The Neoliberal Neocon Lovechild

There I was on Sunday skimming the latest from the New York Times when my eyes alighted upon the headline Poland Steels for Battle, Seeing Echoes of Cold War in Ukraine Crisis accompanied by, what else, a picture of camouflaged women crawling on what appeared to be a soccer field. Curiosity about what my hitherto believed to be apathetic hosts were up to naturally drew me in. Now, living in Poland has accustomed me to western exaggeration about my adopted country along with the natives inability to think rationally any time the word Russia is mentioned. History has scarred the land and imagination every bit as badly as religion and in fact created what the Times once called the Smolensk Religion which propagates the belief that the Russians assassinated Polish President Kaczyński along with 96 others on their way to mark the anniversary of the Katyń massacre. Anyway, the article had me chortling at its transparent cheerleading for war, just another Times propaganda piece pushing for armed conflict a la Iraq 2003, when my snickering was stifled by the sobering reality of this passage:

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz changed the law on who can be called up for service in case of “military maneuvers.” Previously, the armed forces could summon only current and former reservists, those with actual military training. Now, if necessary, they can call on almost any man in the country.

Wait. What? We've got a female prime minister? Ok, I knew that, but I didn't know she could call me up tomorrow to go running around the forest with a bunch of wannabe Rambos. Clearly the Anne Applebaums, Tom Friedmans and whoever the Polish version of a pro-war journalist is have pushed us too far, frogmarching us into another conflict. I've been reticent to comment on the situation in Ukraine for many reasons. First and foremost is how difficult it seems to get any reliable information, regardless of where you are. While back in Canada last summer I was treated to a constant Ukrainian-voter friendly barrage of tough talking politicians pandering to the public's bloodlust and the resultant steady stream of questions from friends and relatives concerned about my safety. Strangely, proximity to the happenings doesn't seem to help and in fact may hinder the truth from surfacing. While there's not a Russian or 'western' source I trust, the situation here in Poland is even worse. Despite Poles geographical contiguity to the festivities, there's nary a soul I've spoken to over the past year here with any idea of what's going on beyond the knee-jerk Putin is bad reaction. That's not to say that I've got it all sussed out, but let's just say I've reserved judgement on putting the good guy/bad guy labels anywhere.

Wait, check that, I do have a clue where to start at least, and as is so often the case, the clue comes from a headline from last week that's just a little bit off:

Ukraine to receive $17.5bn from IMF to save economy

Um, yeah, right. Here, let me try:

Ukraine to receive $17.5bn from IMF to enslave economy

There, fixed it. Just three letters short of the truth, a lot better than normal at least. It's amazing that even complex stories can be simplified if you just follow the money. If the press just spent a fraction of the time focusing on who stands to gain and lose financially as they do speculating about just how demonic/autistic/autocratic/narcissistic Vladimir Putin is, they'd begin to fulfil their role as a check on power. Of course if they did that they might also have to remind their flock why things kicked off in Kiev almost 16 months ago which might lead to uncomfortable questions taking shape in people's minds, so best to nip that in the bud.

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting"
- Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

November 21, 2013, then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych's cabinet announced they wouldn't be signing an EU association agreement the following week in Lithuania. That's about the last fact that we know; pretty much everything else, from the reasons for the decision to the repercussions of it, are subject to debate. That being the case, wouldn't it seem natural to want to know something about the agreement? Yet, little was said beyond that not signing represented a move away from Europe towards Russia; true to a point, but misleading in more ways than one. Most obviously, the agreement didn't mean EU ascension, but instead a vague future possibility and came with a number of strings attached ranging from the release of Julia Tymoshenko to a slew of austerity demands such as budget cuts and a 40% increase in natural gas bills. It also tied Ukraine to accepting, wait for it, an IMF loan worth $17 billion that didn't look quite as alluring to Yanukovych, probably both personally and for the nation, as a $15 billion gift from Russia that came with a 33% discount on natural gas. Yes, we in the west spend billions bailing out banks and then lending money to indebted countries to keep up their interest payments to those same banks, but can't lend a hand to start a real democracy. Just as debt peonage works to enslave students entering adulthood so it does for nations in that it manufactures consent by engendering conformity and enforcing compliance.

(Un)fortunately, one of the first moves of the newly installed government following the unconstitutional coup last February was the signing of the once rejected deal allowing us a closer look at what else was inside the loan agreement. Despite decades of debacles, and dozens of disasters, the IMF prescription for reform demanded in exchange for loans remains the dreaded structural adjustment program. A few highlights of the neoliberal nightmare visited upon Ukraine: raising excise and property taxes, reducing social income support expenditures for retirees and public employees, freezing minimum wage, and cutting public-sector wages; increasing natural gas and heating tariffs for consumers by 56 percent and 40 percent in 2014, respectively, and by 20 to 40 percent annually from 2015 to 2017 while cutting gas subsidies over two years. At the same time, as gas prices increase sharply, gas subsidies to end users will be completely ended over the next two year at a time when Russia was ceasing gas supplies as a result of a payment dispute; oh, and implementing a floating exchange rate for its national currency, the hryvnia, making it increasingly difficult to serve their dollar-denominated loans.

(Un)surprisingly, everything has gone according to script. A world of pain for the poor and elderly has paid for a bonanza for the oligarchs and western puppeteers. The currency has tanked (the hryvnia lost half its value in February alone), inflation has reached 272% while the economy has sharply contracted (down 15.2% year on year) at a time when war expenses are further draining the coffers. Less than a year on from the original loan, a new one was needed and approved last Wednesday but even IMF official admit it's not for Ukraine but the banks, as the bulk of the money is heading out the door to foreign lenders fast: $5 billion likely by the end of this week and another $5 billion in coming months. The Ukrainian oligarch-controlled banks will also syphon off about $4 billion so they can keep financing the war in the east. Even more contumelious, the IMF's own statutes prohibit lending to countries that don't have the ability to repay as that would be, you know, evil. One can only admire the audacity to pull of such a stunt, especially with Greece fresh in our minds, seems evil really is as evil does, again and again and again. Worse, they're also prohibited from giving money to nations at war. Makes sense, seems you wouldn't want to be remembered by history as having financed a government unleashing Nazi storm troopers on a European population, right? Nevertheless, once again the economic hitmen have done there job:

"The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age."
- Gustave Le Bon The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

While everyone was arguing about who was responsible for the sniper fire in Kiev that turned Maiden into a masacre, who shot down Flight MH17, whether or not Russia was justified in annexing Crimea and who killed Nemtsov, Ukraine gave up its sovereignty. We can debate how much of a role US Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria 'Fuck the EU' Nuland (neocon wife of neocon Robert Kagan) and her $5 billion played in fomenting the Maiden protests enabling her to put her man Yats (Arseniy Yatsenyuk) in the prime minister's office, or how much money George "give Ukraine $50 billion so I can have some" Soros and Pierre Omidyar pumped into USAID to help bring about regime change. Or, instead we could just notice how quickly the vice-president of the United States' son, Hunter Biden, was named to the board of Ukraine's largest private gas producer, Burisma Holdings, following the inauguration of the chocolate king, Petro Poroshenko, as Ukraine's president (weren't we supposed to disempower the oligarchs?). As long as there's shale gas to be fracked, you know the people's water table will be poisoned to profit American corporate interests.

