulus, unemployment would have risen above eleven per cent and that GDP. would have been almost half a trillion dollars lower. Yet polls show that a sizable majority of voters think that the stimulus either did nothing to help or actively hurt the economy, and most people say that they’re opposed to a new stimulus plan. The hostility has numerous sources. Many voters conflate the stimulus bill with the highly unpopular bailouts of the banking sector and the auto industry; Republicans have done a good job of encouraging such misconceptions, as when Representative Mike Pence, of Indiana, referred to the “bailout stimulus.”

Oops!

No, it is much easier to attack and criticize than reflect and offer solutions. The battle over the upcoming expiry of the Bush tax cuts will be instructive as to the direction America chooses to go. Does it want to continue to perpetuate a broken system, one in which California has built only one new college since 1984, but 21 new prisons, or will she decide to heal herself by implementing policies to guide us back to sanity. Things don't look good with money not only pouring in from special interest groups but ever more staggering amounts are also being spent by candidates themselves. At times I find myself wanting to see the Tea Party lead the Republicans to victory in the mid-term elections and ride the wave of misinformation through 2012 to usher in the era of Palin just to see how bad it gets but I know we'd all be swept away by the ensuing tsunami. Instead of letting ourselves be tricked into chasing bogeymen who are figments of our imagination we need to go about fixing the problems that we're faced with. The economic progress made over the past couple of centuries since the days of Adam Smith are undeniable, truly a goose laying golden eggs. Greed leads us to want to slice it open and grab all the gold today. A tool is only as good as its user, and capitalism, no matter how superior an economic system, is just that, a tool. We have to remember the users here are little different than monkeys and we all know what happens when monkeys are given tools.

Arrest That Man!

Could it happen? Picture this if you will: Today, George W. Bush makes his first trip across an international border as a private citizen, the plane touches down, he disembarks, but wait, what's this? There waiting for him are representatives of the International Criminal Court to arrest him for war crimes and crimes against humanity. And then we woke up. Not gonna happen, why? Cause he doesn't deserve it? No. Because he's landing in Calgary, Alberta, Canada - proof that he still has people around him doing his thinking for him as he couldn't pick a more conservative, oil loving, cowboy mentality, business friendly place on Earth. A place where instead of arrest, he'll find people lining up to pay $4,000 a table to hear him speak.

Here's the thing: it should happen. The evidence is there. The precedent is there. Now we just need someone with the balls to do it. My bet is that it won't be the Canadians. Legal experts have said that with the issue of a warrant for the arrest of present Sudanese President al-Bashir for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, the same principles of law could be extended to officials from the Bush Administration for the coercive interrogation techniques used on terror suspects. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) leaked a report claiming these techniques "constituted torture". Or perhaps they could get him for the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If that weren't enough, there is also the argument that Bush is inadmissible to Canada under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Section 35(1) (a) states that a foreign national is inadmissible on grounds of violating human or international rights or for committing an act outside Canada that constitutes an offence referred to in sections 4 to 7 of the Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act. Also inadmissible (s.35 (1)(b)) are persons who are, or were, senior officials “in the service of a government that, in the opinion of the Minister, engages or has engaged in gross human rights violations…”. Of particular interest are articles 5, 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

"The test isn't whether the person's been convicted, but whether there's reasonable grounds to think that they have been involved," says Gail Davidson, who's with Lawyers Against the War (LAW), a group that has been pressuring the Canadian government to act. "...It's now a matter of public record that Bush was in charge of setting up a regime of torture that spanned several parts of the globe and resulted in horrendous injuries and even death. Canada has a duty."

Today being St. Patrick's Day, we'll see green beer, green rivers and green outfits. Unfortunately, it's the green of US wealth that flows into Alberta's oil rich province that will most likely prevent the Canadian authorities from acting on their moral and possibly legal obligations to arrest Dubya as he enters Canadian soil. I'm sure we'll see plenty of protesters but no arrest. At least I'll have my beer to drown my sorrow tonight.

