So maybe not every democratic election is as bad as that in Peru. According to Mario Vargas Llosa, these were the alternatives facing Peruvians as they decided where to mark their ballot in last Sunday's presidential election. Yet, a closer look at the state of democracy around the world reveals an unsettling picture. Not only do most voters usually face a choice between bad and worse but those who we select seem to be wielding ever decreasing power. While disenfranchised peoples across much of the Middle East are dying for the opportunity that we take for granted, many of us are waking up to the realization that we really don't have any choice either. As elected politicians lose power to our unelected corporate masters, democracy is more and more resembling the pancurium bromide anesthetic in the lethal injection which paralyzes the condemned inmate before the potassium chloride of debt slavery stops the heart of the hitherto free people of the world.
Perhaps we should save a little room at our Peruvian pity party for the poor Portuguese. At least the voters in Peru had a choice, albeit a rather unappetizing one, between a fascist and Chavista (they went for the Chavista); the voters in Portugal on Sunday could vote for the incumbent PS, the "socialist" party to implement the austerity measures commanded by the troika, or the Social Democrat Party to, um, implement the austerity measures ordered by the troika. In case you missed it, the troika isn't a new Russian vodka, but the frontmen for the sovereign debt holders, the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund. They dictate the terms of the austerity reforms that the overly-indebted nations must abide by in order to qualify them for more debt. Yep, the program that's working so well in Greece and Ireland has come to Portugal. Half a million people marching the streets to protest the program in March were ignored much like the millions who screamed their disapproval of the Iraq war in 2003. Our voices no longer matter as much as the bomb makers or the bond holders.
Portugal's Geração à rasca (or "generation of junk") proved no more effective in getting their message out and attaining their goals than Spain's Indignados last month. Real Democracia Ya! demanded political reform that would break the two-party rule and convinced much of the youth to withhold their vote in May's regional elections, votes that normally would have gone to the "socialist" PSOE party, to show they don't support the austerity program being installed there. Over 20% unemployment (43% for those aged 18-25) should be the priority of a government that calls itself socialist. The result? A near clean sweep for the PP, or Partido Populaire, the descendants of Franco's fascist regime. Fittingly, the righwing Social Democrat Party won in Portugal as well. It's the slow creep towards complete loss of autonomy that has lulled the majority to sleep. One step at a time, one country after another, eventually we will all wake up to a reality in which our future has been monetized and securitized in order to keep the interest payments flowing to the banks who own us. Organize and the government will declare it illegal. Protest and the state's security apparatus will be deployed against you.
Choice? When the Harper regime was forced to call a national election in Canada last month after being found in contempt of parliament, many Canadians decided to try to break the Conservative-Liberal duopoly by voting for the NDP or Greens. The result? While the hardcore rightwing voters remained faithful to the Conservatives, the leftwing vote was scattered which allowed the Conservatives to claim a majority 52% of seats with just 39% of the vote. The hocus pocus of the first to the post voting system stuck it to the UK just as bad last year. Many voters, fed up with more than a decade of Labour rule but unable in good conscience to vote Conservative, opted for the Liberal Democrats. The result? A Cameron Conservative minority government which asked Nick Clegg's Lib Dems to join a coalition, and presto change'o' - ConDem'ned to a failing austerity future. Woohoo, at least Vodafone and the banks are happy!
But it's that great bastion of liberty and freedom that is proving once and for all what a failure democracy can be. Anyone who didn't become disillusioned by the Barack Obama hope and change candidate turned corporate war monger president just isn't paying attention. Branded as a man of and for the people, few noticed that his biggest campaign donors were in fact Goldman Sachs et al who have got more than they paid for. What happened to single payer/public option health care? Remember financial reform, foreclosure protection, bank bailouts, and jobs-jobs-jobs? Remember Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, civil liberties, ? Remember global warming, offshore drilling, clean coal, and nuclear energy? Remember immigration reform, the Pentagon budget, repair of the infrastructure, military commissions, the suppressed torture photos, education reform, the US-enabled coup in Honduras, the continuing Cold War sanctions on Cuba, the Palestinian situation and the Obama wars, wars, wars? Remember restrictions on abortion, the Employee Free Choice Act, the Bush-Obama millionaire tax cuts? Me too. Well, after all, he was the lesser of two evils, right?