We could spend our time arguing about how much of a role neo-nazis had in last year's coup, or better yet framing the openly white supremacist Ukrainian Azov battalion's use of the Wolfsangel symbol on their banner as "romantic" as the Washington Post does. That might explain away the Odessa massacre in which dozens of anti-Kiev protesters were burnt alive in a building set on fire by nationalists or clubbed to death when they jumped from windows. We could even wonder why former US presidential candidate and current senator John McCain met and stood alongside an openly pro-Nazi politician in December 2013. It's easier though to simply evaluate how well the new government has cleaned up the corruption that plagued the pro-Russian regime. President Poroshenko appointed former ING Bank Ukraine deputy head Valeriya Gontareva the National Bank (NBU) chief last June. As a respected member of the banking community, it was said she would inspire the confidence of the private sector and work closely with the IMF. Yet, according to charges brought against her in December, by August she was robbing the state by manipulating the currency. Ihor Bilous, another banker given the post of chief of the State Fiscal Service by the new government dove headlong into money laundering, bribery and corruption schemes from the get go. None if this makes for as good TV as corrupt presidential palaces though. Pity about all that Ukrainian gold.

Hypothesizing about why Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk would tell a German TV station that it was in fact the Soviet Union that invaded Germany in 1941 won't get us anywhere. Questioning Poland's deputy foreign minister, Grzegorz Schetyna's grasp on reality after crediting Ukrainians for liberating Auschwitz thus forgetting they only made up a part of the multinational Red Army history credits with the feat seems petty really. Poking the Russian bear is a spectator sport in these parts every bit as much as popular as ignoring the geopolitical reality that Frontline Ukraine author Richard Sakwa rightly calls a "fateful geographical paradox: that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence". Whether or not Bush the Elder promised Gorbachev that NATO wouldn't expand eastward following the dissolution of the USSR is irrelevant.

Actions speak louder than words and watching NATO swallow up 12 Eastern European countries in three rounds of enlargement would make any Russian leader nervous. Though portrayed as Putin's lapdog, Yanukovych extorted $45 billion from Russia to lease the Black Sea fleet bas in April 2010 causing Putin to exclaim "I would be willing to eat Yanukovych and his prime minister for that sort of money". Putin didn't even deign to meet him when he fled the Maiden protesters for Russia. It is in fact the Russian speaking public who voted for Yanukovych in 2010 in the contested east that Putin claims need protection, and many sources allege are the target of ethnic cleansing in order to guarantee a pro-western candidate wins the eventual next election in Ukraine. For those will to look beyond the tabloids and memes, much of the speculation surrounding Putin's 10-day public disappearing act concerned the powerful voices in the Kremlin who would like to see Russia take an active military role in Ukraine. Perhaps they're more sensitive to the sting of humiliation the west has heaped on the nation over the last 25 years, from the "shock therapy" pillaging of the economy to missile shields and NATO's promise of eventual membership to Ukraine in 2008. Yeah exactly what Russia fears about Ukraine's western pivot. Given the prospect of nuclear war, the old adage better the devil you know than the devil you don't seems more relevant than ever.

Stop me if you've heard this one, an American, a Lithuanian and a Georgian walk into a bar... No, it might sound like the set up for a joke, but it wouldn't be so funny if it were your country that had fast-tracked citizenship for the three in a bizarre ceremony making it legal to name them your Finance, Economy and Health ministers respectively just a few minutes later. The American, Natalie Jaresko, is a former US State Department official and investment banker with no experience with the convoluted Ukraine budget. Aivaras Abromavičius also unsurprisingly comes via the banking world with no previous experience while at least Aleksander Kvatashvili served in the same post in Tblisi, but unfortunately doesn't speak Ukrainian forcing meetings to be held in Russian, embarrassing given the first thing the new government did was to target the language by repealing the minority languages law. If this didn't give anyone pause, maybe when Abromavičius immediately named former Estonian Jaanika Merilo as his advisor on foreign investments did. No? Well, how about knowing the first thing she did in her new post was to tweet the pics you see above to the right?

At least Abromavičius was forthright about his country being bankrupt, declaring about the budget "[t]o expect that we are going to produce real as opposed to declarative incentive programs is unrealistic." Translation: the new Ukrainian budget is nothing but a piece of paper with the numbers wanted from the IMF in order to qualify for the loan. Again, Greece anyone? Seems to me that it's a bit counterproductive to incentivize corruption while claiming that the regime change was necessary to root it out. Oh, by law dual citizenship is not permitted for Ukrainian government officials, except when it is for, say the aforementioned trio or the oligarch governor of the Dnepropetrovsk region, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who has three. Suppose that's what make him such a great banker, or more likely it's the fact that his bank, PrivatBank, that will be the biggest beneficiary of the IMF loan so he can continue to fund his private army fighting in eastern Ukraine. Throw in a few former warlords turned MPs such as Yuri Beryoza, Andrei Levus, assault rifle wielding Igor Mosiychuk (here he is shooting at Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov's picture) and Dmytro Yarosh, who admitted to fondling a real hand grenade in his pocket while inside the Rada, and you might question if pulling Ukraine out of the Russian orbit has sure brought sunshine to the land.

Still no? Well, tell you what. We can ignore everything else except one word in one subsection of a single article in that EU agreement. Here's Article 404 (c);

promoting modern and sustainable agricultural production, respectful of the environment and of animal welfare, including extension of the use of organic production methods and the use of biotechnologies, inter alia through the implementation of best practices in those fields;

Yeah, I made it easy for you. Oh, c'mon, you can't think this whole mess was concocted just to plunder an economy that's soon to be half the size of the state of Indiana. Sure, a long term, low level war in eastern Ukraine is a bonanza for the military contractors' bottom lines on sales not just to the combatants but also the rest of the west who need to prepare for the sure to be coming Russian invasion, but it sure is hell isn't worth risking a nuclear confrontation. The wealth of Ukraine is in that rich black soil ideal for growing grains which has made it the world's third-largest exporter of cotton and the fifth-largest exporter of wheat, and according to a 2013 USDA forecast it is forecast to jump to the second biggest exporter in the world after the US having shipped over 30 million tonnes of grain out of the country last year.