True (well, not so true) to the End

The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 1, Ch. 10

Why oh why do they keep lying and deceiving? Oh yeah, it's because a whole bunch of people eat this stuff up. Stumbled across another case in point of the smokescreen that is the Republican party and the wacky right, a little number released by the White House called the 'Highlights of Accomplishments and Results The Administration of President George W. Bush 2001-2009'. The legacy book is yet another example of the distorted way in which these people actually see the world. So, in celebration of the final moments of the Bush presidency let's try to once again for old time sakes to expose the truth by looking at this publication point by painful point.

The report has five main categories, the first of which is the claim that Dubya "Kept America Safe and Promoted Liberty Abroad". The four supporting arguments are that he waged the global war on terror, transformed the institutions and the tools of war, established the freedom agenda to spread hope through liberty and finally, established a new approach to international development. The first claim is based on the fact that US soil hasn't seen a terrorist attack against it since 9/11. True, but as I've read in many places, the previous 7 years hadn't seen one either. What's been swept under the rug and somehow forgotten is that it was on Bush's watch that 9/11 happened. Have we forgotten that Bush responded to the August 6, 2001 memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" by going on vacation? Or that he hardly paid any attention to the intelligence dating back to January 2001 which insisted that al-Qaeda was an "urgent" threat? The truth here is that the Bush administration has made America and the world a much less safe place, especially vis-a-vis terrorism. The neocon strategy of spreading democracy through war has proved to be an abysmal failure. Yes, they transformed war by instituting a policy of pre-emptive war in Iraq and the tools were sharpened through the unsigning of the ICC and ignoring the Geneva Convention. The use of torture condoned by his cohorts has created a much more dangerous world for troops abroad. The State Department, traditionally the main tool of foreign policy, has become an afterthought, understaffed, underfunded and suffering from low morale. Reading about this 'freedom agenda' is confusing. If it's the measure introduced to but not passed by congress it represents some of the higher ideals of the Republican party. However, the more nebulous 'freedom agenda' held by Dubya and fellow neocons has truly been a disaster. Beyond Iraq, one need look no further than South America or central Asia, where American influence has waned considerably. As for the colour-coded revolutions, well, most have been revealed as nothing more than a smoke screen, whose initial success has faded away much like the smoke. Did I mention Afghanistan? Guess I forgot about it too...

Bush on the economy, another laugher. Section numero dos is headed: Lowered Taxes and Instituted Pro-Growth Policies. Should read: Made the rich richer and sold the rest down river. More than any one single reason for the financial crisis is the culture of lies and deceit that the Bush administration helped to perpetuate. If you aren't so philosophical and need concrete reasons for the crisis, luckily I've got a few. Doubling the national debt after inheriting a budget surplus, pushing for deregulation and the ever widening income gap are good starting points. A doubling of the nation's debt to over $11 trillion while today the richest 1% of Americans share of national income is 22.1% compared to 16.1% in 2002 with the bottom 50%'s share today being 12.5% compared to 14.2% six years ago. In 2007 real median household income dropped 1% while corporate profits jumped 68%. But really, one need only look at Bush's advice to the American consumer which basically boiled down to "go shopping!". Yes, that's right, declare a 'war on terror' and instead of asking the people to make sacrifices, ask them to mortgage their financial future - and of course that's what Joe and Sally did. In previous wars citizens were encouraged to invest in war bonds and the likes, Dubya told the people "to get down to Disney World". Imagine how bad things would be today if he'd had his way and Social Security had been privatized.

