tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6102996260548763202024-02-08T10:38:58.418-08:00Underground Essays --Author -- Mark Biskeborn - My mother never taught me not to discuss religion and politics. In fact, my father encouraged it.
You probably should not read these essays.
You could be doing something more fun. Rollerblading, skateboarding. TV.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.comBlogger66125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-14494079432781476882014-11-10T18:35:00.000-08:002014-11-11T17:07:53.558-08:00Kafkaesque In the twenty-odd-page short story, <i>The Penal Colony</i>, the Apparatus traps most of us. The metaphor turns the abstract concept into a tangible machine of harrows, designer, chains and wheels. As a metaphor, Kafka's Apparatus invites various interpretations enriching the story.
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One reader might interpret it as a means to supply Kafka with many punishment fantasies. Another reader might delve into the contrasts between redemption, suffering, and guilt. Yet another reader will see how the voyager, or the old commandant who died as a folklore prophet expected to resurrect, resembles the new compassionate world of Christ in contrast to the old Testament. Or the new commandant's "moderate tendency," sounding like "let them eat cake" as a solution for the peasants. Another reader finds how language is too far detached from real-named things and requires words to be writing in a person's flesh to make any real sense. Some readers focus on Kafka's alleged masochistic tendencies.
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Yet we can discover more from Kafka than a particular, personal condition. The story reveals universal behavior about raw power, political power, social power, the kind that includes torture, execution, judgment, and punishment without any due process. Let's keep in mind that Kafka trained as a lawyer. He also knew that Dostoevsky had been put up against a firing squad for sedition but was granted a reprieve. "'And what in fact is the sentence?' said the officer in astonishment, biting his lips: 'Forgive me if my explanations may appear disorderly,...?' "
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The Apparatus draws a line between condemning a man by due process or without any rule of law or by guilt simply. We find these flaws in human behavior all through history in almost all countries over time, including Kafka's own homeland in the Austrian-Hungry Empire and WWI.
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Kafka's short story helps us to contrast what we learn today about U.S. exceptionalism as in the neocon propaganda phrase: <i>indispensable nation</i>. Kafka's Apparatus helps us to discover gaps between propaganda that we learn in youth at school about freedom and justice and what we later learn as adults--or not.
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We need only remind ourselves of U.S. detention camps or penal colonies like Guantanamo Bay or Camp <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/camp-bucca-the-us-prison-that-became-the-birthplace-of-isis-9838905.html" target="_blank">Bucca</a> where advisers view it as "an appalling miscarriage of justice where prisoners were not charged or permitted to see evidence against them and freed detainees may end up swelling the ranks of a subdued insurgency."<br />
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"It's a peculiar kind of apparatus," said the officer to the voyager, and he surveyed the apparatus, which was after all quite familiar to him, with a certain admiration. It seemed to have been no more than politeness that had prompted the voyager to accept the invitation of the commandant,..."
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In the first sentence of the story, the voyager from another country surveyed the apparatus..."with a certain admiration." The voyager seems to know about the Apparatus or at least something like it and "walked up and down behind the condemned man with almost visible indifference...." The voyager seems accustomed to this Apparatus or at least its similar imposing raw power in his more northern county, presumably in Europe, and especially in an empire. Nevertheless the voyager does show some surprise that the condemned man doesn't know his sentence much less his defense. The officer explains that "guilt is always beyond question."
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As a new-comer to the nondescript, generic setting, a valley with uniforms "too heavy for the tropics...." The voyager already knows about the Apparatus, mostly because a similar authoritarian power, like the Apparatus in Europe or the new world, exists. The voyager operates among the higher class of the military hierarchy. Meanwhile, the condemned man "wore an air of such hangdog subservience that it looked as if he might be allowed to run free on the slopes and would simply have to be whistled for when the execution was due to begin."
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The authorities--the voyager, the officer, the commandant--view the condemned man as ignorant and subject to their judgments like a dog on a leash. Although Kafka wrote this story in 1914, it still applies to any country today imposing authoritarian power over the people, the great unwashed or simply the vast middle class.
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Now in U.S. the Patriot Act and the NDAA (the National Defense Authorization Act) allow authorities to detain indefinitely suspicious looking citizens, including dozens of whistle-blowers or protest leaders. The FBI evoked the Patriot Act in order to arrest <a href="http://rt.com/usa/156172-scotus-ndaa-hedges-obama/" target="_blank">Susan Lindauer</a> for talking publicly about her knowledge of 9/11. They <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQjTYmDKPaI" target="_blank">incarcerated </a>her without trial, and diagnosed her mentally incompetent. When she demanded to stand trial, authorities eventually released her. The FBI applied the State's Secret Privilege in order to muzzle <a href="https://www.youtube.com/?v=KUt_gbRP3EA" target="_blank">Sibel Edmond's </a>birth place, birth date, and language skills as secrets of state while she was about to bear witness regarding 9/11.<br />
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A part of the Apparatus, called the Designer, crawls under our skin before we know that it writes our fate, our beliefs. It writes our values in unintelligible longhand. It uses harrows to engrave into our flesh about how we must behave and believe. It imposes its program, unlike our popular, trendy tattoos that mark our skin in a superficial technique. It brainwashes us before we have time to pick and chose our preferences and thoughts.