Still, you might ask what's so nefarious about the word 'biotechnologies', after all, Ukraine, as the rest of the Europe, prohibits genetically modified crops. Selling the lie that GMO is the only answer to food security to a Rada full of parliamentarians inclined to listen to corporate interests shouldn't prove any more difficult than it was to convince them to open up selling land to foreign agribusinesses. Yes, that's right, as part of previous structural adjustment programs agreed to in exchange for debt, since 2002 over 1.6 million hectares of land have been snatched up by multinational companies since 2002. This includes over 405,000 hectares to a company listed in Luxembourg, 444,800 hectares to Cyprus-registered investors, 120,000 hectares to a French corporation, and 250,000 hectares to a Russian company. A now disputed deal brokered between China and Yanukovych prior to the political crisis granted Beijing control over some three million hectares of prime farmland in the east, an area about the size of Belgium or about five percent of Ukraine’s arable land. Something tells me something will overturn the deal and they'll be a willing American buyer waiting in the wings. I wonder who would be interested?

Though Monsanto's $140 million Ukrainian investment in 2013 was ostensibly for conventional seeds only, later that year six large Ukrainian agriculture associations happened to be pushing draft amendments for "creating, testing, transportation and use of GMOs" and the president of the Ukrainian Grain Association, Volodymyr Klymenko stated that "[w]e...have signed two letters to change the law on biosecurity, in which we proposed the legalization of the use of GM seeds". Strangely, both amendments mirrored the wording in the EU Association Agreement. Still not convinced a change is coming? Well, take a gander at this recent investor report regarding our old friend Monsanto which includes "The IMF and World Bank included a clause in their loan package to Ukraine to force the country to use GMOs as part of its loan package" as part of its recommendation to be long in Monsanto stocks. Oh, and I suppose that it was just a coincidence that Ukraine's US ambassador Olexander Motysk met with Brett D. Beggemann, Monsanto's President and COO on March 4th.

"There are only two peoples now. Russia is still barbarous, but it is great. The other young nation is America. The future is there between these two great worlds. Someday they will collide, and then we will see struggles of which the past can give no idea."
- Alexis de Tocqueville

While the neocons' rockets, missiles and bombs get all the headlines, it's the tender ministrations of the neoliberals that deserve the regime change accolades and therefore blame for the deformed offspring of the confluence of the two in Ukraine. Warmongers from Australia to Canada have taken the opportunity to portray themselves as tough guys, witness Prime Ministers Abbott and Harper's shirtfronting and confronting antics at last November's APEC meeting. In another reality they'd be called Abbott and Costello, playing both the court jesters and jousters to divert the public's attention from the goings on behind the curtain. The weapon of choice in this war is economic as round after round of sanctions against Russia prove. Yet, even here the true intent is murky as they serve the dual purpose of strangling both the Russian and European economies. For these latter 28 states, faced with the cost of breaking ties with an important trading partner, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) suddenly looks more appealing despite its decidedly anti-democratic nature. Meanwhile, the Russians have redoubled their push to implement and expand the Eurasian Economic Union in places like Egypt and even India.

So while the western and Russian propaganda machines have been working overtime to produce visceral fear to shut down our critical thinking, ironically usually involving casting the other as modern day Nazis. Putin's Crimea gambit to protect ethnic Russians is compared to that of Hitler's justification for annexing the Sudentland while the New York Times hides the fact that a few Ukrainian battalions, er, actually are on a crusade against what they see as the Semite-led Untermenschen. Yeah, that's right, I did it, I compared apples to oranges, but unless enough people wake up to the reality of what's happening 1,500 km to my east, the neoliberals could accidentally lead the neocons into a war that I'll have to take part in. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail to save my tail, either by imagining a Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse or remembering how many times we've been hoodwinked into war, but what of the Ukrainians caught in a geoeconopolitical tug of war? Strangely, banging the war drum so fervently last week, this time for war on Iran, the neocons themselves may have offered a ray of hope for Ukraine as they reminded the world that no deal is ever etched in stone.

A Post-Easter Trinity Post

The fundamentalists are on the march again. It's not surprising, times of crisis invevitably bring about an upsurge in wackos as the true believers emerge from their caves to reveal the secrets revealed to them and only them. The coming week will bear witness to a triptych of delusion, a true masterpiece that deserves to be hung alongside Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado. For those of us on the flipside of delusion however, where reality rules supreme instead of royalty, theocracy or right-wingnuttery, the scenes out of London, the Vatican and Ottawa serve to remind us of how easily the masses are convinced to continue down the path of self-destruction.

Another crisis, another royal wedding. The parallels between today and 1981 are striking. Another conservative government pushing through a right-wing agenda provided with the perfect diversion with which to distract its population of Daily Mail readers. Kate Middleton will wed Prince William Friday in a choreographed ceremony of pomp and circumstance to rival that fairy tale marriage between Diana Spencer and Prince Charles nearly thirty years ago. Panem et circenses serving once again as cover as the ideologues in power push through an agenda to cure the nation's economic woes by doubling down on the same policies that caused the crisis to begin with.

The main difference to be found is in the rhetoric employed by Margaret Thatcher then and David Cameron today in order to justify implementing policies to further shift the wealth of the nation towards the top. While Thatcher may have referenced Francis of Assisi when she moved into 10 Downing Street, "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope", she generally took on a confrontational tone with those who opposed her. Cameron on the other hand, due to the nature of his coalition government with the Lib Dems, employs a much more subtle divide and conquer strategy.

While Thatcher thrived on confrontation, Cameron's PR spin doctors (courtesy of the Murdoch empire) have him cloying on about a fictitious Big Society. Whether or not you believe that Thatcherism sowed the seeds of the UK's current economic distress, her policies failed to decrease the size of government while shifting the tax burden down the income scale, setting the scene for the explosion of income inequality seen today. Cameron and his Eton buddy-turned chancellor of the exchequer George Osbourne are proposing to build on this while shifting ever more wealth into the hands of the corporations and other elite. Of course, you won't hear this from their mouths in the UK, however, their minions will tell potential investors on the other side of the pond exactly what they are planning - We are making cuts that Margaret Thatcher, back in the 1980s, could only have dreamed of.



