Thatcher's Poland

My mistake was not waiting to light my cigarette until after I'd passed the pawn shop. The lombard, as they call them here, opened only a few months ago but it's quickly become a favorite hangout for young and old alike. Bizarrely, you're just as likely to see a group of old fogies as a gang of kids ogling the phones in the window, dreaming of the day when they can afford to light up the screens with the slide of a fingertip to signal to the those around them they are worthy while sending and receiving signals from around the world.

As I hit the corner of the main drag, I suddenly remembered I needed cash. Lucky every other building is now a bank while the majority of those in between are oft-time ironically named cheque cashing joints like Happy Credit, mortgage brokers and aptly named kantors (foreign exchange) such as Joker Kantor, so cash was flowing free and easy. Well, apparently not for buddy who was on me like a fly on shit as I waited for the bank machine.

- "Daj mi papierosa" (Give me a cigarette) Came the predictable plea.
- "Jest moj ostatni" (It's my last) I tried to parry.
- "Give me cigarette"
Fuck. Something about my amazing (!?) accent had given me away making me both a prey and a mark.
- "Cigarette!" He barked.
My smoke was now the focus of both our attentions as I raised it to my lips and dropped it to my side. A couple of quick drags and I hand him the butt but he still doesn't budge.
- "One, two beer. How much?" Guess he's thirsty, too. After all it's almost noon.
- "I dunno, depends which" I answer, giving him a shoulder slap to his right shoulder while dodging to my right and slide into the bank machine as the previous customer walks out.

Cash in hand, smoke accoster nowhere in sight, I continued my walk towards first the train and then my work station beyond. As the flow of traffic peppered with the odd late model Porsche and communist era Polski Fiat 126p whizzed by I pass the Golden Arches just in time to see a herd of diabetic fat kids stream out the door, miraculously avoiding the two drunks splayed on the pavement leaning against each other for support as they dream of their next drink. Next up is the wheelchair beggar at his post just past the rail yard and in front of the trade center on the corner where I turn toward the university. Fortunately I'm shielded from his view as I pass by a gaggle of home decor/gardening/fashion enthusiasts clutching their conference bags filled with soon-to-be landfill waste and don't have to respond to his plea for the zloty (cash) he'd need to survive the next 24 hours.

Turning onto the bridge I walked past the newly completed portion of the train station, already covered in grime thanks to the pollution along with the road work and construction of the monstrous mall and even more ginormous parking garage that will be attached to the new Poznan train terminal. Wired gates control traffic at the end the bridge where the roadworks are most intense. Cars jockey for position from all sides as I emerged onto the zebra crossing with my usual contempt for motorized traffic. My second confrontation of the day comes when a car creeps up to my knee and we lock eyes, I point to the crossing and he starts yelling through his windscreen. Flipping him the bird I've already had two opportunities to fight and I haven't been out of the flat for 20 minutes.

That's when I found out Margaret Thatcher had died. I didn't have to wait to read about it in the obituaries or the newspaper, the words accompanied the beep that lit up my cellphone (fortunately I'm still holding onto my decade old Nokia brick and haven't yet needed to join the gawkers in front of the lombard).

"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"

Having come from a British friend that's all that was needed to convey the news. The fraction of a second it took for the impulse to smile to travel from my brain was long enough to allow the guilt for having such a feeling to arrest the curl of my lips before they'd even crinkled. I had to stop and look around. Here I was in Poland about to walk into university to teach a group of students whose parents most likely believe the Iron Lady was at least in part to thank for causing Communist USSR to crumble. The knowledge was more likely than not passed to their offspring subconsciously, like the information transmission of DNA, the kids probably don't even know what they, well, know. The terms Thatcher's Britain and Thatcher's child took no time to enter the lexicon and then the OED, and now standing on the corner with a Beyonce for H&M billboard to my left commanding women to buy her swimsuit or suffer social ostracism, if one's different, one's bound to be lonely, and a Szybcy i Wsciekli 6 (Fast & the Furious 6) billboard to my right reminding me of Thatcher's possibly apocryphal quote "[a] man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure", I couldn't help wonder how much this was Thatcher's Poland.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"
- Orwell, 1984

Upon noticing a book carried by one of my first Polish private students with Ronald Reagan on the cover, I was informed that Saint Ronnie along with John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher were his heroes: the holy trinity of freedom, a triptych of Maggie, Ronnie and JP2 on the mantelpiece of every good home. It's one of those things everyone here just knows just as I knew at that moment that Thatcher's passing wasn't going to go quietly; an information war every bit as deadly as the shooting kind she loved so much was already under way to remake her legacy, reframe the perspective and retard the rest of us.

Had she been a man, Margaret Thatcher could easily have been called Iron Balls as she had conviction in her beliefs if she had anything. Instead, thanks to her power to make most shrink around her, she was ironically given the nickname she came to love by the system she loathed. Accusing her of trying to revive the cold war, the Soviet Army newspaper Krasnaja Zvezda (Red Star) dubbed the then leader of the opposition železnaja dama (the Iron Lady) in January of 1976.

Seems as with everything else about Lady Thatcher, measuring the impact of her role in the fall of the Soviet Union is too subjective to measure, a hagiographic effort at best. Sure, after meeting Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984 she declared "We can do business together" and shortly thereafter the official party policy of glasnost was adopted in the USSR. However a near identical phrase "I think they can do business together" had been uttered in February of the same year by the American Senate Majority Leader Howard H Baker Jr. in reference to Reagan's potential meeting with the then Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko.

Her bold assertions that there was no alternative nor any such thing as society, delivered in a tone both boring and boring, made her seem so decisive and divisive but when examined in context become wishy-washy and banal. Should we celebrate the life or death of a lady who may have had a hand in bringing about a Brave New World order by bringing down the (iron) curtain on our 1984 future? How does one shed a tear for a woman who had no qualms about ordering the death of hundreds of 'Argies' sailing away from a fight, not only allowed the US to station nuclear tipped cruise missiles on British soil to up the Cold War ante but also to use British bases for bombing raids on Libya, and above all, taught us to be selfish and that the pain of others isn't our problem?

But did she help save the Poles and the rest from communism? Unanswerable and doubtful but Poland's neoliberal lackey foreign minister Radek Sikorski eulogized her as a "fearless champion of liberty". We can guess how the Argentinians feel about how she saved the Malvinas. Barack Obama trotted out the obligatory praise saying she was "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty". Why don't we ask a Chilean if she helped or hurt their struggle against her buddy Pinochet by thanking him for "bringing democracy to Chile" by murdering the people's elected representative. I'm sure the tens of thousands murdered, hundreds of thousands tortured and million plus forced to flee Chile under his dictatorship would disagree.