It gets worse as no longer will children want to grow up to be firemen or teachers as their unions will be broken and their professions downgraded to rent-a-cop status. No, they'll dream of being corporations when they grow up. After all, corporations are people, so why can't people be corporations? The Supreme Court's Citizen United decision was the final nail in the coffin for electoral fairness as the floodgates were opened wide to corporate sponsorship of candidates. We've made fun of the farce that is the Republicrat-Demopublican duopoly that is the American coin toss in the past but it's sure to get worse. The race for the White House in 2012 should more appropriately be called the race to a billion. As in, who can raise a billion dollars first, Obama or whichever monkey the Republicans manage to pick. Seriously, it seems the party of Lincoln is throwing out clowns like Bachman, Santorum and Gingrich in a vain attempt to make Sarah Palin look electable. Good luck with that America.
There's much to like about democracy in theory but we have to wake up the fact that it needs an overhaul or at least a tuneup as the cons begin to outweigh the pros. A misinformed electorate, abstruse voting systems designed to confuse and favor the incumbent alongside a devolution of powers to unelected bodies to name but a few. More dangerously, in many people’s eyes, certain government functionaries may legitimately take actions that would be condemned as criminal if anyone else were to take them. If I were to send a private Predator drone to Pakistan to fire explosive missiles into villages, killing women, children, and other innocents, I would be seen as a monstrous mass murderer. How did Barack Obama come by the right to kill innocent people? By democratic election to the presidency of the United States, of course. "When the president does it," Richard Nixon insisted, "that means that it is not illegal." Most people actually believe, and act on the belief, that mere election to a political office can endow a person with standing to disregard the moral requirements applicable to people in general. And not only the elected official, but all those officials beneath him in the chain of command, nobody demands that the technician who sits comfortably in the United States and directs the lethal drone be brought to justice; he, as the saying goes, is "only following orders."
As much of the west heads for the austerity inspired double dip recession, spin control will go into overdrive. This time will be worse than 2008 as government debt loads have exploded everywhere leaving little fiscal policy maneuvering room, so in order to keep the bond holders happy and the interest payments flowing, more cuts will be demanded, leading to further slowing of the economy leading to, more cuts and, well, you get the picture. The corporate controlled media will dutifully report deceptive economic statistics about green shoots or some such nonsense all the while ignoring the one way out - actually asking the people what to do like they did in Iceland. Yep, home of Bjork and unpronounceable volcanoes that erupt whenever Obama comes to Europe, was also the first country to guarantee its banks debts back in October of 2008. Virtually unheard of in the west thanks to a media blackout, the Kitchenware Revolution, so-called because of the pots and pans used by protestors, forced the fall of the government.
Then Iceland did the unthinkable and asked her people if they really wanted to spend the next 15 years paying back $3.5 billion at 5.5% to British and Dutch banks thanks to the gambling losses of a few bankers. In American and the UK they turned on the printing presses, in Iceland they had not one, but two referendums in which they voted not to force every man, woman and child to pay back over $10,000 each. Instead, they voted in a new government, now led by the first openly gay Prime Minister, (Saint Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir), convened a constitutional assembly made up of non-politicians to draft a new constitution and most importantly, began arresting the banksters who caused the crisis.