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The new commandant "would find it impossible to alter any part of the old system, at least for many years to come."
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Powerful people, elites, craft the Designer carefully much like persuasion of the oldest, classical rhetoric. Here in America this Designer started as soon as the British aristocrats and the nascent bourgeoisie first put foot on the New World. By the time of Kafka, the Designer--propaganda--became more precise, more effective in manufacturing public consent. Kafka's contemporaries like Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann made a science of successful propaganda as an overwhelming source of power. The Apparatus can persuade us that even the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is a fight for our own freedoms and rights. Since then the raw power, the Apparatus, refines by subtle and sophisticated market categories, enabling a divide-and-conquer approach, a breaking up the citizens into small, manageable subgroups.
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Most of us go along with the sweet-smelling, sugar-coated lies that the Designer conjures up for the benefit of those in power. Kafka's stories deal with personal freedom while facing a world of conform. Kafka's world swelled in conformity during WWI, Austrian-Hungary Empire when Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and other writers dealt with nascent fascism in Europe, "special measures were necessary here, and that military procedures had to be adhered to throughout," the officer said.
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And we now see in the U.S. where a corporate, <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/democracy-incorporated-sheldon-s-wolin/1101639451?ean=9781400834846" target="_blank">inverted totalitarianism</a> takes control and owns the government. As a metaphor, the Apparatus can represent various types of control. The elites in the U.S. can pay millions of dollars to buy advertisements for certain candidates in the same way they market a breakfast cereal or a cell-phone.
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Most of Kafka's novels and stories center on personal freedom as it does in <i>The Penal Colony</i>. Kafka parses freedoms into various dichotomies: the Officer vs. the Soldier, powerful class vs. dominated class, enlightenment vs. ignorance, living by default vs. living originally, guilt vs. innocence, orthodox vs. personal spirituality, and so forth.
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If you have not yet read any of Kafka's stories, <i>The Penal Colony</i> serves as an introduction to a world-shuddering fiction. There is much to consider in the twisted plot.
Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-40800014999610852262013-04-09T13:45:00.002-07:002013-04-09T13:45:10.676-07:00Larry Summers Still Living Large<br />
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Early this morning, when NPR broadcasted an interview with the infamous Larry Summers, I almost choked on my coffee, shocked that people still listened to this hoodlum. But then, an entire wealthy class applauses his destructive policies. Summers embodies the elitist class.(1) <br />
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In his youth, he learned how to manipulate and obfuscate the truth for the sake of promoting Big Business agenda and at the detriment of the <img align="right" alt="Larry Summers Speaks On U.S. Economic Crisis" border="3" class="img" height="174" src="http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2010/09/22/57161341_5004489-563b9a663d767618bcf416ce00fdb25c79edf8f1-s40.jpg" style="display: block;" title="Larry Summers Speaks On U.S. Economic Crisis" width="502" />greater good of society. He is a member of the American aristocracy like G.W. Bush—you remember that president who lied and deceived Americans in order to obliterate Iraq for the sake of Big Business and Big Oil? <br />
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In the early 1980s, Summers was an economic advisor for Ronald Reagan. In the capacity, Summers was instrumental in deregulating the banking and financial industries and this despite the three important financial crises in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.<br /><br />
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Like most elites, Summers played a key role in the free-wheeling, free market. Under Summers' tutlege, Ronald Reagan, a former spokesman for GE, said government is not the solution, government is the problem. Among the barons of industry, the cult belief since the 70s was a conforming dance to the tune that unregulated markets would always automatically correct any problems and without government intervention. In 1999 Summers cheered the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act" title="Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act">Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.</a> Summers was happy to help dismantle the Glass-Steagall Act and its six decades of restrictions against banks offering commercial banking, insurance, and investment services. <br />
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While working in Clinton's administration, Summers argued against U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol to decrease carbon emissions. "During the California <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_crisis" title="Energy crisis">energy crisis</a> of 2000, then-Treasury Secretary Summers teamed with patsy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan" title="Alan Greenspan">Alan Greenspan</a> and the felon <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron" title="Enron"> Enron</a> executive <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Lay" title="Kenneth Lay">Kenneth Lay</a> to lecture California Governor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Davis" title="Gray Davis">Gray Davis</a> on the causes of the crisis, explaining that the problem was excessive government regulation." (2) Summers stand on this environmental policy may cause the extinction of civilization as we know it.<br />
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Summers relied on his old buddies and fellow Big Business courtiers, in the ilk of former Carlyle Group as well as Goldman Sachs adviser Arthur Levitt, Fed Chairman Greenspan--another patsy in the cult of neocons, and Secretary Rubin, a former executive of Goldman Sachs for 26 years, a bona-fide shark. Summers destroyed any attempts to regulate the derivatives that many blame for bringing the financial market down in Fall 2008. This deregulation led directly to the Great Recession. <br />