The Economist magazine, bringing the tru to Minitru and where 2+2=5, eulogized "[t]he essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom", thus doing their part to ensure her support of the South African apartheid regime is lost down the memory hole. Not only did she once refer to Nelson Mandela's ANC as a "typical terrorist organization" while her spokesman said it was "cloud-cuckoo land for anyone to believe" they could run the country, she somehow worked the doublethink trick of projecting opposition to the racist regime while befriending then Premier P.W. Botha. She celebrated her friendship with Indonesia's General Suharto calling hime "one of our very best and most valuable friends" for having killed 500,000 suspected Communists in Indonesia before moving on to invade East Timor in 1975 to massacre around 250,000 men, women and children on the island. Her government helped arm Saddam Hussein, lent a hand to Pol Pot and hailed General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq's work in Pakistan that laid the groundwork for the Islamic radicalization of a whole generation.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the woman was just that, she was a woman. In 1970, a week after becoming Secretary of State for Education and Science, she was asked if she would she like to become the first woman Prime Minister. "No," she answered emphatically, "there will not be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime—the male population is too prejudiced." Of the movement and activists which possibly did more to change the 20th century than any other and opened the door to 10 Downing to her, she reportedly told an adviser, "[t]he feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison." In 1982 she said "The battle for women's rights has largely been won" which explains why she never felt the need to speak out against domestic violence, rape, sexual abuse or harassment or how women earned about 60 cents to the dollar of men's wages. She gave the appearance of smashing the glass ceiling while in fact pulling up the ladder, famously promoting only a single woman to a cabinet position preferring instead to surround herself with vegetables. Is it sexist of me to wonder how a mother of two could also become Maggie Thatcher the milk-snatcher by taking away kids' milk? Despite her portrayal as a greengrocer's daughter who had to fight to the top, she seems to have been a daddy's girl who married well which allowed her the luxury to study and hire a nanny.

Apologists rose to Thatcher's defense to claim her actions were a product of the times, the ends justified the means and of course, war is peace. Her sales pitch to a roomful of Saudis, "I'll have one of those!" while stroking a gleaming missile, to seal the $80 billion Al Yamamah arms deal wasn't meant for public consumption as 'batting for Britain' really involved billions in black money to bribe Saudi princes and add to the bottom line of BAE. Poles have learned Thatcher's buddy system well, er, well, the politicians at least, lining up to sacrifice lives and zloty to the alter of American military hegemony. Polish may have recently become England's second language but Polish politicians speak Anglo-Saxon ass-kissing as good as any lapdog. Most Poles are oblivious to the fact they ranked number four on the 'coalition of the willing' casualty countdown and just last month saw their 39th soldier killed in Afghanistan, while four more stand trial for war crimes committed there. Meanwhile the billions to be spent on a useless missile shield that the majority of the people don't want will piss off the Russians and definitely won't end up in the pockets of the locals.

"Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature...are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation."
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Thanks to doublethink, the lady wasn't for turning and probably believed in what she was doing but the real trick was to convince not just the people but her own party of the myth that Thatcherism was good for 'ordinary' people and would emancipate the working classes. Attila the Hen found an ally in Rupert Murdoch; she helped him consolidate his media power while he helped her spread the gospel and get reelected twice. The two protestant 'outsiders' who attended Oxford railed against the establishment which they became a part of by helping each other; he by having his tabloid the Sun shift its traditional support for Labour to Thatcher's Tories with a front page editorial arguing Thatcher’s election would be better for the working classes, she by allowing his acquisition of The Times and Sunday Times to avoid scrutiny by the competition authorities thanks to a deal struck during lunch at Chequers. While Thatcherism was tearing the heart out of the industrial heartland and looting the commons to hand it over to a tiny elite of 'wealth creators' who would free up the market and rain wealth on the land, Murdoch helped make sure there would be astonishingly little protest or consciousness by blaming the poor, promoting war and of course giving the people want they really wanted, more football.

The strength of ignorance is both easily built and desperately needed here in Poland. Caught so often on the wrong side of history and geography, convincing the Poles that there is no alternative to the current course has been an easy sell. Football, vodka and the Catholic Church allow the people to imagine they'll get to a better place as long as they keep their head down and work hard. Sure, they have the right complain and the array of choices seems as diverse as anywhere but the media landscape ensures the discourse never strays far off course. German companies like Axel Springer AG spew IngSoc, er, tabloid trash and EU propaganda with their version of the Sun, Fakt, alongside Dziennik and Newsweek Polska, American movies continually revise the past while TV portrays seemingly  possible present from the west or a poor simulation thereof and Radio Maryja spews xenophobic hate cloaked in the hope of redemption. The closest Poland comes to Murdoch is Adam Michnik, editor of the ofttimes leading national daily Gazeta Wyborca who somehow managed the trick of undergoing a conversion from a fearless dissident into a hack propagandist heralding the evils of Islamofascism and convincing women to go shopping on cobblestone streets wearing high heels (er, a forced reference to his paper's women's magazine Wysokie Obcasy - High Heels)

Maggie may or may not have been instrumental in delivering Poland and Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union but it was her amazing electoral success along with that of fellow cold war warrior Rotten Ronnie on the other side of the pond that sped the demise of democracy as we knew it. Yes, the unions they broke had too much influence on Labour and Democrat policy and no, it wasn't her or Raygun's fault those parties ran into the arms of Big Finance but there you are. Poland et al had the misfortune of gaining freedom just as the end of history arrived and democracy became nothing but a choice between  more or less measures of neocon and neoliberal, a lesser of two evil song and dance, a recipe repeated around the world from Ottawa to Warsaw. When asked about her greatest achievement, Thatcher simply replied, "New Labour" and Tony Blair. In Poland the answer would be the ruling Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform) and the likes of Oxford educated, husband of Washington Post hack Anne Applebaum, current foreign minister Radek Sikorski (not only did he write this drivel after Thather's death he called for a statue to be erected here in her honour, maybe right next to Reagan's in Warsaw!). Politics have become subordinate to markets and labour to capital, society now serves the economy instead of the other way around.