Democracy gives a free pass to those who rape and pillage African, Asian, South American and now European nations, in fact we call them socialists and wait until they rape hotel maids until we finally decide to prosecute them for their crimes. Until being caught with his pants down DSK, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was the leading candidate to run for the presidency of France under the socialist banner. When democracy offers the choice between a neoliberal right winger in favor of cutting corporate taxes, services, pensions and regulations to support the gilded class and their banking buddies or, well, the same but with a different name, like socialist, no wonder much of the world is in fact turning away from democracy. Yep, the last five years has seen the world become less democratic. It's not hard to see why. While those who have languished under authoritarian regimes for decades fight for what they think will be a brake on unbridled greed and power, democracy in fact is fulfilling the iron law of oligarchs and doing the opposite. As Robert Michels stated, all organizations, no matter how democratic or autocratic inevitably develop into oligarchies, in the case of western democracies, one formed by the corporate class, the corpocracy, controlled by a sociopathic elite.
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
-Winston Churchill
Meanwhile, so sure of the superiority of our democratic values we've spent much of the past decade (ok, maybe a little more) justifying bombing and killing brown people by claiming the moral high ground of spreading democracy. It's a useful fiction as many are duped into believing that somehow their quadrennial ballot box charade lends consent of the governed and thus legitimizes government when in fact it is the corporate overlords and their lobbies who write the laws for the governed. Strategic voting along with voter apathy, stupidity and cupidity are minor problems when compared with the damage done by those given the moral pass to commit the crimes they do once elected. Sadly, democracy, "rule of the people" has become "ruling the sheeple". I wonder if we were warned this would happen?
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.
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 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.
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.
"Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world"
- Walid Rachid, member of the Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement
Reading the headlines and commentary from the mainstream media one would think the revolutions in Tunis and Egypt have succeeded. The corrupt, authoritarian regimes have been toppled and a future of freedom guaranteed with the only question being who will be next, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain or Iran. However, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the people's uprising in Egypt and Mubarak's forced departure constitute the end of the beginning of their revolution. Mubarak's second choice to succeed, Omar Suleiman, AKA Snidely Whiplash is still calling the shots in a country where the army is in charge, the constitution has been suspended and the parliament dissolved. Worse, nothing has happened that will change the fact that 40% of Egyptians will now return to living on less than $2 a day in an economy set up by Hosni's first choice, his son Gamel, for the exclusive benefit of the oligarchs. However, I'm going to don my Panglossian cap and imagine that we are in fact living in the best of all possible worlds and imagine how the chaotic scenes in Cairo and Tunis could be an inspiration to spur action against repression around the world. Perhaps we've been given a wake up call and a template on how to break free of the bonds holding us hostage on an accelerating crash course for disaster woven by all of the threads that make up the tapestry of global control which we're watching fray in front of our eyes.
While the 24 hour news cycle will have us wondering if the Muslim Brotherhood will hijack the Egyptian revolution like the theocracy did in Iran over 30 years ago, I'm hopeful it will stir us to focus on what we can do to break the corpocracy which has taken a stranglehold on our democracy. Nobody wants to be told that their life is based on a lie. From the cuckolded husband (orcuckqueaned wife)to the fundamentalist fanatic the job of the propagandist is facilitated by the fact that it's much easier to continue to accept the deception than to question one's very beliefs. After sleepwalking through the aftermath of the financial crisis many people are now waking up to the reality of its consequences - draconian austerity measures are being taken by governments around the world to combat ballooning deficits fueled largely by bailouts given to large corporations combined with falling tax revenues that were the result of the greed and hubris of those very same institutions. We're told there is no other way, that we must pay. In a time of permanent war, exploding poverty, threats to civil liberties and ecological devastation, humanity faces the challenge and opportunity to choose powerful and creative nonviolent alternatives. We can continue to opt for the devastating spiral of violence and injustice, or we can build civil societies where the dignity of all is respected and the needs of all are met.
We knew the cuts would be brutal and of course regressive in the UK with the incoming Tory government last year. Yet there were hopes by some (including me, sorry guys) that their junior coalition partners, Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats could moderate some of the cuts and would ensure that the rich would pay as well as the poor for the devastation caused by the banking collapse. Instead, Clegg, Prime Minister Cameron and his Eton cohort George Osborne cut a deal with Vodafone to forgive £4.8 billion in unpaid taxes while tripling tuition fees and making social cuts so deep there won't be enough libraries, housing or services to provide jobs or any hope for the future, let alone support Cameron's creepily Orwellian sounding Big Society. Seems the river Styx has been crossed and like Cerebrus this three-headed monster will ensure there's no escape from Hades once every public service is thrown open to outside providers, be they private companies, charities or voluntary organizations.