Next up, George the second apparently "Reformed Government to Better Serve Americans". The first subsection is about education and the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, part of the Bush pledge in 2000 to improve education when he lamented, "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?". The results have been mixed with reading and math scores showing improvement but many questioning the neglect of other subjects; an overhaul awaits the Obama administration. On health care the report mentions the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. Whatever it's merits the cost represent another boldface lie told to the American people as the White House continually low-balled the price tag in order to ensure passage. Sound familiar? Refresher: Back in 2003 the Bush Administration wanted to put the price tag of a war in Iraq at around $50 billion. White House Economic Advisor Larry Lindsey was fired for suggesting it could be $100 to $200 billion, that's right, fired for stepping out of line. The real cost could come in somewhere around $5 trillion! Only missed that one by a factor of 100. Oh yeah, there are over 46 million Americans without any kind of health insurance today, an increase of more than 8 million since 2000. The next part is the creepy one for us small 'g' god people; Dubya's administration has "Improved lives by partnering with faith-based and community groups". Whether or not one supports the president's Faith-Based and Community Initiative (FBCI), what is undeniable is that it will be a part of the Bush legacy as it has changed the rules of the game. The Constitutional line between church and state has been blurred and a new way of handing out money to political allies was created, sound familiar? It should as cronyism is a central theme in the last section here, where Bush II "Provided unprecedented resources for those who defended our freedom". Yes, sending over 4000 folks to die in a war tends to put pressure on you to spend some money on the armed forces. The silver lining? Well, at least Dick Cheney and Haliburton got richer.

GWB "Set a Bright Course for America's Future" must be the most baffling section of the document. Apparently he advanced energy production, lessening America's dependence on oil. One almost has no words to argue against this, and I guess that's the point. But pointing to the success of ethanol subsidies when they have had a large hand in disrupting world commodity markets, threatening global famine? Maybe the authors missed out on the run up to near $150 a barrel oil last year. Or perhaps the report implicitly counts Iraqi oil production as being American now. Dubya has also protected the environment, damn, I almost can't write this stuff. An administration that has done all it can to perpetuate global warming deniers' claims while removing itself from the obligations of the Kyoto Protocol could one day be pointed at as the reason for the end of the world. Lastly in this section the administration "Reduced crime, lowered drug use, and protected vulnerable children". While having the authority to pardon crimes helped his family sleep at night while in office, it will be interesting to see how many within the inner-circle are brought to justice. Legalizing war crimes through the Military Commissions Act helped keep the streets crime free too, at least those in Washington, D.C.!

The final section is titled: Stood on Principle and Showed the Way Ahead. Thank you Mr. President for creating the environment we're in today, one where lying, deceit, greed and corruption have come together in a perfect storm that truly threatens to end the American way of life. Through it all though Dubya "promoted a culture of life", by which I guess it means for those who weren't killed in Iraq. In fact, the phrase is lifted from a speech given by Pope John Paul II on a tour of the US in 1993, and by the Vatican's standards, Dubya has sort of succeeded. The main points of this ideal are: opposition to abortion, check, opposition to capital punishment, oops, opposition to cloning, check, opposition to contraception, check, opposition to embryonic and stem cell research, check, opposition to euthanasia, check and opposition to unjust war, d'oh! Well, 5 outta 7 ain't bad I guess. Opposition to stem cell research "set research back five to six to seven years in this country," delaying potential treatments for a number of degenerative and life threatening diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And guess what, those scientists that would have been working in the US are simply in other countries doing that same research. Next, George "Appointed judges committed to ruling by the letter of the law" is the shortest section of the document, quickly mentioning the appointment of Judges Samuel Alito and John Roberts. Funny how it skips over the whole Alberto Gonzales fiasco, assuming the public has already forgotten. Guess that's the point, most already have and won't even really know what is missing, much of their civil liberties. From wire tapping to political favouritism and approval of torture, (Gonzales called parts of the Geneva Convention 'quaint') Dubya and his gang chipped away at all that Americans supposedly hold sacred, their freedom, while proclaiming to be protecting and spreading it abroad.