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

It's this last point which is probably the most important connection between Thatcher and life here in Poland, freedom is slavery. Sparked by the Powell Memo in 1971 and lent an aura of intellectual legitimacy by the Chicago Boys, a new economic ideology was propagated through institutional sponsorship: America has the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute while the UK's versions include the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies founded in 1974 by Thatcher's mentor, Keith Joseph. Despite their benign sounding names, these are radical think tanks with almost nothing to do with the likes of Adam Smith who understood something about Moral Sentiments and the dangers of private monopolies and everything to do with Hayek, Friedman and Rand and their belief in extreme individualism or social Darwinism. Nigel Lawsen, Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer from '83 to '89 summarized their economic philosophy, "Economic planning was both impossible and unnecessary. . . . The price mechanism . . . was a much more efficient means of transmitting consumer wants and needs than the vast bureaucracies of Whitehall and the nationalized industries." Selfishness along with ostentation of power and status was in. Culture was ruled over by money, and the idea that those who win by making more of it do so because they are better was not just permitted but ordained.

Profit and capitalism were good while planning, government and taxes were bad. Conveniently this all worked together as in order to lower taxes, public spending had to be lowered which scaled back government by reducing public services, privatizing whatever was possible and deregulating the rest. Inconveniently most voters viewed the government as subsidizing essential public services, ensuring economic security and helping families in need. The trick therefore was to create a backlash against government waste, resentment against public subsidies to those who were less hard working than themselves and place the blame for inflation on greedy unions. Notice the success as the issue of benefit fraud, which costs the UK about £1.2 billion yearly is a far more emotive topic than tax avoidance, which costs about £70 billion a year. Voters also needed to be convinced that what was taken from the state was being given to them thus enhancing individual economic freedom and unshackling the wealth creators, allowing the wealth to trickle down on everyone. The only valid idealism was to destroy the state by, as Lawson continued, "elevating private actions above public direction and dismissing ‘social justice’ as both vague and arbitrary." Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

Thatcher was swept into power on a perfect storm of global inflation emanating from the US pushing up world prices, IMF imposed austerity in exchange for loans to support the value of sterling after Britain's 1976 foreign exchange crisis which made it impossible to finance the modernization of public industries as it would increase the PSBR (Public Sector Borrowing Requirement), and finally, well, strikes and weather, otherwise known as Britain's Winter of Discontent. Yes, a public sector strike during an unusually cold winter ground the country to a halt, literally, as roads went unsalted, hospital patients were denied treatment and garbage piled up in the streets. Labour, who had tied themselves to those striking unions, found themselves with their hands also tied behind their back. Thatcher picked and chose her battles with labour wisely and pursued a step-by-step program of trade union reform before ultimately crushing them in the '84-'85 coal miners' strike. There was indeed no alternative to the monetarist Thatcherism which created an employers' market by imposing chronic under-employment and shifting enterprise out of the unionized public sector to newly privatized, non-unionized enterprises; Marks and Spencer had triumphed over Marx and Engels.

Ironically, or perhaps just calculatingly mercenary, while destroying unions and solidarity at home she was lionized by Solidarność (Solidarity) in Poland, actually being mobbed by dockworkers in Gdynia when she visited in 1988. If you've gotten this far in reading it hopefully means you realize I understand there was a difference between unions in the UK and Poland, after all, in Poland the military used to shoot striking miners dead. Given the trade unions' role in the democratization of Poland it is curious that Poland today has among the lowest unionization rates in Europe as from 1982 until 2005 membership fell from 80% to below 14% (only  2.4% for employees under the age of 25). There are myriad of factors at play here, from the many mistakes made by the unions themselves, a massive shift of the workforce from traditional industries and sectors such as mining and steel, and the privatization of many formerly public, union dominated industries, but it was the pernicious effects of Thatcherism on human psychology that seem the greatest factors. The transformation of the full-employment ideals of post-WWII society to an economic system based on chronic un- and underemployment has made many afraid of forming or joining a union along with the societal appeal to the narrowest self-interest of individuals having gained the upper hand over the feeling of brotherhood and the desire to work for the collective good.

Thatcherism also slowly shifted the balance of power from labour to capital through tax and monetary policy, privatization and deregulation. She managed to destroy more than 2 million jobs in two years, an astonishing figure considering unemployment only breached 1 million in 1978 before reaching 3.5 million by 1983. Her monetarism lowered everyone's taxes a bit and 'simplified' the fiscal system by regressively shifting taxes away from wealth onto consumers via sales taxes, excise taxes and the value-added tax. With public institutions being starved by austerity, privatization was the only way to modernize. "Popular capitalism", spreading ownership as widely as possible, would serve the double purpose of making it difficult to re-nationalize in the future plus giving the public skin in the game, giving workers a stake in preserving the value of the shares they held in these enterprises. The discipline of the market would make British industry more competitive but its effect along with deregulation of the financial industry, the 'Right to Buy' scheme of 1980 and the 'Big Bang' of 1986 simply handed over complete control of the British economy to the square mile in the heart of London, the City.

Privatization, which started tentatively in her first term with British Aerospace and Cable & Wireless, had reached fever pitch by her second reelection: Jaguar, British Telecom, Britoil, British Gas, British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways. Her fourth term (well, John Major's first) saw British Rail hit the auction block. By the time the Conservatives were voted out of office in 1997 by one of the largest margins in history it had become clear to the public that there were some side-effects to the medicine they were being forced to take. Prices hadn't declined along with productivity gains in some areas while they had jumped for essential services like water whose systems were breaking down or shifted against residential consumers in favor of large industrial users in the case of electricity. Services had been cut back, privatized companies were engaging in monopoly practices and to add insult to injury economic inequality had widened with the shrinkage in the industrial labor force and stagnating real wages while profits soared for the privatized companies and the City fleeced the government for underwriting fees and began gambling in earnest thanks to the newfound market freedom. Thatchers reply? "Let us glory in our inequality."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
- H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

Pity the Poles for having gained their freedom at the height of Thatcherism, imagine how different the future would look had it been in, say, 1968? As it was, having been tried and tested by Thatcher's buddy Pinochet in Chile, the Chicago Boys idea of "Shock Therapy" came to Poland in the person of Leszek Balcerowicz in 1989 under the guidance of Harvard's Jeffery Sachs backed by the muscle of the IMF. Doubtless, drastic measures were called for to make the huge transition that was complicated by the fact Poland was an economic basket case, with debt of $40 billion and inflation running at 600%. Also doubtless, the Balcerowicz plan was a success when compared to the results achieved in some other Eastern bloc nations. Forgotten though is the doublethink trick achieved of forcing a now 'free' democratic nation to trade off part of the debts incurred by a totalitarian regime it had never voted for in return for selling off state assets at discount prices for the benefit of foreigners and those highly place communists who were quick enough to convert to the new religion. Who cares if it was completely undemocratic, Balcerowicz termed it "extraordinary politics" while Michnik warned that the common people or "rank and file...irrational hotheads [were] incapable of recognizing the limits and realities of the real world". Those in position to do so stripped all the assets they could, a $1 billion stabilization loan (aren't numbers from the olden days quaint?) was arranged, large blocks of shares of privatized assets were placed in the hands of banks and Poland was absorbed into the global slavery debt trap.