In a rerun of 1981, it's hoped that the public will be pacified by the pomp and circumstance of another royal wedding while the fabric of society is cut to pieces to knit a jumper for those who caused the crisis. If you live in the UK, where the economy shrunk again last quarter, and are afraid of the future being imposed on you, take a look at UK Uncut. They are calling for a Bail-In to replace the Bail-Outs of the banks to be funded by tax evaders, both corporate and personal, such as Sir Philip Green who gets to advise the government on cuts while avoiding paying taxes. They are focusing their efforts on raising awareness of how big business manages to escape corporate taxes and receive government largesse while the majority of the population is forced to pay for their losses. It is an open platform for self-organizing direct action, in other words, it's a revolution engine. Anyone anywhere can list an action anytime. Last weekend featured day cares and libraries in many Barclay's branches while next weekend will focus on RBS. Sign up to take part in one of their events near you, the biggest coming Saturday March 26th in London.
While the UK is ConDem'd by a coalition trying to channel Margaret Thatcher, across the pond there's a Democratic president doing his best Ronald Reagan imitation to please an opposition guided more by biblical scripture than scientific or economic principles. The task of waking the public from its slumber won't be easy where much of the population was so easily duped by a pair of billionaires into creating a movement that blamed the government for the economic meltdown. Conspiracy theorists no longer need rumors of the proceeding of the likes of the Bilderbergers when we've got the real life Koch brothers manipulating public policy in the open. Helped in part by last year's Supreme Court Citizens United decision, they managed to put Tea Partiers into Congress to work directly for corporations. New levels of absurdity were reached in a political process already too subservient to lobbyists by deciding that election spending is speech and that since corporations are people (really), that spending on elections by corporations can't be restricted as neither can people's speech. If you don't think it's right you can join Common Cause who are leading the fight to bring to light the conflict of interest the Supreme Court justices, particularly Clarence Thomas, who made the ruling have managed to keep hidden until now.
You may also have noticed the $1.1 trillion in cuts over 10 years announced by Obama the other day didn't take enough heating oil from the poor to placate the Republicans while bankers' bonuses have returned to eight-figure levels and corporations made record profits last quarter. Yeah, you guessed it, the cuts will ensure the poor and middle class pay for the banks and corporations screwing up the economy. You hear a lot of wingnuts complaining about the onerous 35% corporate income tax rate yet it's rarely mentioned that 115 of the S&P 500 companies actually pay less than 20% while 39 of them paid less than 10%. Oh, and that doesn't include the 37 companies like Citigroup and AIG that received more in tax credits than they paid. There's also Exxon who made $37.3 billion in profits but didn't pay a penny to Uncle Sam and most egregious of all Bank of America who made $4.4 billion pre-tax in 2009 and received $1.9 billion tax benefit and GE whose $10.3 billion in pretax income was supplemented by a tax benefit of $1.1 billion. Hoping to highlight this injustice, thanks to the 10-step guide provided by the Nation, a fledgling US Uncut movement was born. Sign up and join in the fun of the February 26th Day of Action.
On the heels of extending the Bush tax cuts which cost the government $2.48 trillion over the last 10 years (PDF comparing that to health care costs), Obama's budget cuts need to cut off grandma's heating oil. Only religious fundamentalism can explain cutting off funding for a program that saves $4 for every dollar spent (PDF) as that's exactly what the House just did by passing a resolution to end funding for Planned Parenthood. Oh, and increase military spending by $22 billion while the media repeats the duckspeak lie of cutting $78 billion. Strange, if they really wanted to cut $100 billion out of the budget, all they needed to do was end the killing of brown people in a far away land that no one seems to care about anymore. If you care, why don't you check out Russ Feingold's new movement Progressives United. You might remember him as the only good senator besides Bernie Sanders until the Tea Party money came along to unseat him; now he's got some time on his hands and a corpocracy to expose and depose. Speaking of Feingold, you might have heard there's been some action in his home state of Wisconsin.