None of this could have happened without three main factors, 9/11, Cheney and Rove. Cheney pushed for a radical rewriting of American policies on such critical issues as surveillance and detention of terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks, with virtually no oversight or input from Congress or the courts. Meanwhile Rove worked his black magic upon a sleep-walking nation, molding public opinion through his version of the truth with impunity. Before getting to the gripping "100 Things Americans Might Not Know" wrap-up, this legacy forming document proclaims that, "President Bush led with a hopeful vision, met complex and rapid-fire challenges with steady resolve, and based his decisions on principle." This seems to be the central theme of the Bush record defense, he was a victim of circumstances and he dealt with all the issues based on his principles. Herein lies the ultimate irony of the past eight years: If a man (or woman) with more sense than neocon ideology had occupied the Oval Office to face those same challenges, America and the world would be a much better and safer place today. Instead of seeing 9/11 as an opportunity to reach out to the world, it was treated as a chance to settle scores and start wars, thereby fuelling extremism and creating legions of new terrorists. Evidence of moral corrosion can be found everywhere we look, from the financial scandals of Enron to Bernie Madoff, the humiliation of Saddam Hussein to Guantanamo Bay. Thank you Mr. President, we wish we never knew you.

Skeletons in the Closet

“If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.”
- Shakespeare, Richard II

We all have one. Some deep, dark secret locked away out of view where no one will see it. Nations have dirty laundry hidden in a dark corner too, and like people, each has a different way of dealing with their past. Internationally, the need to seek justice, even retribution, for extreme acts of injustice has resulted in the Nuremberg Trials and other international war crime tribunals. On Friday, Poland's last communist leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, and seven other Soviet-era officials went on trial in Warsaw over the declaration of martial law more than a quarter of a century ago. The trial re-opens old wounds and will surely once again demonstrate how difficult it is to judge the wrongdoings committed under far different circumstances than we can understand today.

In the 90's, the Bulgarian Communist leader, Todor Zhivkov, was put on trial for embezzlement rather than political acts such as the imprisonment of thousands of his fellow citizens in camps where several perished and were allegedly tortured. Ramiz Alia, the former Communist leader of Albania, was tried and convicted of abuse of power. In Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were tried in just a few hours by the leaders of an uprising against them in December 1989. The couple was convicted of crimes against the people and summarily shot.

In Chile, a legal battle raged years as the government tried to bring former dictator Augusto Pinochet to justice for crimes his regime committed. Long after he stepped down from power he was shielded from prosecution for thousands of killings and "disappearances" by parliamentary immunity and an amnesty that the military had granted itself. It took a warrant issued by a Spanish judge for him to be arrested on Oct. 16,1998 in London. Pinochet died in prison awaiting trial but his case may have changed the world's perception about the worth of such a fight. He spent 17 months in detention in Britain as he fought extradition back to Chile on health grounds while the criminal cases against him jumped to hundreds. By the time Britain sent Pinochet back to Chile, the myth of his immunity had been shattered. For the last years of his life, Pinochet was dogged by his past. His immunity was stripped in six major cases, ranging from death squads and abductions to the hiding of millions of dollars abroad, and at the time of his death, he was under house arrest. One hundred and nine other agents of his regime have now been convicted of human rights crimes.

While a Spanish judge helped bring justice to the Chilean people, Spain has taken another course in dealing with their own dark past. After nearly 40 years of Franco and fascism during which time 200,000 people were killed in concentration camps, they simply changed the name of the fascist party to the Partido Popular (PP) and continued like nothing happened. Yes, Fraga Iribarne, Minister of the Interior in Franco's fascist regime (in charge of Spain's political police), founded the PP. The party, which has governed Spain for much of the time since Franco's death and led the nation into the 'coalition of the willing' in Iraq, believes that the Franco regime was good for Spain. The last Spanish president, Jose Maria Aznar was himself a member of Franco's fascist party and disobeyed the instructions of the U.N. Human Rights Agency to find the bodies of those who disappeared during the Franco regime (more than 30,000 people).

Over in Italy, we know that things aren't any better. The past isn't only being ignored, it's being repeated, as Berlusconi has formed coalition governments with fascist parties for much of the time since 1994. Mussolini era laws are even being dusted off for the first time in almost 80 years as Berlusconi tries to court the Catholic vote by prosecuting comedians. Here's the catch, maybe Mussolini wasn't so bad, as with all these 'bad' guys, history books are written by the victors: How can something that was praiseworthy at the time they did it, 10, 25, 50 years ago, suddenly become reprehensible now? With Mussolini, he went from hero:
If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been whole-heartedly with you in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism... (Italy) has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism. -Winston Churchill (1927)
... to zero, as he was guilty of the only crime that matters, he lost.