The only goal of the IMF/Sachs/Balcerowicz policies was to ensure payments continued to flow west on the $40 billion in illegitimate foreign hard currency debt (what would be called odious debt today). Much of that debt had been incurred in 1979 when rates in London and New York increased 300% under the policies of, you guessed it, Margaret Thatcher and US Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. By the end of '91, Polish unemployment had reached 2 million, industrial production was 66% of the '89 level at the end of '92 and as 1993 closed 2.8 million were unemployed and 50% of families with 3 or more children were living below the poverty line. Little wonder that elections held in September of 1993 saw the the pro-IMF government of Hanna Suchocka replaced by a raft of coalition parties with direct ties to the communist regime. Predictably, as inequality elsewhere surpasses levels unseen since the roaring '20s, the new grand bourgeoisie that has emerged here has combined old bureaucrats, new managers and a burgeoning entrepreneurial class; a situation reminiscent of Poland in the 1920s. Perhaps the best symbols of what Poland got in return for the misery, organized crime, and debt-based slavery brought by the 'reforms' are Galeria Mokotów (Mokotów Mall) in Warsaw and Stary Browar (Old Brewery). The former, a shopping center built in place of a demolished semiconductor factory, cuz, you know, who needs those in a modern economy when you can create another black hole to suck wealth out of the local economy, and the latter a mall built on bribery (Polish link) and murder involving the richest man in Poland.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
- Anatole France, Le Lys Rouge (The Red Lilly)

Ah yes, the riches and glory promised to Poland are coming but as in the rest of the world more and more disproportionately to those at the top of the income scale. It would take a figure  stronger than Thatcher to convince Poles they are on the wrong course though as they are pumped through the indoctrination centers that are the education system. They emerge believing they have free will and as unquestioning of the free-market god as their forefathers were in the Catholic one unaware that one believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them; soma is simply Christianity without tears. The trains are slow, late and chaotic not because they're being sold off piecemeal on EU orders which is creating the disarray, but because it's not fully privatized like the UK's, who cares about their disastrous experience. The long waits at NFZ have nothing to do with it being underfunded, the public health care system isn't a blessing but a curse as promoting preventative medicine instead of the Americanized version of health for profit resulting in worse health outcomes and higher costs must be better as it's the path the Cameron government is choosing as they privatize the NHS by stealth. Oh, and don't worry Polish kids, it's only a matter of time until the course laid in leads to a completely privatized American-style college system of trillion dollar debt slavery before you've even entered the workforce. Just ask any 20-year-old Brit what it's like. 

Would the UK and Poland be much different if Thatcher had never been? Maybe not seeing as even the EU, the institution that most separates Maggie and Poland, has become nothing more than a glorified debt collector/pusher a fact not lost on most Poles as they become more disenchanted with the concept as their democracy ages just as Thatcher did. Even the Iron Lady, as she mentions in her autobiography, was caught off guard at how much she came to rely on the financial manipulators, how little she was able to control them and the scale of those bankers' greed; she convinced us to sell the family silver for the benefit of the rentiers who perceived the Thatchers and Friedmans as pawns, well-meaning promoters wrapping austerity economics in populist garb. Unfortunately, the deleterious social effects of the inequality caused by growing GDP through financialization of the economy, empowering those banks and other corporations to pursue profit without paying the price for wrongdoing and turning people into consumer zombies takes years to measure and decades to be felt. Trillions in wealth will continue to by siphoned out of the productive economy while we are forced to run faster and faster just to keep up and are convinced that our phone has somehow made us smarter. Yet while there is always time to get off the tracks before the train hits there's not much chance of heeding the warning the more we come to rely on those who profit from us being run over.

A Corporate Death Penalty

Here at In Case You Missed It we like to fess up to our mistakes, errors, follies and bone-headed pleas whenever we can. A couple of years back we published one of our most popular posts titled Rent Seeking Parasites which accused the financial industry of parasitism, getting a free ride on the backs of its host, society - you and me. While this seemed a reasonable metaphor at the time operating as we were under the assumption that regulation and taxes would have to be reintroduced to curb their feeding excesses eventually, it has proven wrong. Parasites they are not - they are parasitoids, creatures that similarly live off the back of their hosts but eventually return the favour by killing them.

Don't you dare roll your eyes at the thought of another climate change, anti-oil screed, I promise to not even go there, even though it's the easiest path to prove our faith and reliance on crony capitalism and corporations is suicidal. No, instead we'll start in Greece, a country that's been forced to live under the indignity of not only being labeled one of the PIIGS but the worst of the bunch, a profligate, lazy, early-retiring, ouzo-swilling, tax cheater that built a shack out of straw. Despite the falsity of the stereotype or how they actually got in over their heads in debt, the Greeks have been pushed into debt-slavery, a no longer sovereign nation forced to accede to the austerity demands of the troika, the EU/ECB/IMF.

Strangely enough, these policies have not only led the Greek economy into a vicious debt trap circle - reduced spending leading to lower growth and the need for more borrowing to bridge the budget gaps provoking further calls for deeper cuts - but they've also effected people in the same depression-inducing way. Gross domestic product in the second quarter was down more than 7% from last year amid government spending cuts and tax increases that, combined, will add up to about 20% of GDP while unemployment is over 16%. Predictably, crime, homelessness, emigration and personal bankruptcies are on the rise. Tragically, as a result of these market forces, recorded suicides have roughly doubled since before the crisis to about six per 100,000 residents annually according to the Greek health ministry and a charitable organization called Klimaka.