Madison, Wisconsin has become the epicenter of the fight against the Shock Doctrine and turned it once again into what Teddy Roosevelt called America's "laboratory of democracy". The state capital might not be Tahrir Square but Feingold's home state has become the site of the most important fight in America today. New Governor Hosni Mubarek, er Colonel Gaddafi (it was Republican Representative Paul Ryan who said "It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison") no, Scott Walker has decided not to let a crisis go to waste by taking a complex problem, making it worse and using it to push through his ideological agenda. Yep, a crisis caused by rampant inequality which led to a financial crash is being paid for by public employees instead of those who got rich by fleecing the system. Should we be surprised that the Koch Industries PAC was Walker's second biggest campaign contributor?
Class warfare anyone? How is it that people making $50,000 a year are the ones who caused the crisis when John Paulson can make $5 billion and pay only 15% taxes? Ever get paid overtime? You like having weekends off? Safe workplace, health care? Remember the middle class? All courtesy of unions, a dying institution in America; coincidentally(?) the middle class is going extinct as well. Hate child-labor laws and prefer kids working in sweatshops to going to school? Well, get ready, that's what they're trying to bring back in Missouri (seriously, look). Walker wants Wisconsin wants to join Virginia, Texas, Georgia and North and South Carolina in banning collective bargaining for its teachers; those states rank 44th, 47th, 48th, 49th and 50th respectively in ACT/SAT scores nationwide while Wisconsin is currently 2nd. The oligarchs are still in control of the message, stirring up a culture war in which we blame everyone else except those who actually blew up the economy. Wake up and smell the irony, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.
It can be argued that many unions are in desperate need of reform but they represent the only protection we have against corporations and government. Wisconsin, considered a cradle of US labor rights and progressive social policies, was the first state to give its public workers the right to bargain collectively, a right that Scott Walker is now proposing to take away. Yep, one could understand asking workers to take pay cuts as well as contribute more to their health and pension plans but this animus goes too far and that's why people are fighting back. It's great to see Democrats finally show some spine and the people finally snap out the their trance; legislators on the lam (thank them here) and protesters on the streets. Want more crazy? Walker channeled his inner Gaddafi and ordered the National Guard to get ready to respond to a strike or any resistance to his plan. I suppose he doesn't know the last time Wisconsin called in the National Guard was way back in 1886, when they shot on a rally of Milwaukee workers advocating an eight-hour work day - five unarmed workers were killed in the massacre. We shouldn't be surprised, it was such freedom loving patriots as Limbaugh, Beck and Santorum who denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.
Even crazier? You betcha! The deficit that needs to be addressed by the cuts was manufactured by Walker and his cohorts. January 31st, the state had a $121.4 million surplus which was wiped out when Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups. Crazier? No, can't be. Yep, the proposed bill would allow for the selling of state-owned heating/cooling/power plants without bids and without concern for the legally-defined public interest. Best yet, Walker is only proposing to strip the bargaining power of the unions who didn't support his election campaign. Coincidentally, it is the firefighters and police officers whose unions were spared that will be his last line of defense if the protests turn violent. Maybe you oughta send MiniMubarek an email to govgeneral@wisconsin.gov to let him know what you think. It might be an exaggeration to compare Cairo to Madison but what we're seeing shock resistance to the exploitation of a manufactured crisis by constricting the democratic space through the reduction of the ability of the workers to participate in the formation of their economic future. Contrary to what Faux News et al will tell you, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications (PDF). This isn't about being fiscally responsible so much as it is about power - taking it away from the people and handing it to the oligarchs. Who better than Naomi Klein herself to explain the importance of shock resistance and then why not join the Wisconsin Wave?