Whoops, where was I? Right, wedding. Royal. Buck-toothed balding guy and his commoner bride-to-be. Why does the public still eat up this pablum? Who cares what it costs when the working shmoes can get an eleven day holiday by simply taking three vacation days thanks to the magic of the calendar. Besides, won't the expense be offset by the benefit provided to the economy from all the tourists who plan on flocking to the British capital to take in the event? Well, in a word, no. The firm, or royal family as they are known, cost the public about £38.2 million a year, or 62p a person to defray expenses but the wedding will cost the public an awful lot more than that. Extra policing and overtime alone is estimated at more than $35 million. Add in the cost of all that extra holiday time and the costs begin to skyrocket, economists are "suggesting that it could knock something like a quarter percent off growth." That translates into a potential loss to the economy of about $50 billion.

But it's worth it right? After all, instead of watching depressing stories of British missiles raining down death on Libyans or Taliban terrorists escaping from prisons in the graveyard of empires, we get to see a princess crowned. Another aspirational lesson in which we learn that if we just believe enough, we too can have the fairy tale ending. Or not. Guess what Britons? There's only one royal family and you're not part of it, nor will you ever be. Kate will become your sixth Queen Catherine carrying on a tradition that should have died centuries ago but somehow didn't. She'll hopefully avoid the fate of Catherine Howard and probably won't have the impact of Henry VIII's first queen, Catherine of Aragon. After a 24-year marriage cursed by the stillbirths and early deaths of several sons, Henry was so desperate to have the marriage annulled that when the Pope refused to give his consent he broke away from Rome and founded the Church of England.

Ah, that church thing, the Brits are still sticking it to the Vatican, this time the royal wedding is stealing the thunder of the beatification of John Paul II. There doesn't seem to be a problem with the fact the church waved the manadatory five-year waiting period for JPII's beatification, or that maybe he shouldn't be beatified at all, no, the problem is that the Holy See's big event isn't selling enough tickets. When the date was announced in January the royal wedding date had already been set for months yet Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, former head of the Vatican's saint-making department, said he expected more than two million faithful to show up for the event. Based on that prediction, Vatican and Italian tour operators booked entire hotels in Rome and its surroundings. Enthusiasm has been tempered a bit since then, predictions have fallen to the 150,000 range despite the Vaticans best efforts to make the event go viral by setting up a beatification website, Facebook page and Twitter account.

In typical unthinking fashion, Santo subito! - Sainthood now! is the chant today just as it was then on St. Peter's Square in 2005 during JPII's funeral. Granted, he was an extraordinary man and a decent enough pope in many ways. More than a moral and symbolic force again totalitarianism, he toured his homeland giving Poles the courage to resist Soviet domination. Even after the collapse of communism, he offered a prescient warning about capitalism, "The excessive hoarding of riches by some denies them to the majority and thus the very wealth that is accumulated generates poverty." The first non-Italian pope since the renaissance, the former actor and factory worker was a skiing cardinal, a mountain-climbing poet, a kayaking philosopher, a singing author. By capturing the world's imagination he was in a position to not only influence the world outside the walls of the church but that within as well and that is where he sadly failed.

Imagine if Grima Wormtongue who whispered counsel into the ear of King Théoden to poison his soul in The Lord of the Rings coveted little boys instead of the kings niece Eowyn. Such a character would most properly be based on the Rev. Marcial Degollado, the founder of the Legion of Christ, who was formally accused of pedophilia in a Vatican proceeding yet remained John Paul’s pet. Despite nine different people accusing him of abusing them as children, the soon-to-be-blessed refused to investigate thus allowing the church's wound that is peodophilia to continue to fester and ooze pus to this day. Instead of reform and healing we get the former bishop of Bruges serenely admitting to abusing his nephews on TV and rationalizing his atrocities, "I had the strong impression that my nephew didn’t mind at all," 74-year-old Roger Vangheluwe said, smiling. "On the contrary. It was not brutal sex. I never used bodily, physical violence." He said he abused the second boy for "merely over a year".

Revalations of the game of hide the pedo-priest from parish to parish or the effects of the regressive stance taken on social issues and the part played in the spreading of AIDS particulary in Africa are slow evolving stories and exactly the reason for the five year waiting period before beatification. Calm rationality replaces emotional passion and allows us to weight decision properly instead of making rash choices. Instead, Pope Benedict chose to speed up the process, the third of four steps in cannonization, the path to sainthood. It was JPII himself who cheapened the whole process, beatifying almost 1,400 people, more than the total of all his predecessors since Pope Sixtus V (1585–1590).

The final panel in our tryptich features the creepiest image of all, that of a democratic nation lulled to sleep by an egomaniacal authoritarian bent on turning his country into the mirror image of their southern neighbour. I mean, it's not even the government of Canada anymore, it's the Harper government. Canada, my birthplace, has enjoyed a reputation surpassed by few nations. In fact, to those not paying attention, the word Canada still brings to mind an image of unspoiled wilderness and friendly, peace-loving people. This has been slowly eroded over the past five years by the Harper minority-government yet many seem prepared to give him and his party a free pass based on the fact that they are the only choice to ensure a stable government conducive to economic growth. The main selling point seems to be that under his stewardship, Canada was able to sail through the financial crisis relatively unscathed. This is of course a joke, a monkey could have (and would have) done a better job, being capable of giving a green light to the exploitation of resources to be ripped and burned out of the earth in order to satifsy the insatiable appetite to the south while ironically benefiting from the sound foundation provided by the financial regulations that Harper's corporate puppet-masters will have him tear down in the event of a Conservative majority. Meanwhile, the world is beginning to pay attention, sharply rebuking Canada for it's Afghanistan atrocities by denying her a UN security council seat (which of course Harper blamed on the Liberal party!) and naming the Great White North the worst environmental offender in the world.

A closer look reveals the self-destructiveness of his evil mix of policies, neocon on the social side and neoliberal on the economic, all sold to the public through lies, deceipt and cover-ups. Oh, by the way, that's why there's even an election at all, Harper's became the first government in Canadian history to be found in contempt of parliament. While Mr. Harper likes to tell Canadians what they care about, this little detail should be enough to reveal the undemocratic nature of the man, especially when combined with his unprecedented usage of an obsure parliamentary trick, proroguing government, not once, but twice. On both occasions Harper requested and was granted permission from the governor general, the Queen of England's representative in Canada (she is after the true head of the Canadian government), to shut down parliament as he was set to lose confidence votes. Yep, sounds like a democracy to me, one where if you don't like the possible outcome, you just change the game.