So, what of General Jaruzelski? In Poland, officials and police officers from Jaruzelski on down have been put on trial in connection with some 150 deaths -- from the shooting of 44 Gdansk shipyard workers in 1970 to the martial law crackdown against Solidarity. Not one has been convicted as General Jaruzelski has continuously proclaimed his innocence in the deaths. In 1996, a special parliamentary committee absolved him of responsibility for the 1981 killings. This time, prosecutors from the Institute of National Remembrance, a state body that investigates communist-era crimes have charged him and his fellow defendants with "communist crimes," violating the constitution and leading "an organized criminal group of a military nature having as its goal the carrying out of crimes that consisted of the deprivation of freedom through internment." His defence for declaring martial law is that he wanted to avoid a Soviet invasion in reprisal for the Solidarity uprising, as was witnessed in Prague and Budapest in response to similar anti-Soviet uprisings.

How will future generations deal with the wrongs they deem are being committed today? Will there be a witch hunt of those responsible for the illegal war in Iraq and violations of the Geneva Convention similar to the Nazi hunt following World War II? Preparations are already being made, making it possible that one day Cheney, Bush et al. will face a fate similar to that of Saddam Hussein. Who knows how future generations will look back at such human rights violations as Guantanamo Bay. People clearly feel the need for justice, but as Orwell stated, it's best "When tyrants are put to death, it should be by their own subjects; those who are punished by a foreign authority, like Napoleon, are simply made into martyrs and legends."

China+Olympics=What Did You Expect?

With just a couple days until the opening ceremonies in Beijing of the 26th Olympiad, you can't help but get the feeling that the press really want to find something wrong with China´s "coming out party". The last few days have seen a slew of negative headlines: Olympic Sport: Blocking the Internet, Olympic Protests Over Beijing Evictions; Beijing pollution may force new crackdown for Olympics (I like that one, the writer must have got a bonus for getting the reader to link Tibet with pollution!); Olympics: The Violence Has Started Already in Beijing and on Borders. I have just one question for all these finger pointers: really what did you expect when you combine the IOC (International Olympic Committee) with China?

On July 13th, 2001, Beijing beat out rival bids from Osaka, Toronto, Istanbul and Paris in voting to become the host city for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Controversy was assured from the get go, as the bids from Toronto and Paris were both considered superior, but as then IOC head Juan Antonio Samuranch was eager for the games to go to China, that's where they went. It was clear that China's human rights record was going to be carefully scrutinized as the EU immediately issued this resolution.

Maybe what was needed was a new Olympic motto, citius, altius, fortius- swifter, higher, stronger- just doesn't seem to fit anymore. Maybe something along the lines of politics, argentum, facinarose -politics, money, scandal. When was the turning point for this once pure sporting event? For years competition was limited to amateurs, but this era ended in 1971 when the IOC allowed athletes to receive compensation for time away from work while training. As well, athletes were permitted to receive sponsorship from national organizations, sports organizations, and private businesses. Of course this still didn't allow western athletes to compete with eastern bloc nations and by 1986 professionals were granted permission to compete, leading to the 1992 "Dream Team" in Barcelona. Or was it the jingoism of the 1936 Berlin games where Hitler wanted to show the world the dominance of the Aryan race only to be humiliated by the achievements of Jesse Owens. Strange to think, but these were also the games where the Olympic torch relay was introduced, Hitler's still causing problems today as the Chinese found out to their surprise.

Few will remember that the Seoul games of 1988 were awarded to an authoritarian regime in 1981. A regime that had killed 500, or as many as 2000, democracy protesters just the year before. South Korea was one of the little dragons economically, but it was still behind culturally and politically. They, like China today, hoped that the games would showcase the Korean economic miracle to the world and legitimize the regime. The crackdown spurred resistance from opposition parties and the sports world contemplated moving the Olympics to another venue as most major cities had been turned into war zones by June 1987. The IOC issued an ultimatum saying that if the riots weren't stopped, the games would be moved. In the end Chun Doo-hwan's government was forced into allowing free elections.