Exploding inequality and grinding poverty were the match that sparked the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions when struck by new and old media technologies provided by Twitter, Facebook and Al-Jazeera. Taking a more practical path and serving as a reminder that inequality in the US is greater than in Egypt Tunisia or Yemeni is the Progressive Strategy Handbook(PDF) from Cognitive Policy Works. Their proposal is set out in four parts from setting the landscape to the strategic need to set the agenda as well as the psychological nuances involved in preparing to engage the public along with the technological power of social media for driving cultural and political change and finally and perhaps most importantly, the need to be an innovator in the ultimate goal of changing how politics is done.
Perhaps you're not stirred to action watching $4 billion being given away to oil companies while cutting $1.6 billion from the EPA. There's a chance you don't care that in Arizona, cuts to the Medicare system have already killed two people and 98 more are waiting to die as the state won't pay for transplants but can give tax cuts to corporations which will cost the state $538 million by 2018. But maybe you've caught the doublespeak coming out of your telescreens and are starting to wonder why no one else has noticed the hypocrisy. How does Hillary's head not explode from the cognitive dissonance as she urges countries to embrace internet freedoms while the US is moving in the opposite direction. The House just voted to extend three controversial domestic spy provisions of the Patriot Act, customs officials seized 18 more internet domains without giving the pirate website owners a chance to challenge the forfeiture and the administration is trying to expand the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which already requires telecoms and internet access providers to have wiretapping capabilities. The FBI wants Congress to demand that same requirement for encrypted e-mail services like Blackberry and also wants it for social networks and peer-to-peer messaging networks like Skype. Oh, and the Justice Department is in federal court trying to get Twitter to cough up records related to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and others, including an Icelandic parliamentarian.
Fancy a little vigilante justice? Think you know your way around the intertubes? Then you might want to think about joining the gang over at Anonymous. Love 'em or hate 'em, in addition to adding another computer word to the lexicon, their brand of hacktivism has gotten the attention of the powers that be. All you need is to get the Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC), log onto Twitter, find the latest Anonoymous tweets (if an op is in progress) and join in the revolution, but remember, you'll be up against powerful enemies with friends in high places. The first target of their information warfare was the Church of Scientology in 2007 followed by the Australian government for introducing internet censorship laws. By far their most publicized attacks however have come in defense of Wikileaks and its supporters. Operation Payback saw them take on/out Mastercard, Amazon and Paypal for behaving like the US government's lapdogs. While Assange's persecution has been well-documented, the forgotten hero may be Private Bradley Manning who may have supplied Wikileaks with the bulk of their stash of illicit trash. Based on the testimony of one extremely untrustworthy source Manning has been locked up in solitary confinement in a military brig for nine months and the torture is having the desired effect. Did we mention he's a UK citizen? No trial, indefinite detention, torture, sound familiar? Guess this is what happens to a society once they condone torture. We should all Stand With Brad, or help all soldiers who have the Courage to Resist when their conscience tells them.
Anonymous' most recent actions have revealed the most sinister face of corporatism. One moment HBGary, a private cyber-security firm, thought they had unmasked Anonymous, the next the self-styled, new-age Robin Hoods had implicated the corpocracy in a smear campaign. Among 50,000 hacked emails was a report the firm had prepared with several other online security firms on how to destroy Wikilieaks for Bank of America in their defense against yet to be released cables expected to reveal corruption and fraud at the bank. It's too complicated for my little brain, so here's the story in the words of one of the targets, Glenn Greenwald:
The Chamber of Commerce, that once upstanding organization that used to help small business, has become a corporate tool to hammer home the conservative agenda. While Citizens United allows unlimited election contributions, not many corporations want their names attached to the spending and therefore funnel most of the money through groups such as the Chamber, hiding their influence and actions from the public and shareholders alike. Ironically, they sued the Yes Men a couple years ago for deceiving the press and public yet engage in that very same behavior when it comes to sullying the reputations of those who would oppose them. Not to mention their disinformation campaign in opposing healthcarereform, employee free choice and other labor legislation, veterans' rights, banking regulations and, of course, transparency. An honest person in the media is dangerous, just knock off a couple of the honest journalists and activists who are left, then there's nobody left to defend the truth. Bring on the Lindsey Lohan stories!