The financial press lauds Harper's economic program because it consists of lowering taxes on their corporate masters and shifting the tax burden to the people. Meanwhile the illusion of fiscal responsibility is nearly maintained by lowering environmental standards and subsidizing the oil giants to rape and pillage the ecosystem in a mad scramble to burn up the planet as quickly as possible. Following the American lead, the sheeple are being sold the same old bill of sale, lowering taxes on the corporations and the rich while gutting regulation will lead to economic prosperity. If people would just take the time to read the fine print they'd realize their wealth is simply being handed over to the wealthiest 1%. Canada will have cut corporate taxes virtually in half over the past 10 years once the current program is complete. The super-rich in Canada have enjoyed a decline in their tax rate of 11 percentage points while 95 per cent of Canadians averaged a decrease of 1 percentage point. In a bid to improve Canada's competitiveness, or what should be called trying to win the race to the bottom, Harper wants to lower the already-reduced corporate tax rate from 18% to 15% at a time when Canada is sporting a record $56 billion deficit. We're not competing with the US, where the rate is 35%, we're trying to compete with already broke and IMF controlled Ireland, Albania and Uzbekistan. Oh, and this tax break won't apply to 95% of the 2.2 million businesses in Canada, only the big boys on Bay Street.

Social policies? Let's see. Cut funding to the arts. Check. Cut funding to women's shelters. Check. Watch as your country falls from 6th to 24th in child mortality. Check. Spend like drunken sailors to build prisons for all the folks who fall on hard times and through the growing holes in the social safety net. Check. Add the US style get tough on crime costs to the nearly $30 billion for a bunch of F-35s without engines and then act surprised that more cuts are necessary to plug the budget deficit especially while cutting revenue earned on corporate taxes. Check. Ignore abuses of the health care system to encourage the development of an American style for profit game of life and death. Check. Orwellian surveillance laws to ensure the populations docility? Check. This seems to be what many people want as they continue, Candide style to believe that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, somehow nothing can go wrong following the US down it's suicidal path of destruction.

Truth is far stranger than fiction, yet none of this surprises anymore. How could it be surprising that billions of people would be interested in a wedding that has nothing to do with them or pilgrims are fainting like school girls at a Justin Bieber concert over the sight of a vile of a dead Pole's blood - it all explains how people could vote for the likes of Stephen "I'm not quite as bad as Robert Mugage" Harper. The fundamentalists are still firmly in control driving us ever faster towards judgment day.

Memory Holes and Pyramid Schemes

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of ‘The Times’ and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

- 1984 George Orwell

As the tubes used in Orwell's 1984 protagonist Winston Smith's Ingsoc employers' gleaming white offices at the Ministry of Truth to purge our collective memory become increasingly clogged, it seems to be happening to me more and more frequently of late. That blank look of incomprehension staring at me around the classroom or across the table at the pub after delivering what I'd thought just a moment earlier to be a thought provoking observation. Events such as those happening over the past fortnight in Egypt, home to Gizan Pyramids and a KFC for the deaf, provide enough fodder to stoke the furnace of forgetfulness. The conflicts that have been sown in and around, by and for, the likes of Tutenkahmen, Cleopatra and Nasser from the Pharaonic high point of ancient civilization to the Tahrir Square occupation keep Big Brother digging the memory hole ever deeper. How can it be a 1979 moment or even '89 or simply '09, when there's no Ayatollah Khomeini coming home, Solidarity of Lech Walesa or even a Mir Hosein Mousavi? In our reality an American president can become a torturer who gets to go to the Super Bowl but not Geneva for fear of arrest while Obama has to help Egyptian torturers become presidents to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood becoming the Revolutionary Guard.

Watching the bumbling US government response to Egypt along with the rope-a-dope technique #3 from the authoritarian leader handbook (the others being violent crackdown or exile to mountainside villa) being played by Hosni Mubarak while the media whips up fear of Islamic extremism can be depressingly predictable. Regardless of whether the spark of revolution was the social media connectivity of Facebook and Twitter, the reporting of Al Jazeera and Wikileaks or grinding poverty combined with the skyrocketing price of bread, the fact is thirty years of political repression has left a void bigger than what a former UN Atomic Energy chief or Google executive could fill and so would give Islamists a voice in any democratically elected government. It was a crafty move by Mubarak to unconstitutionally name Omar Suleiman vice-president, buying time with America as he was their main rendition connection in the region and a trusted friend of Israel. The Winston Smiths of today have cut and pasted his name to Soliman in the cables provided by Wikileaks where he calls Iranians 'devils', turns the Muslim Brotherhood into the bogeyman and promises to pressure Hamas. Omar Suleiman may be better known as Sheik al-Torture but you can't convince me Mubarak's consigliere's not Snidely Whiplash with his look and fetishes; I wonder who we could get to play Dudley Do-Right?



As Minister without Portfolio and Director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate (EGID) since 1993, Omar Suleiman oversaw the security apparatus and torture program that produced the likes of Mohamed Atta and Ayman Al-Zawahiri. These graduates from his CIA designed torture chambers went on to pilot American Airlines flight 11 into the north Twin Tower on 9/11 and become Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant, the real brains behind Al Qaeda respectively. Of the19 hijackers that day, there weren't any from Iraq, a problem for Dubya's plan to finish off Saddam Husein for his dad - 15 were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Egypt and Lebanon. As point man for the CIA's rendition program, Suleiman received many of the suspects that America snatched around the world for torture. The most notorious case was an Al Queda suspect known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi who was bound and blindfolded at Bagram Airforce Base in Afghanistan and flown to Cairo. Suleiman convinced Libi to confirm a personal link between Saddam and Osama and that the former was providing the latter with chemical weapons by locking him in a little box for eighty hours. Though Libi later recanted, his torture induced assertions were used by Colin Powell in his testimony to the UN in building the case for war in Iraq. For nearly 20 years, Suleiman has played Saraman for Mordor, the USA.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
-Inner Party member O'Brien in 1984