The Greeks aren't alone in the suffering being induced in order to pay off the often fraudulent debt incurred in order to keep the financial ponzi scheme afloat while suffering under the humiliation of taking orders from the financial markets and their lackeys. Ireland's pot-o-gold bank guarantees led to overnight insolvency and a double austerity dose causing another mass emigration, Portugal's ignominious acceptance of the same troika treatment will produce the same cure as Ireland, Italy had their debt downgraded despite cutting, re-cutting and then cutting the budget some more to please the market wolves while Spain not only had a gun held to their head by the same hit men until they changed their constitution to 'limit' debt without a referendum a month before an election but also had to increase 'labour market flexibility', an Orwellian moniker which will somehow create more employment by making it easier to fire young workers. When markets attack French banks, rules are changed to protect them, but the assault on society causes lives to be lost when fruit stand owners use gasoline to light themselves on fire to draw attention to problems in Tunis or mix it with beer to literally drown their sorrows in Athens or when there's riots on the streets of London. The worst off seems to be Latvia, the anti-Iceland of Europe, a country that could become the first murder victim of neoliberal austerity measures.

Yet German bank inspired bailouts provided by the European Financial Stability Facility and the European Financial Stabilization Mechanism won't solve the problem, it will continue indefinitely without debt forgiveness. Ironically, these obligations being forced on the public will serve the same function as that of the war reparations forced upon Germany after the Treaty of Versailles when John Maynard Keynes warned the world that the "policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable...even if it does not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe". I think we can all still remember the seeds that were sown and how many lives were reaped thanks to that plan. 

In America we need to be granted a little bit of poetic license to expand the metaphor a bit, after all it is the land of the ever-expanding waistband. According the the General Accountability Office, the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and around the world over the past couple of years. This goes along with the $1.2 trillion in slightly less secret back door loans we later found out about last year or the (only) $700 billion TARP money a couple of years back that everyone talks about. Hurray, the corporatocracy was brought back to life thanks to the politicians they paid for! Funny thing is this transfer of wealth hasn't trickled down to the people yet, nor have the efficiency gains of the past 30 odd years of economic growth. No, the result of the neoliberal free market driven policies of major tax cuts for high-income Americans, union-busting, aided and abetted by federal policy, and financial deregulation such as the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which has fed inequality because very high incomes come disproportionately from that sector, has strangely enough only benefited those the policies were meant to help, the rich and the corporations. Median incomes adjusted for inflation have fallen over that time while the number of Americans below the poverty line has reached 46 million with 21.6% of American children now living in poverty (predicted to hit 25% soon; it's 3.7% in Denmark). The very corporations who the Fed helped out instead of people are often making record profits from this poverty and play a part in the bloodbath, as this poverty is a death sentence.

Instead of using this infusion of cash along with the access granted to US and non-US banks and corporations to near-zero financing at the Fed window to you know, create jobs, financial firms have used it to increase our suffering while lining their pockets. They've thanked the people who cover their losses by betting on their death and creating new casino-like commodity markets, hurting the poor most as increases in the price of rice and gasoline hit them harder. The flip side of the profit prospect created by wheat price volatility for a corporation is starvation for the world's dispossessed thanks to the increased price of bread. A food system where Americans waste enough food everyday to fill the Rose Bowl is great for those who can afford the luxury. For those that can't, well, you know. Worse, a McDonald's corporation that took part in the $1.3 trillion short term lending bonanza gets to serve $5 Big Mac meals thanks in large part to the billions in corn subsidies lavished by the government in support of the unholy alliance of agribusiness and science to produce high-fructose corn syrop (HFCS) and ethanol to put in everything from french fries to feed for filet-o-fish or filling the Ford Fiesta.



The subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that budget wary consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to "choose" the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support. The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry is "that a dollar [can] buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit". This Super-Size-Me economy leads to early death through obesity, diabetes and heart disease. This lifestyle non-choice has played a big role in the decline of life expectancy for women over the past 20 years in 313 counties in the United States, a problem exacerbated by poverty, with the proof played out in the fact that those in the top 20% of American incomes live, on average, at least 6.5 years longer than those in the lowest income group. So you see, privatizing both profits and losses of corporations is paid for in not only gold but also lives by society. It's become more than a crime to be poor - poverty is a death sentence and corporations, who we're told over and over are job creators, are in fact, executioners.

In a culture where Orwellian political vocabulary turns the idea of universal single-payer health care into "death panels" while advocating actually killing grandma and rationalizes disenfranchisement of "non-productive citizens", it should come as no surprise that Obama's faux-populist promise to veto any budget proposal that doesn't contain tax increases can be turned into a class war, when, in fact, the war has been hot for decades and it's pretty clear which side is winning. The reality is this war doesn't differentiate between innocent and guilty when choosing its victims though it does discriminate based on race just like capital punishment. Just imagine the cognitive dissonance involved in being both pro-life and pro-death. Murderous spectacles are put on to appease the mob with circenses as if the panem killing them weren't enough. Maybe this explains the indifference to executing possibly innocent men like Troy Davis in Georgia or the Tea Party cheering for the straight shooting style of killing kids, the mentally ill and the innocent among the 234 people Rick Perry has executed in Texas:



It's a death sentence to be poor, especially if you're among the 49.9 million Americans who lack health insurance, a number that soared by 13.3 million since 2000. The main driver in both the national and personal bankruptcy story is a health care system whose costs are spiraling out of control thanks to corporate greed in both the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. State enforced patent protection of the latter isn't only killing AIDS babies in Soweto while thanks to the former, the only evidence that really matters in determining treatment based on evidence-based medicine is what's in your wallet. Tea Partiers like to cheer on this corporate killing too (listen for it at 0:55):

Killing requires a large staff

Poverty is also the best recruiting tool ever invented by the ultimate killing machine, the armed forces, and thus provides the fodder to feed the military industrial complex. Again, corporations are there to innovate new ways of killing and can even fill the void with corporate mercenaries when volunteers run short. The stark contradiction between the money making mantra of murder and Christ's advice, "If you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me" lends a dark layer of irony to our present wars justified by condemning Islam as a death-glorifying cult. Even though we know innocent people will die when we're bombing, droning or whatever we call trying to kill brown people we've labeled terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan or Libya, it's somehow different than when those terrorists kill innocent people when they blow themselves up on buses in London or trains in Madrid. We're Americans celebrating the illegal killing of the most-wanted criminal of our generation thanks to our culture of death or out of relief from a false belief they wouldn't be called to die as the perpetual war on terror would end with Osama bin Laden's death? USA! United States of Assassination! Woo hoo death to international rule of law!