The Yes Men have been trying to fight irrationality with the ludicrous for over 15 years, managing to pull off some audacious stunts whose ridiculousness is only matched by the inanity of those being mocked. They've recently launched their Yes Men Lab in an effort to help grow their movement by sharing their experiences of the past decade and a half. Networking with social justice organizations to spread their ideas for activism. Though their victims such as the Chamber of Commerce seldom seem to get it, their brand of consciousness awareness can be hilarious as well as contagious, so join the fun!
It's hard not to see the election of Ronald Reagan as the last inflection point, one of his first acts as President was to break the air traffic controllers union. It was the beginning of the class war waged by America's corporate oligarchy to transfer wealth from the working and middle classes to the rich and to deregulate the economy in order to increase the wealth and power of the corporate and financial elite. Since then, the share of wealth held by the top 0.1% (the richest one in a thousand households) has grown from 2.7% to 12.3%, a fourfold increase. The same time frame has seen an identical growth in incarceration rates and costs thanks to a war on the poor cleverly disguised as the war on drugs; 1 in 100 American adults are now behind bars. We've managed to trade in a cold war for a warmer war on terror as an excuse to ship off just enough of our youth to keep the official unemployment rate under 10%. California came close but we still need to organize if we want to legalize and end the war at home so sign up with NORML.
The women's liberation movement helped the other half of the population into the workforce just in time for middle class families to keep their head above water for awhile and when that wasn't enough, we worked more hours but still couldn't offset stagnating wages. Finally, the promise of never falling real estate prices meant people could use their homes as cash machines which worked great until the curtain was lifted on the wizards of Wall Street. Now, everyone is being decimated by a mortgage system that became so complex no one knew who owed or owned what leading to foreclosures on families who have never missed a payment and people who have never even had a mortgage. Whether you're facing foreclosure, have an underwater mortgage, or are just a concerned homeowner, it’s important that you contact your bank and demand to see the original note on your mortgage. Better yet, turn the system to your advantage and foreclose on the bank.
The right screaming about government taking over the private sector and the left about the reverse has distracted us from the reality of landing somewhere in the middle where a government by and for corporations control one another. Just look at any industry and corresponding government department, financial, military, agriculture, energy it doesn't matter which, the pattern is the same. A revolving door of an elite class with occasional holidays in the world of academia. Yesterday's institutions were built to narcotize us into sleep and while we dozed, they purloined our future, looted our societies, trampled nature, eviscerated our communities, ransacked our values, and body-slammed our very sense of self-worth. There are many positive signs that people are waking up to the nihilism of the present system where industry provides the regulators to write the rules so they can later be rewarded with executive positions in the board rooms of the very firms they once regulated. Perhaps this new 'Nile-ism' is a sign that enough people see what's happening around them and realize the system is broken, desperately in need of being torn down and built again. We're told we have a choice, after all, this is democracy, when in fact we can choose between a wolf and a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's a false choice, just like the austerity packages being introduced from Madison to London which tell us that we need to pay for the excesses of the past by punishing the poor and middle class.
The stock market has completely disconnected from the economy and is little more than a place for speculators and algorithms to compete over who can trade his way to the most money. The casino's high rollers room is roped off to the masses while the VIPs engage in flash trading and front running stocks in a computer power arms race rendering the idea of stocks representing value obsolete. Any attempt at regulation will be stymied by Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary who believes what we need is a financial deepening. Crisis is good for his buddies, as the more Americans there are on food stamps, the more money JP Morgan Chase makes; thanks to food speculation opened up by deregulation, business is sure to be good. It's not surprising in a country where the government spends more on military bands than it does on public broadcasters. Oh, yeah, forgot the old saw: Funding NASCAR is freedom while funding NPR is tyranny.