When America was given custodianship of the world's economic system from the British Empire after World War II they also inherited the disastrous legacy of colonial duties from all the previous world powers from Chile to Vietnam, Angola to Afghanistan. America chose to spread freedom and democracy while ignoring convenient client state dictators and installing others who played for their side. Saudi Arabia and their extreme Wahabi version of Islam became fine but Iran's theocratic regime certainly isn't. Arming and supporting the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan in their struggle against Ruskies only to fight them twenty years later as the Taliban. The fear factory slipped seamlessly from fear of the Russian commies to the Islamic fundies in Iran. After screwing up Persia the US had to give Saddam weapons to fight the Ayatollah in a war that cost a million and a half lives only to have to turn its sites on Baghdad not once but twice. CNN and the 24-hour cable news cycle was born as George the elder's, Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. led (fun triva fact: his dad, Sr., was the man sent to bring the Shah back to Iran in '53 from self-imposed exile in Italy and went on to train the Shah's security forces, SAVAK) Desert Storm kicked Saddam out of Kuwait. Americans were taught to believe in smart missiles that only killed the bad guys but weren't shown the mass executions of those America incited to rebel and then deserted to die. Faux News was legitamized in the eyes of hillbillies as the embedded journalist came courtesy Dubya's shock and awe in Gulf War II as reporters rode the army's tanks into Baghdad. With their impartiality already compromised, they had no problems beaming staged celebrations back home to be played on an endless loop. Perhaps Egypt's protests will bring about cable news' next revolution and help propel Al-Jazeera into more living rooms to provide an alternative to the background noise designed to dull or senses.

Keeping in mind the arbitrariness of choosing a point in time when the story of empires keeps building on foundations heavy with history, we should look at Iran and Egypt in the early 1950s especially since the Bill O'Reillys and Glenn Becks of the world want us to fear the rise of a Muslim Caliphate from Cairo to Tehran (and yes, onto Islamabad and Kabul) if we dare encourage democracy. Since they get to ignore the differences across the region - Sunni from Shiite, petro-wealthy from poverty-stricken, Arab from Persian - and present a false choice faced in Egypt as one between Jihadist and friendly dictators, so can we. To combat the Manichean view of perpetual Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, who said, "there's a real possibility in a few weeks...that Egypt will join Iran, and join Lebanon, and join Gaza, and join the things that are happening that are extraordinarily dangerous to us" we could study the past to learn from our mistakes. More than 50 years ago Egypt and Iran both had back to back major revolutions, the second Shah was installed in Iran while a military coup in Egypt eventually saw Gamal Abdel Nasser take control. By constantly rewriting history, Oceania's perpetual war alternated between Eurasia or Eastasia; the doublethink in our world had the US conspire with the USSR to push the British out of Egypt while McCarthy whipped up anti-commie rage to convince America to work with the Brits in Iran.

Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq nationalized Iran's oil industry and earned Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1951 while US President Truman stood by. It seems quaint today but when first presented with a British plan to overthrow Mosaddeq, Truman said, "We don’t overthrow governments; the United States has never done this before, and we’re not going to start now". By 1953 General Eisenhower was president and the US along with Britain had successfully completed Operation Ajax, overthrowing Mosaddeq and installing the Shah (fun tria fact #2: the CIA plan was hatched by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of Teddy Roosevelt), thus earning the lasting hatred of large sectors of the Iranian public, uniting communists, nationalists and Shia clericalists behind enmity of foreign meddling. The world got BP in exchange for Anglo-Iranian Oil and America got a client state to supply cheap oil for 26 years.



The Shah's supporters point to successes such as the 1963 program known as the White Revolution, which included land reform, the extension of voting rights to women, and the elimination of illiteracy. His detractors however remind us these very achievements served to alienate the clergy and avoid real democratic reforms. He flouted the constitution which placed limits on royal power and provided for a representative government, going so far as crowning himself "Shah en Shah", King of Kings in 1967. His increasing subservience to the US played poorly as he threw an extravagant celebration of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy and in 1976 he replaced the Islamic calendar with an "imperial" calendar, which began with the foundation of the Persian empire around 500 BC. These actions were clearly aimed at sidelining the Islamic religion, and excited the opposition of Muslim groups, which rallied around the then-exiled Ayatollah Khomeini.

The second Egyptian Revolution broke out in Egypt the year before resulting in Nasser's military coup on July 23rd 1952. This time the world got pan-Arab nationalism and three more Israeli wars in '56, '67 and '73 to add to the Arab loss of 1948. It wasn't until his successor Anwar Saddat that the lure of American dollars could convince them to at least play nice with Israel. In exchange for honoring the Camp David Accords signed by Sadat in 1978 and keeping the border to Gaza sealed for the most part, Hosni Mubarak and his cohorts have been made rich; Sadat paid with his life, Mubarak has paid with his soul. Corruption in Egypt has been taken to a whole new level; in America the corporations control government policy through lobbies, election funding and regulators, in Egypt the businessmen simply are the government and vice-versa. As the public grew poorer and prospects grew ever dimmer for the university graduates who managed to avoid being beaten by the secret police, five of Mubarak's cronies became billionaires. Former interior minister Habib Ibrahim El-Adly and party insider Ahmed Ezz amassed $1.2 and $3 billion respectively. A few other billionaire former Cabinet ministers trying to flee the country as protests broke out but were stopped. Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of the late President Gamel Abdel Nasser spied for Mossat and was killed in England; another billionaire former Parliamentarian, Talaat Moustafa paid a hit man $2 million to kill a Lebanese pop star who jilted him.

Much was deservedly made of the fact that over the billions in military support that made Egypt the second largest recipient of US military aid after Israel so they could buy the same American built F-16s, tear gas, and Abrams tanks buzzing, blinding and encircling the crowds in and around Tahrir Square. No wonder Egyptians are now referring to Obama as the Black Bush as he, his administration and other western leaders try to maintain the status quo that is looking more and more like a Madoff Ponzi scheme ready to collapse. Frank Wisner, the US envoy sent to speak with Mubarak after protests broke out,  works for a law firm which works for the dictator's own Egyptian government. Usurprising then that he would say, "President Mubarak's continued leadership is critical: it's his opportunity to write his own legacy." Vice-president Biden stated that because Mubarak had been a responsible ally he "would not refer to him as a dictator." Tony Blair, probably hoping this will somehow make it more likely we'll attack Iran, said Mubarak is "immensely courageous and a force for good". Silvio Berlusconi, perhaps to distract attention from the myriad of scandals that tend to follow septuagenarian prime ministers who sleep with underage hookers, said of the dictator "in the West, above all in the United States, [Mubarak] is considered the wisest of men". Yep, apparently wise enough to have siphoned off enough of his people's wealth to build his family a $70 billion fortune.