What? Killing bin Laden didn't solve that war on terror problem? You mean, it's all related, people blowing themselves up at outdoor cafes, creating terrorists by raining death down on Tripoli, Kabul and Baghdad or being the only vote in the UN to support Israelis killing Palestinians, allowing illegal settlements on their land or even denying them statehood next month. Killing is killing, whether in the name of good, Zeus, protection, defense or Allah. Once you accept it as no more than collateral damage you think differently, become indifferent to death and probably think it's ok to torture while praying in a church that covers up for pedophiles. Another victory for Oceania over Eurasia or Eastasia won't alter the course in the perpetual war because there's money to be made for McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, BAE and IBM from death.

But if, as the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations are people then shouldn't they get the death penalty for killing people? Even at a time when slavery was legal, America had the morality to realize corporate killing wasn't. The corporate death penalty could be applied in cases of "operating contrary to the public interest" or those that saw "a pattern of abuses" and result in their charters being revoked. Ah, those were the progressive days, the very time today's right-wingnuts would like to take us back to with its lack of child labor laws, clean water protection and such. Trials might go something like this if such a world still existed I suppose:



Yeah. We not only wage war and trample human rights for oil companies' drilling rights, we just make them pay a fine for destroying entire ecosystems and spraying chemicals with unknown long-term effects to clean up the surface for the cameras. We enable through our continued consumption and ignorance of corporate evasion of responsibility for less visible murder via contamination or explosions in places like Ecuador or Nigeria. Move on to do the same in the Arctic while other gas companies extracting using hydraulic fracturing which pollutes the very water table we rely on for life will make sure we don't figure out how their harming human life. Car companies? What better way to kill millions than by rigging the game to ensure we drive cars forever? Big tobacco serves as a role model for the Catholic Church on how to cover up scandals after killing millions more. Obfuscate, donate and litigate.

Wait. All this and no mention of Bhopal. Yeah, that's right, when 3,800 people are killed almost immediately when tonnes of toxic gas escape and today more than 100,000 people remain chronically ill from exposure, it's more of the same, obfuscate (corporate takeover of Union Carbide by Dow Chemical - it's not our fault!), donate (maybe a stadium for the Olympics!) and litigate. Rinse and repeat. How about Monsanto? Who could have foreseen that allowing a corporation to patent life would have, well, life-ending consequences, right? DeBeers, turning blood diamonds into love? The beverage industry from Coca-Cola to Red Bull and Budweiser, the fashion industry or even Hollywood for toxification, body image distortion and indoctrination? As long as there's an app for you iPhone to keep you connected who cares how many Apple kills to make them. What about the billions of people whose lives are threatened by the ecological disaster sure to come about as a result of the greed for profit written into the DNA of the corporate psychopaths we've created. Oh yeah, that's right, I made a no climate change promise. That would be controversial and might give someone the idea to protest, maybe even occupy Madrid's Plaza del Sol or decide to march to Brussels or, heaven forbid, occupy Wall Street in the heart of NYC if perhaps the corpocracy's killing of the middle class and slaughter of the poor weren't enough. Oh, some people have already done that, are heading there and doing that (see below for live stream when available), fighting our fight. If they need a suggestion for one demand mine is to bring back the corporate death penalty - capital punishment for corporations!

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Further reading:
Occupy Wall Street 
March to Brussels
Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe 1919-2009
US Poverty figures
IMF inequality report
US Uncut / UK Uncut
Further Viewing:
Sugar: The Bitter Truth
Food Inc. (It might take an extra click)
Clip from Inside Job
Interview with Josh Fox - maker of Gasland

This Month in Wingnuttery

As events spin ever faster out of control it's getting harder and harder to tell if the tail is wagging the dog or if the mongrel is simply chasing his hind end in a circle. WMD's (weapons of mass distraction) flash from son of Hollywood royalty 80's pretty boy-shoot a fiance-beat a hooker or two-ex-wife restraining order champion but pay him a couple million an episode to appear in a sitcom meltdown to Chernobyl flashback, the end is nigh-radioactive cloud of death nuclear Godzilla-creating kind. Few are able to pay much attention, so it's like shooting fish in a barrel from religiosity to larceny through hypocrisy to find gems of downright wingnuttery.

Besides killing us all, the Japanese tragedy (what do you call an earthquake/tsunami/nuclear chain reaction) could have been worse according to the preachings of the gospel of capitalism on CNBC. After last Friday's earthquake in Japan, Larry Kudlow summed up the wingnut view on the value of life versus profit succinctly, "The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that."



Ok. The real upside for the wingnuts here is that with the Nikkei and other markets gyrating out of control, maybe we won't notice that no one besides Bernie Madoff is in jail for the construction and self-destruction of the pyramid scheme that is the financial world. Do watch Inside Job. If you don't understand how credit default swaps are like buying insurance on someone else's car so you hope they crash to collect, the WMD's will be able to go to work earthquake style so the next financial meltdown can be blamed on Atheists instead of teachers. More likely, it'll all be blamed on the Muslims like in California where they protest families trying to go to a fundraising dinner:




Freedom of speech means all this and more in America with the Supreme Court recently affirming the right to air your grievances at funerals in an 8-1 decision. The members of the Westboro Baptist Church (read: extended family of Fred Phelps) believe the ails of America are being brought upon her because she has accepted homosexuality. God's wrath for making everyone more equal was unleashed on 9/11, kicked the hell out of the Gulf Coast a couple times with Katrina and the BP blowout/unleashing (and possibly still leaking and definitely not cleaned up) hell on Earth, and is to blame for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Therefore, this cult travels around the States protesting the funerals of soldiers coming back in boxes of course. Counter-protester signs are bit more creative which isn't hard when your dealing with complete waiting to drink the Kool-Aid brainwashing that leads you to protest the burial of dead soldiers returning from the graveyard of empires for supposedly being God's retribution for society's acceptance of homosexuality.



If only they could make gay Muslims the ultimate evil when the evidence seems to run contrary to that idea. Enter the wingnuttery of Peter King, congressman from New York and his Faux News henchmen. Tag-teaming with Sean Hannity (who actually got angry at Phelps' daughter, god bless that freaky chick) who said to King in a hard hitting (?!) interview "from everything I've been reading, you're not going after the Muslim community". Forgot, like most of the world, he doesn't read the Washington Post or any source that doesn't confirm his bias. King's on a mission to show that Muslims aren't patriotic enough and not reporting their brethren to the authorities if suspecting them of terrorism. He could've just asked Michael Rolince, head of the counter-terrorism division in the FBI’s Washington field office from 2002 to 2005 who said, "I will tell you in no uncertain terms that the community has on multiple occasions come forward and assisted law enforcement". Or maybe read this PDF. The McArthyism of the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee's first hearings being on Muslim radicalization aside, how do people not wonder why Peter King thought the IRA was a-ok? Brown Muslim terrorists equals bad while white Irish terrorists are good in his world. In fact, he once said that "the moral standing of the IRA is equal to that of the British army". Huh? Well, here, watch on Jon Stewart - he's funnier at least:

The Daily Show - How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sharia?
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Or maybe a Brit has a different view of King supported terrorism...