The unnatural coalition of wealthy corporate capitalists and poor social conservatives who drive right wing ideology is exemplified by a couple of US congressmen. Chairman Darrell Issa of the House Oversight Committee is at the service of his corporate overlords. Add in a little John Shimkus who will chair the Subcommittee on Environment and Economy and there's no end to the destruction they can wreak. Some may think it's not a good idea to put a guy who quotes biblical scripture to explain why climate change isn't occurring in charge of anything to do with the environment but god still sells in the bible belt. For those who don't think Yahweh will save us from ourselves or don't think it's fair that mining companies are allowed to blow the tops off mountains to extract the minerals, you can arrange a sleepover in your governor's offices. That's what they did in Kentucky where they decided to push back against a corrupt government which has joined in a lawsuit against the EPA for trying to block some of the more harmful aspects of the practice. Never mind that these companies get the profits while the commons of the people are destroyed, the very earth, rivers, streams and air.
Don't let them convince you that the small stuff doesn't add up. Get out of your car, buy locally produced produce, turn off your TV - it all counts. Join 350.org, take part in Earth Hour March 26th at 8:30 pm, hell, plant a tree. If you're in Italy you can join the call for Silvio Berlusconi to resign for any of a myriad of offenses (he's defending himself in four separate trials). Bunga-Bunga is the most titillating and you probably think it's not right your prime minister pays for sex with an underage girl and later uses his influence to have her released from prison by claiming she was a relative of, you guessed it, Hosni Mubarak. Move your money out of the big banks, buy silver to help crash JP Morgan, join the Common Good Bank or flamenco dancers in Spanish banks. In Greece, why not turn transparency detective to expose the rich who camouflage their swimming pools from satellite pictures in an effort to evade taxes. French? Maybe you should question who sold the fighters being used to bomb civilians in Libya. Irish? Probably a good time to vote for a government who won't sell your future to the banks. If you think funding for the future is a better idea than buying bombs when 50% of the schools in Detroit have been ordered to close, sign a petition here or rally for education in Texas here. With media consolidation picking up speed, there's no wonder so many don't even realize there's still a war going on, but you can help bring an end to the longest war in American history (now in it's 10th year!) by helping Rethink Afghanistan. Tell Congress to protect the open internet. End the next war, the one on women, before they win too many battles. If you still believe in the American Dream, heed the MoveOn.org call to action this weekend. Finally, don't forget to join US Uncut or UK Uncut for their next big action February 26th, find a creative way to highlight why we need a bail in as they make us pay for the bail out.
It's now or never, something needs to be done soon as those in control of the economic and political levers are the same ones making the rules of their use. The plutocrats know the limits of growth have been reached economically and environmentally and have doubled down to get as much out as quickly as they can before the game's up. The North and South Poles are melting, Brazilian rain forests and the Russian tundra are burning, the Australian outback and Indus river basin are drowning. Crying orange men who used to hand out tobacco company bribes on the floor of the House are dictating a penny-wise and pound-foolish policy guaranteed to destroy his nation. Turn Facebook into a weapon to spread knowledge and form alliances instead of a tool to dull the senses. Question why Google exhorts us to do no evil while doing just that by dodging taxes through income shifting schemes known as the "Double Irish" and the "Dutch Sandwich". I'd call reducing their overseas tax rate to 2.4% a Dutch oven for the rest of us. Join a movement, spread the word, read an article longer than this post to learn about a subject instead of simply feeding off the informational tit of the corporate controlled mainstream media. They have an interest in propagating the system as their ownership is that system and in places like Canada now have a license to lie.
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Part-time recluse, part-time rockstar,full-time ranter. Paying the bills teaching English in the wild west of capitalism.
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and turned it once again into what Teddy Roosevelt called America's "
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