Politics have never been far away from the Olympics. From boycotts to terrorist attacks, nations and groups have tried using the games as a means of furthering their political agendas. The Melbourne games of '56 were boycotted by the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland in protest of the Soviets crushing the Hungarian democracy uprising. While Cambodia, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon stayed home that same year too, protesting against the Suez crisis. Neither event had anything to do with Australia. Similarly, 20 African nations boycotted the Montreal games in 1976 because the IOC refused to ban New Zealand, something the African nations wanted because the All-Blacks had recently played in apartheid-sponsored South Africa. This was completely unrelated to either Montreal or the Olympics. So why hasn't anyone boycotted the Beijing games over human rights abuses or the Tibetan occupation, issues directly related to the Chinese government. Or how about their support of the government in Sudan and Zimbabwe? Hell, even Dubya will be making the first appearance of an American president at a games held outside the US. There can be only one answer, money.

Since the fall of the Berlin wall, there hasn't been a single Olympic boycott. The 80's saw tons in Moscow and Los Angeles. Those same Los Angeles games in 1984 also showed the world how much money was to be made, it even became the first Olympic games to make money, bringing in $215 million and earning organizing president Peter Ueberroth the Time Man of the Year award. The mayor of Montreal was infamously quoted as saying the Olympics "can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby". Montreal is still paying the debt left by those games. By the time the Beijing games begin, China will have spent $40 billion on new venues and infrastructure. GE's NBC paid $1.5 billion for the exclusive rights to broadcast the Turin and Beijing games and will more than make that back. The price tag just to become a global Olympic partner is around $70 million for a winter/summer package, then of course there are the actual advertising costs. I'm sure they all got a little worried a few months back when it looked like the torch relay protests were actually going to have an effect on the public.

Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin coined the modern Olympic Creed in 1908, displayed on the scoreboard at opening ceremonies: "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well." However, today the first thing we will learn each day from the Olympics will be the medal count. Will China win more gold medal than the US? On the days that this isn't the leading story, it will be that an athlete was caught using illegal substances. Of course athletes used alcohol, strychnine, cocaine and other substances to ease the pain and give them an edge in the past - the famously male, female athletes of the eastern bloc nations weren't natural - but it wasn't until Ben Johnson was caught in the '88 Seoul Olympics that it became clear that almost everyone was doping. One of my favourite SNL skits called for a separate "All Drug Olympics", not really such a bad idea. (By the way, can anybody tell me why I can't watch Hulu outside of the US, I can't see the skit?!)

Once it became clear to the world that the IOC was awarding games based on bribes, they tried to fix things with a few cosmetic changes to the awarding rules. China on the other hand is even bigger than the Olympics, so their change appears far more subtle . Take the Sudan. In 2004 Chinese president HuJintao referred to Chinese aid to Khartoum as "free of political conditionality". Yet since then China pressed for Sudan's acceptance of a UN-AU peacekeeping force and removed Sudan from Beijing's preferred trade-status list. While in Burma, following the violent crackdown against Buddhist monks, China cut arms sales and played a critical role in getting aid workers into the country after the typhoon. Perhaps we won't see voters lining up to elect the next government in Beijing, but it will be interesting to see whether or not the Beijing Olympics will prove to be the coming out party that many countries have enjoyed as hosts, from St. Louis in 1904, to 1964 in Tokyo and Seoul in 1988. For once I agree with Dubya, he should attend the games. There is one things for sure, he won't see any doves being released at these games.

$50 billion

It wasn't so long ago that $50 billion was considered a lot of money. Well, the world has changed and along with it, so has the value of money. General Motors' net losses since 2005, $51.1 billion; the six largest oil companies combined profits this QUARTER, $51.5 billion; Anheuser-Busch cost InBev $52 billion; the US contribution to fighting AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis over the next 5 years, $50 billion; the portion of the latest war funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan devoted to new weapon systems, $51.8 billion; the amount Microsoft saved by not buying Yahoo, about $50 billion; Obama's emergency economic stimulus package, $50 billion.