When the US lost Iran to the 1979 Revolution, American interests, or more precisely, Israeli and oil flow security, were buttressed by Anwar el-Sadat's decision to make peace with Israel. Mubarak has more than held up their end of the bargain in other areas as well from his positions during the wars against Iraq, his stand against nuclear Iran and it's involvement in Lebanon but the Israeli free pass has been key. In making peace with Israel the 26th of March 1979, Egypt essentially permitted Israel to tighten their grip over the West Bank and Gaza, and concentrate their military ambitions elsewhere such as Lebanon or Gaza, and perhaps sometime in the future, Iran. In the words of a 2009 American embassy cable, part of the Wikileaks document dump, "The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the US military enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace."

Yet, instead of using this breathing space as an opportunity to make peace, Israel has seemingly done all it can to alienate everyone around them. It seems to me that the last couple of years have brought an increased arrogance to the aggressive actions taken by Israel, meaning the Palestinians could be the biggest beneficiaries of an Egyptian power shift that could threaten the border with Gaza. Settlement expansion along with that in East Jerusalem, a crazy wall and the creation of a ghetto in Gaza. Just as a peace deal with Syria brokered by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed to be about to become reality, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the people of Gaza. Further frosting the Israeli-Turkish relationship came with the attack on the Freedom Flotilla trying to break the siege and deliver supplies to Gaza. a people slowly being starved and limited to an ever changing list of 81 items allowed entry into their sliver of a territory, more concentration camp. In international waters, the IDF killed nine activists, eight Turkish nationals and a Turkish-American. As the world argued over who started it and what label should be attached to the parties we forgot about the real victims in Gaza. Israel spin is better than any pneumatic tube system.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
- John F. Kennedy 

Yeah, it could be that the Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war that Kennedy wanted to avoid could quickly become a Pox Americana for her client states in the region. Israel along with  it's friendemies in Jordan, the UAE and of course Saudi Arabia are piling the pressure on Obama not the cut Mubarak loose. At least King Abdullah II’s recent dismissal of his cabinet in Jordan (the only other Arab country that has signed a peace treaty with Israel) shows he's aware of the change, Saudi's King Abdullah (yeah, same name) still thinks his oil means he calls the shots. Wikileaks is there to help reporters again in a timely way as just released cables reveal fears that the sea of oil in the Kingdom is about 40% smaller than previously thought, bringing Peak Oil ever closer. These nations real and legitimate fear is the 240 F-16 fighters in play along with the other advanced weaponry the Americans have sold Mubarak over the years in an attempt to create a balance with the Iranians. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, it's a belief that keeping the oil flowing at all cost can continue forever and not seeing that America is the biggest obstacle to peace and democracy in the Middle East.

By supporting the status quo, siding against the protesters, America will force the military to eventually back Mubarak/Suleiman to keep the money flowing into their coffers with or without bullets. This money ensures rigged elections come September and once the international cameras go home Suleiman's torture chambers await any pesky dissenting voices, their thoughtcrimes earning them the Mubarak treatment that turns them into unpersons. The cycle intensifies as anti-Americanism grows for supporting torturers in the Arab world while the western media (with ever-concentrating ownership) points out the only support for the opposition parties comes from Iran and Hamas. This allows the US government to defend Suleiman when he keeps emergency powers in place (motto: in place since 1981 so why not forever?) and ratchets up repression. Such a course of events ensures that if democracy ever comes to Egypt, thousands will have to die and the resulting government will be far less open than whatever would have come from the current demonstrations, had we supported them in the first place. The false choice of stability versus democracy that has been played far too long must be refuted.

The fate of over 80 million people hangs in the balance, the 15th most populous nation just in front of Turkey and Iran, the latter used as a dog whistle of fear to cover the only sustainable path to follow blazed by the former. Our old buddy Newt framed the issue in a perfectly partisan way by offering this advice to Obama, "study Reagan and Carter and do what Reagan did and avoid what Carter did", neocon code for the old game of continuing to lecture on democracy while supporting dictators. Jimmy Carter didn't lose Iran, it was the decades long support for brutal dictatorships that accomplished that trick. If fears of Islamic extremism cause us to falter in our support of the pro-democracy movement, "What is certain is that siding with a repressive regime against the Egyptian people, especially against young Egyptians, will turn these fears of extremism into a reality." Damn memory holes, we always seem to forget that blowback is a bitch.


Update #1: You may have noticed the celebrations in the streets of Egypt being beamed around the globe. Unfortunately, not much is being said of Omar Suleiman the man who announced the resignation of Hosni Mubarak last night, February 11th. All the commentary seems to agree the best outcome possible has occurred, but all that's happened is the US supported army is in charge. The only certainty they seem to be expressing is that all existing treaties will be honored by Egypt. They're celebrating across the Arab world, whispers of Algeria or Morocco being next, and everyone seems to be appeased, but the only reassurance has been directed at Israel. 

Coming to a Consensus

Way back in time, before there was Twitter, before the perpetual recession had come, in 2007 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had a mere $2 billion in lending commitments on its books. Two billion. Avatar made that in seven weeks. That's the monthly increase in the cost of the Afghanistan war this year. From its inception at Bretton Woods in 1945, the fund had been transformed from an instrument to promote and facilitate trade between its member nations into an object of hate, letters spoken together with derision from Bangkok to Buenos Aires. Well, here we are in a world of two billion tweets a month with much of it stuck in near economic depression where the IMF has $195 billion in loans on its books. This week central bankers and finance ministers from around the world are gathering at IMF headquarters in Washington DC for the IMF and World Bank annual meeting and they'll be on their best behaviour. You see, with about $900 billion at its disposal, the IMF has been charged with saving liberal capitalism.

It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world as we stumble headlong into the second decade of the 21st century but what I'm finding hardest to swallow is the rejuvenation of the IMF's image. There was a reason it only had a couple of billion in loans a few years back; it had lost its legitimacy in the international community. It had morphed from a cold war tool to support dictatorships in South America into a neo-colonial boot across the throat of Africa before becoming a purveyor and destroyer of capitalist dreams beyond the Berlin Wall and finally the instigator of global economic turmoil even further east. By first denying credit to elected governments led by 'left leaning' types such as Allende, Goulart or Ortega who may not have followed Washington's orders then supplying it to dictators that overthrew them, the likes of Pinochet, Branco and Samosa, the IMF was a good soldier in the fight against the Red Menace. Countries such as Senegal have found they are better off following the Beijing Consensus to Washington's nasty version. Privatization and market liberalization that was gonna make everyone rich following the collapse of the commie regime was unleashed without the proper legal framework (read: government institutions, is that irony?) bringing the world Russian billionaire oligarchs, some of whom managed to move to London to buy football teams before the Putin authoritarian backlash. Others languish in prison. The last bit of credibility seemed to evaporate with the steam from hot money that poured into the opening of financial and capital markets ordered by the IMF as a remedy to East Asia's downturn in 1997 transforming a hiccup into worldwide crisis.