The Daily Show - Radical Muslim Hearings - IRA Terrorism
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Lucky we've got wingnuts to distract Americans from the real threat of domestic terrorism, otherwise the MSM would have to pay attention to those who are actually threatening and killing people.

The fear card is all that's been left in the deck since WMD's weren't found in Iraq. How could all of the wingnuts, from Faux to the NY Times have been so wrong? Again. The situation in Libya seems like the ultimate damned if we don't, damned if we do situation, and it is - but of our own making. It's not the possible combinations of Gaddafi's name or the hallucinogenic drugs he claimed protesters were on that ensures we keep the area in turmoil. The west has cuddled and raised their dictators in an advanced version of Risk which keeps ending with someone knocking over the board. It's deja-vu all over again, this time with Super Sarkozy and his European arms makers' fear of doing nothing and losing a chance to make some cash by blowing Russian Migs and their own Mirages out of the air in the skies around Tripoli convincing us to intervene. It's always been this way from the Shaw, Sadam and Saud to Ben Ali, Mubarek and Gaddafi, prop them up, build them up, wind them up and let them go. Transparency gets ugly as yes, there's always the oil, we couldn't afford to sit around and do nothing, after all, we couldn't in good conscience continue to buy oil from an autocrat who slaughters his people, could we? UNSC Resolution 1973 seems to have included more bombs than the Arab League expected but probably not enough for these guys, who knew two weeks ago what was going to hit Libya. Watch how General Petraeus greeted his boss Defense Secretary Gates in Afghanistan back in February -



A sideshow of evil is provided by Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF thugs in Zimbabwe who claim that "vigilance has become the order of the day all around. Only God knows why these hopeless copycats, whose death wish is to be arrested at the Harare Gardens and be charged with treason in accordance with the rule of law they love preaching about, honestly think they can do an Egypt or Libya in Zimbabwe". Mugabe chum Ahmadinejad and Iran were the only one's complaining when at least a thousand Saudi Arabian troops marched across the causeway to join those from the UAE to help try to quell the rebellion in Bahrain. And quell they did - the burning and shooting kind. The home of the US Fifth Fleet features a Shi'a majority tired of living in an apartheid Sunni-dominated state and have been protesting for a month with many violent confrontations. With unrest spilling over to the Shiite minority in northeast Saudi towns where they've managed to stage a couple of protests the past couple of weeks despite heavy military deterrents including shots fired, the scale of the potential disaster for American policy was unacceptable and the WMD in Japan provided the perfect cover to violently crack down on protesters nearly unnoticed. A state of emergency was declared, the protesters were cleared out of Pearl Square and the hospitals taken over. Nothing to see here though, move along.



The most important love story of the past generation took place on the US Navy cruiser Quincy fittingly enough on Valentine's Day 1945. On his way back from the conference in Yalta with Stalin and Churchill to plan out the world's configuration as World War II wound down, Roosevelt was first through the Suez Canal to a meeting with the king of Saudi Arabia, beating out the other leading suitor Winston Churchill by a few days.



The ink had yet to dry on the lines drawn on the map and those in the sand still weren't all that cemented until the US gave its full support to the fledgling kingdom and reassured its aged monarch that they would champion the Palestinian cause. King Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud's naivety was possibly the result of never having been outside his country before but in return he gave America a stranglehold on the lifeblood of the economic system to power the post-war growth. This system powered by US petrodollars is so threatened today that King Abdullah had to hurry home to try to appease his people by sprinkling a bit of the cash around. While money may be debt in practice (damn you Nixon!), in theory it's just been a proxy for oil since that meeting aboard the cruiser Quincy on Great Bitter Lake. The love story has continued with each president and successive king, working on the 12th and 5th respectively, each partnership able to dance the complicated steps of the Palestine/Israel/Iran blame boogie.

The silence coming out of Bahrain and to a lesser extent, Yemen, is deafening yet anything but surprising, look at a damn map. No wonder American and the oil consumers sit back and accept Saudi and UAE troops under the auspices of the Gulf Cooperation Council being brought in to help crush a pro-democracy movement in Bahrain to protect the flow of oil. The love for black gold is so strong that America has even forgiven the Saudis for supplying most of the 9/11 terrorists and in fact wants to train more Saudi pilots, this time to fly F-15Es in Idaho as part of a $60 billion arms deal. From Yemen, we hear even less of an autocratic ruler perhaps using poison gas on his people, because, well, Americans provide the instruments of death to this or that autocratic rule but not as much to the other.



Who needs Hollywood or Bollywood when the streets of Lahore provide CIA not-so-secret war movie scenes. The American public will never understand why the Other hates them so much when they watch their President demand the release of their embassy worker on the news interspersed with scenes of Americans being burned in effigy on Pakistani streets. All too many will never know their 'free' media was asked by their government to lie to the public and keep the identity of Raymond Davis, an American CIA operative working for Blackwater (now Xe) secret from the American public. All told four people were killed in the incident (a pedestrian run down by the SUV dispatched to pick up Davis and the wife of one of the shooting victims committed suicide) but it will have the effect of making "the Other" even more distrustful of America and weakening future claims of diplomatic immunity. The smugness of the American belief in their superior news service makes the situation even worse for the ignorant viewer as he pities the 'uninformed' Pakistanis, who ironically know so much more. To fix it, a little blood money is simply paid to the families and Davis is magically pardoned and whisked out of the country. To celebrate the deal, the US decided to take out a peaceful meeting of tribal elders with some predator drones. They rain down in Pakistan killing nine civilians for each terrorist target while Americans reading their Newsweek will smugly believe their president is efficiently killing the enemy and can therefore make jokes about them.