These are just a few of the numbers tossed around in the last month or two. The problem is the loss of perspective, just what is 50 billion? It was the GDP of the United States in 1916 in 1916 dollars. It is the estimated (by some) to be the number of galaxies in the universe (although most say 100 billion). Before the currency devaluation the other day (they lopped 10 zeroes off the Zim dollar in an effort to "fight" inflation), it was the cost of the Sunday Independent newspaper in Zimbabwe dollars. It's a 5 with 10 zeroes following it. That's ten to the power of nine (10^9). To make matters more confusing many languages interpret the word billion differently. In a nutshell, there are what are known as short-scales and long-scales. In countries using the short scale, such as the US and Canada, they use a numeric system where every new term greater than a million is 1000 times the previous term, thus a billion is a thousand millions, a trillion a thousand billions...While in long scale countries such as Spain, every term is a million times larger, thus a billion means a million millions (10^12). A Spaniard would say "mil millones" (a thousand millions) to mean my version of a billion!

In order to truly understand such large numbers, one must take a step back and put them in perspective. Exxon Mobil made over $11 billion this quarter, that's a couple bucks for every man, woman and child on the planet. Mexico's Carlos Slim's $60 billion fortune is large enough to place him in the top ten of national GDP's in Africa (yes, I know, GDP is the measurement for one year while his wealth was amassed over his lifetime), just behind Tunisia and ahead of Kenya. The White House predicts that the budget deficit left to the successor of Dubya for 2009 will be $482 billion, ten times 50 billion! (the figure isn't final as it may not include all costs of the wars or an additional economic stimulus package of, you guessed it, $50 billion) That's over $1600 for every person in the USA. Imagine spending that much more than you made in a year, would your bank keep lending you money? (Just a few hundred billion more until $10 trillion total outstanding public debt) You gotta love those fiscally conservative Republicans.

In Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Nine Billion Names of God, once the task of listing all the names of God is completed, the universe is brought to an end. By pumping up the numbers thrown about to ever greater amounts, our governments, corporations and not least of all, the media, are making the task of counting to the end more and more difficult to complete, thus keeping us occupied. A little over six years ago, the Pentagon estimated the war in Iraq would cost $50 billion in total, a number thrown to the public with little meaning behind it, just a number to hold in our heads. Of course the costs have spiralled out of control, but the numbers seem endless, without any real meaning; is the cost $3 trillion, $1.2 trillion or just $600 billion. Sadly for the public, unlike pi, all these amounts are finite and someone will have to pay the bill.

Extra! Extra! America Violates International Law!

Might is right. Thus it comes as no surprise to hear that they are killing people without due process in America. Imagine your surprise, when you realize...wow~! some difference, Reece's Peanut Butter Pieces inside. oops, sorry, a bit of a flashback from cartoon days... Anyways, the latest kerfuffle comes via Mexico. Can you imagine that, the Mexicans complaining about American mistreatment? What? 160 years after the US stole much of the south from them? Thank God (large G or small g, as you wish) the Canadians finished the railroad in time before Manifest Destiny kicked in.

The USA still has the death penalty. Much like the Saudis or Bangladesh, or wait a second, how could you tell me this isn't a test of how far a society has developed. The death penalty is like something out of the Koran or the Bible, look, capital letters and all for you believers. Here's a list of the countries that still perform capital punishment:
Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, China (People's Republic), Comoros, Congo (Democratic Republic), Cuba, Dominica, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Korea-North, Korea-South, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United States, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Ummm, that's kind of long. But look closer at the list, Japan is the only other country there besides the US that is considered a "developed" nation. Back to Mexico, who of course passed the death penalty phase of societal development in... wait a second, don't tell me that Mexico has never had the death penalty...Reader's please let me know if this is false. Anyway, Mexico has made an emergency appeal to the World Court to block the execution of its citizens in the US as they are in defiance or a previous World Court ruling (see below). The complaint is based on the fact that the Americans haven't been letting the accused know that they have the RIGHT to consular assistance. ummm, yeah, believe it or not, if people are accused of a crime in a nation other than their own, they can speak to people from their country before being put to death. Whether or not you believe that capital punishment is right on moral grounds, the biggest problem with it is the chance of mistaken convictions, so due process, no matter how insignificant, is of huge importance. In America alone, there have been 111 people released from death row because DNA evidence exonerated them after they were convicted.