It's no coincidence that the three biggest debts on the IMF's books as of August 2010 belong to Romania, the Ukraine and Hungary each owing over $11.7 billion, almost six times the total of outstanding loans three years ago. October 3rd saw the 20th anniversary of the reunification of East and West Germany which heralded the triumph of capitalism over communism, good over evil, opportunity over captivity. Some 8% of the world's population that had lived under the Soviet Communist system traded in one form of enslavement for another as IMF experts marched in to preach the gospel of a new religion, market fundamentalism, as a substitute for the old, Marxism (Well, a twisted Leninism/Stalinism/Gorbachevism?). For the western powers (ie. the banksters) the sudden opening of an untapped, unregulated market was a once in a lifetime opportunity as it lacked the most fundamental building blocks of efficient markets such as anti-trust laws or property rights. This lack of government regulation allowed those who knew which vodka to buy Yeltsin (answer: any) to prosper as most of the population suffered. Americans saw shock therapy through the lens of Reagan's victory putting a McDonald's on Red Square while the reality was the percentage of Russians living in poverty using the $2 standard skyrocketed from 2% in 1989 to 23.8% less than a decade later. The IMF brought Mercedes traffic jams to Moscow but 40% of the country now had to live on less than $4 a day.

The IMF was created to smooth financial crisis when they occur yet seems to have been the cause of political and economic disease as often as the cure. Yes, Virgina, there have been other crises before this latest one and they are coming ever more frequently, powerfully and lingery. That's not a word, but they tend to drag on, with recoveries marked with ever less, and painfully slow, job creation. Our hopes for recovery are resting on the drug dealer of debt that turned many of us into junkies in the first place as much of the world is relying on the IMF pit bosses to keep the casino open. The next crisis is already written into the loopholes lobbied into the financial regulation bill in the US. The last not yet complete judging by ever widening bond spreads in Europe which highlight the uselessness of trying to save the euro by propping up PIGS with more debt and occasionally issuing reports on their progress to soothe jittery markets. An optimist will say the protests in Seattle in 1999 or the street battle in 2001 in Genoa may have lit the fire under the IMF to change its ways. But it seems just the names have changed in this truly grim fairy tale where only the banks get paid as we double down on SDRs instead of structural adjustment loans and implement austerity programs in place of job cuts.

Not being able to know who the bad guy really is helps keep us interested in the story and allows the cycle of crisis to continue. The Greeks, banks, Irish, Al-Qaeda and the government all played a role in putting us in a situation where cuts are going to be necessary along with tax hikes but the biggest baddie in the financial press these days seems to be China. Sure, China's on board, what with the G20 and now a Special Advisor to the Managing Director at the IMF, their cash is needed, but the boss is still European and Canada has a bigger vote than Russia, or Brazil and Mexico combined. The US still has a veto power with over 16% of the vote, as major policy decisions require a supermajority of 85%. For these past 20 years much of the world has gone along with what the IMF prescribed, often having no choice, accept or perish, but there has been growing evidence that there might be another path to choose and many are taking it.

About ten before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1978 the Chinese government began making economic reforms that have brought in a hitherto unknown combination of mixed ownership, basic property rights, and heavy government intervention. On the surface, what distinguished this new capitalism seemed to be the level of government intervention. While this is true, what surprisingly sets Washington and Beijing apart is flexibility. While America opts for nostalgia and ideology instead of pragmatism and progress, the winning model of capitalism is being made in China, like so much else in the world these days. A two-party political system is no better, in fact worse, than a one-party state when both parties are under the control of lobbyists and one of them is bought and paid for by a major media outlet. Whereas the neoliberals and neocons invade nations financially and militarily through loans and bombs in order to exploit their resources, the Beijing Consensus simply builds them infrastructure in exchange for their riches. Roads and hospitals for copper and rare earth metals. Risk capital instead of lives. Seeing the game slipping away, the west, America in particular, is trying to find a scapegoat, blaming the winner for playing the game better.

So we'll continue hearing a lot about the yuan (renminbi? still don't understand the difference) being undervalued while not criticizing too directly as we're still offering the open hand of the G20. After all, it'll be good to spread the blame when things fall apart. The Chinese understand that it wasn't American style management skills that made the US the global economic leader for the past century but a combination of luck and directing the resources of the country in a productive manner. Think of the big money makers of the past century and their connection with government. From the direct to the indirect in the big picture and in the details. Militarily not only conquering markets that needed to be rebuilt after winning world wars or friendly invasions but also directly employing and educating soldiers along with buying and selling all those weapons of war. Boeing, General Electric and Haliburton anyone? All this spending and the hydrogen bomb gave a head start to the computing industry and even gave us the internet. Detroit wouldn't have had the run it did if an interstate system hadn't been built to handle all those cars criss-crossing the continent. There's no secret to China's success, it's much the same recipe America used when it understood that since market forces cannot even do something as simple as finance home mortgages it shouldn't be trusted to restore and maintain full employment, reduce global imbalances or prevent the destruction of the environment while preparing for a future without fossil fuels. China's doing it while somehow being both more overt and less conspicuous. Not wasting energy pretending to be what it's not at home and forcing their ideas on others abroad.

The success of the Chinese approach to modernization has struck the developing world as attractive and the developed as amazing. As the calls to control deficits grow louder and governments are told to cut more jobs, raise retirement ages and lower subsidies while bailing out banks, the Chinese will keep building the things we need and using the proceeds to fund the debt the IMF has ensured we're addicted to. While Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's in person offer of support to Greece (obviously in exchange for market access) was being gratefully accepted, the head of the IMF issued ominous warnings of a currency war being waged by those Chinese. In Europe the cracks are growing as "You can't have a monetary union without a reasonably coordinated fiscal policy" - Orwellian for a true supergovernment from that same IMF director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It gets worse in America where most of the public has been convinced that all things government or intellectual are bad - insert your own Palin 2012 vice presidential nominee here and imagine the outcome. Richard Nixon is attributed Milton Friedman's misquote that "We are all Keynesians now" after breaking the gold standard and reluctantly accepting John Maynard's economic ideas. The IMF was built upon that economist's ideas but I get the feeling that the next great shift in economics will have most of us saying "We are all Chinese now".

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.