Abandoning another election promise, Obama "regrettably" vetoed an Arab-sponsored UN resolution branding Israeli settlements illegal this month, his administrations first veto. The resolution, sponsored by 130 countries, reaffirmed "that the Israeli settlements established in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and constitute a major obstacle to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace." The US veto in sole-support of Israel has been a tradition since March 17th, 1970. 14 of the 15 Security Council members voted in favor of the resolution, adding to the insane number of times the US has defied world opinion alone to prolong the Palestinian dispute. Then we're supposed to be surprised when the Israelis announce further illegal settlement construction the next day. Quietly every other day, the IDF kills a Palestinian civilian with impunity in the occupied territories. It's a terrorist attack when a wacko Palestinian knifes five Israelis in their home but a security operation when the Israeli army kills hundreds of Palestinian children.

Speaking of the US and the UN, you won't hear the Koch suckers on Faux News informing the public that the Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has signed legislation that puts his state in contravention to article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A news network that employees half, five of the ten, possible Republican candidates for president isn't there to inform so you can decide. Whatever, there's something about torture in there too, right? Instead, Republican presidential hopefuls like Mike Huckabee are employed by Fox to feed lies about his president, "his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British are a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather." WMD's providing a cover of ignorance allowing Walker to ram through an austerity bill that lost all its financial savings and only left in the budget busting bits to avoid quorum in service to the Koch Brothers. Funny the governor had time in a budget crisis to sort out strategy with his puppet master:





So, he's following in the steps of Ronald Reagan? Maybe it would be more instructive for Faux News viewers to learn their hero, Ronald Reagan was really a raging socialist!



In 1980, two out of three American workers were in defined benefit pension plans with guaranteed lifetime benefits. Now it’s one in five and falling. The end result is the emergence of the politics of resentment. Most workers don't have pensions, so why should union members? Pit the workers against each other. Keep the lower classes fighting each other, while the rich loot the country. It's all about what teachers make instead of what the corpocracy is stealing. Classic divide and conquer technique making jokes reality. A CEO, a public employee union member and Tea Partier were all sitting around a table with a plate with a dozen cookies. The CEO took eleven cookies for himself. He turned to the Tea Partier and said "watch out for that union guy, he wants part of your cookie."

Meanwhile, in Michigan it gets even crazier...



I suppose next we'll be hearing about the new Strength through Joy program. In case you didn't get that, governor Rick Snyder has made it so he can declare a financial emergency and appoint an administrator to take over towns, human or corporation. So, when the taxes run out, which inevitably will when you cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations by $1.8 billion and raise $1.7 billion from the poor and elderly, and the townships default on the loans they took out to buy a new sewer system or the like, the banks they can't pay will take over the running of the town. These administrators are empowered to do anything to return their version of economic stability (them getting paid) from voiding contracts and collective bargaining agreements to dissolving the town council and school board as well as firing anyone including elected officials, hiring private security, unincorporating the town, and of course selling off public property. Oh, and of course the citizens have no say in this. Go Democracy!

All is good though as the newest Forbes rich list celebrates the increase in the number of billionaires to 1,210 and their total wealth to $4.5 trillion. It's somehow good for the economy that the richest 400 Americans now hold more wealth than half of the population combined, 155 million people. When it's so easy to convince people that teacher's unions caused the financial crisis it's no wonder that at the top of Sunday's New York Times best-seller list for paperback nonfiction was "Heaven Is for Real". Yep, the near-death tale of the three year old son of an evangelical pastor in which he not only met his great-grandfather, the biblical figures Samson, John the Baptist and Jesus, who had eyes that "were just sort of a sea-blue and they seemed to sparkle", but also his younger sister who was never born due to a miscarriage is the most popular NONFICTION book in America. Wonder if he asked about the crucifixion or how bringing torture back from the history books is supposed to spread peace and love. Along with neo-fascist parties serving in western European governments such ideas would have been dismissed as ethical disasters which could never really happen just a decade ago. But there they are in Stockholm, Amsterdam and Budapest while torture has spread from Abu-Ghraib to the military brig in Quantico, Virginia in the blink of an eye.

State Department spokesman PJ Crowley was forced to resigned from his post just two days after calling the treatment of alleged Wikileaks source Private Bradley Manning "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid". Regardless of whether what Manning did was a crime, his treatment amounts to torture and is further proof that Obama is actually a more dangerous person to have as president than Dubya. With George you knew where you stood, with Nodrama it all depends on the optics and what the polls tell him, so you want to keep it quiet when you're torturing your own in America. Crowley was the author of a homeland security report that foreshadowed his demise as it read in part, "[W]e have policies, including harsh interrogation techniques, detention without charge, government surveillance, and immigration that are inconsistent with our values and our long-term interest. All this in the name of something called the “war on terror." The ultimate WMD, "the war on terror".

The same passage from impossibility to normalization is happening as reality melts into a new age. Literally in some cases like the ecological threat of global warming in the new Anthropocene Era where "humans - thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuels and other related activities - have become a geological agent on this planet." Or not. Nuclear power plants, which are definitely anthropogenic, meltdown thanks to an earthquake/tsunami one two punch. Maybe the tremor wasn't caused by HAARP but the building of the Three Gorge Dam in China was most likely a factor in intensifying their last big Sichuan quake. And don't tell me you haven't noticed the increase in the number of big, devastating quakes from Chile to New Zealand, Haiti and now Japan. Yeah, I know, there have always been earthquakes in these places but we are living a time when we and they are all connected by the capitalist market amplifying the aftershocks felt around the world. The mode of our survival depends on the maturity of our collective reason which unfortunately seems to only have one button, MORE. This 30 year experiment in planned stupidity has reached a critical point as the fuel may be cut off that we need to burn up the planet. More disasters mean more money for those who seem to have it to burn, but we'll probably just keep blaming the teachers.

The Daily Show - Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street
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Fun and games. The cycle of death and violence continues alongside the cycle of poverty and larceny. A delicate balancing act of choosing among which autocrats to support and which ones to help bring down in a new era of regime alteration change. Shared sacrifice translates in the real world to making the poor, elderly, children, and now working-class families pay for the losses of the ultra-wealthy. WMDs like Sarah Palin are able to spread their fear and hate as far as India so we don't notice the next disaster being planned by Wall Street. I'd like to believe in Tony Blair's hell if only to know there's a special place reserved there for him just for the part he played in re-legitimizing Colonel Gaddafi not to mention his warmongering throughout the region. But like the corporate minions they are, the press will continue to feed us Charlie Sheen stories while sweeping the real evil under the rug. One can only hope the day is fast approaching when that rug gets pulled from under all of them.