Let's look at the organization of the World Court seeing as it's the first time I've written about it here. The International Court of Justice seems to be a force even too powerful for Google, as it's the Permanent Court of International Justice, the International Court of Justice (the real one now), or the International Criminal Court(genocide only) if you search under World Court (try it, this stuff is confusing). Basically the International Court is the judicial arm of the United Nations, responsible for resolving disputes between nations and at times giving other forms of legal advice. Upon its creation, the court's verdicts were binding on nations, but that is so passe, ever since 1986 when the US withdrew from compulsory jurisdiction. If you're wondering why well, it's, surprise, because the court ruled against America in favour of the Nicaraguan government when it lodged a complaint about the US mining its harbour in support of the Sandanistas.

The Mexicans' cases are quite serious, maybe one of them raped and killed a couple women (funny that's the only case they give any news about in the Reuter's report). The world's judicial forum, the court in the Hague must decide before the execution date of August 5 if a Mexican scheduled to die had his day in court. Oh yeah, there's 51 other Mexicans on death row paying attention to the ruling that could come in time to save their lives. The weirdest angle to the story is that Dubya, as in George W., gave the poor bastards waiting to be offed a bit of help; he ordered the states' attorneys, as in Texas', California's and Oklahoma's, to do a bit of work, to back check after a 2004 World Court ruling the US had violated international law. Somewhat ironically, his home state of Texas refused and then the US Supreme court ruled 6-3 that George didn't have the authority to force state courts to comply with World Court rulings. Dubya had overstepped his authority by saying the US and its states must adhere to its international treaty obligations.

George knows damn well that the US no longer needs to comply with the wishes of most of the world. In fact, shortly after the first World Court ruling regarding the necessity of reviews due to the lack of consular assistance, he quietly had Condeleeza Rice inform the UN that the US was withdrawing from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Rights, originally an American proposal from 1963. You can't find many things on the net from before '96, but a lot of it is from the Best of America Soundtrack of not give a fuck what the rest of the world says. Not a big surprise to see countries such as the Sudan now defy orders from the same organization, good example hmmm Darfur anyone? (Crazy Bush is good reporting here). The argument of the Texans is that states need not comply with international law, sounds a bit like the old Guantanamo gambit. At this moment in Guatanamo there are, umm, there were 619 prisoners in 2004, who really knows how many are left and where they're from anymore? (it's really difficult googling for Guantanamo these days, more than 5 years after the camp was set up, so many results, around 270 prisoners remain I believe)

Another strange development has to do with Guantanamo. The same Supreme Court ruled last week the Americans government had to abide by Habeas Corpus, yes, I do mean the accused in Guantanamo will have the right to full judicial review of their detention. Day in court and all that, maybe, 5 years later after being locked up. Of course this is a war on terror stuff that followed hot the heels of the illegal invasion of Iraq. Why else would the US refuse to ratify the treaty that established the International criminal court except for the fact that they know most of the men behind this war would be convicted there.

Back in the 1930's a pair of fascist states walked out of the League of Nations. Germany and Italy were not willing to allow international law to impose itself on their foreign policy objectives. Mussolini and Hitler both had to shake free of any kind of treaties, pact or alliances that would restrict their ambitions. It's not hard to see a parallel with the United States of George W. Bush. The term "unsigning" was practically invented to describe the Americans moves to withdraw from their obligations to the International Criminal Court, the CTBT, a verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia the Vienna Convention on Consular Rights and even Boundary treaties with Canada (Almost funny, check it out). Remember how they tried to fool the UN into giving permission for the Iraq War? Well, next time they probably won't even bother to ask.