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Early in this new millennium, Summers lost his job as Harvard president for suggesting that women lack a natural aptitude for math and science. (3) <br />
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Larry Summer's track record resembles that of the Devil in carnate. The man has a bold talent for making the most destructive policies of any man in our times, second only to G.W. Bush and his cabinet. Society would be more secured and prosperous if Summers were banned on a desert island. It would be dangerous even to put him in prison as he might persuade hardened criminals to practice his form of terrorism. <br />
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<img align="left" border="3" height="146" src="http://www.marketplace.org/sites/default/files/styles/primary-image-610x340/public/103859047.jpg" typeof="foaf:Image" width="415" />Most people probably had forgotten Summers. Most practical people probably never heard of him at all. He is a man with a triple chin and a behind that doesn't fit in any chair. That's why he's always slouching. He has a smile that terrifies hardened street criminals. <br />
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If you want to learn the easy ways to make money without working, you do not have to enter a prison to learn the trade of a professional criminal. If you can afford an extremely high tuition fee, you can enrol at Harvard and take notes from Satan himself. Several ivy league universities employ business and economic grifters as full-tenured professors like Summers.<br />
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How Summers and his friends still retain any credibility is a mystery. Their cancerous careers threw the nation and most of the planet into dangerous waters. We can say the same for the likes of G.W. Bush. <br />
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Very few journalists have dared to report how the Bush Wars into Eurasia combined with the financial collapse caused the on-going Great Recession and its high unemployment. Now the focus is on reducing the great deficit. In particular, Republicans are keen on reducing entitlements for the middle class while maintaining the entitlements for the wealthy, including low or no taxes and bailout bonuses for financial executives at Goldman Sachs...Citi Bank..... <br />
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(1) Interview with a Vampire on NPR: Larry Summers: Economic downturn will leave 'permanent scar' >> <a href="http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/larry-summers-economic-downturn-will-leave-permanent-scar">http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/larry-summers-economic-downturn-will-leave-permanent-scar</a><br />
(2) Wikipedia, Larry Summers, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers</a><br />
(3) Secrets and Lies of the Bailout, Taibbi, Matt, Rolling Stone Magazine, January 2013. <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104">http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104</a><br /><br />
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Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-83421144122830018452013-01-21T11:58:00.000-08:002013-03-15T18:34:49.537-07:00War and Corruption Deficits: Insects and Leviathans<a href="http://biskeborn.com/blog_images/Defense_Contractors.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://biskeborn.com/blog_images/Defense_Contractors.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Huge defense contractors and oil corporations <a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/15096-once-upon-a-time-corporations-paid-taxes" target="_blank">avoid taxes through loopholes </a>while they profit from the recent invasions into Eurasia. They <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/secret-memos-expose-link-between-oil-firms-and-invasion-of-iraq-2269610.html" target="_blank">lobbied our government to destroy Iraq and then to rebuild it</a>. In the case of Dick Cheney, Halliburton enjoyed a non-bid contract. The wars and the <span id="goog_853505605"></span><span id="goog_853505606"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a>bank frauds cost Trillions of dollars, a deep fiscal deficit. To pay for these extravagant escapades the government now forces the general public to sacrifice by austerity policies and sequester. The shrinking middle class pays heavily for the war and the banking frauds that the industrial barons trumped up for profit's sake.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Economic inequality destroys every square inch of a society and the psyches of individuals. I</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">nequality stems from extreme materialistic ambitions by which the wealthy want more than more. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the U.S. unbridled, unregulated capitalism has taken over the entire country where there once were laws applied to restrain abusive corporate powers. Remember the antitrust laws applied to AT&T. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Massive corporations in banking, energy, healthcare, defense and other industries have </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">seized political power in the U.S. Industrial barons pull the strings of whatever is left of our government, now a spineless puppet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some people, like <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/03/09/the_world_according_to_milton_friedman_partner/?source=newsletter" target="_blank">D. S. Jones</a>, say that an economic doctrine arose in the 1970s. F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman described this doctrine and called it neo-liberalism. A<a href="http://hnn.us/articles/32681.html" target="_blank"> salesman for GE who became a U.S. president, Ronald Reagan</a> supported this trendy doctrine. <br /><br />This doctrine favors privatization, deregulation, and unfettered free markets over government regulations or the slightest over sight. Historical narratives, like this new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Universe-Friedman-Neoliberal-Politics/dp/0691151571/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363231019&sr=1-1&keywords=Daniel+Stedman+Jones" target="_blank">Masters of the Universe</a>, by D. S. Jones, might help clarify this trend as some neat, rational economic solution. But this historical narrative sits framed in merely small thinking. This trendy fashion, neo-liberalism, is not a useful economic doctrine. It is not even a viable economic policy. Rather it is simply a human trait otherwise known as greed. Neo-liberalism is dreck, useless for any real economics. And yet in the U.S. it is the dominant ideology. The money elite revel in it.<br /><br />Powerful people have always made government a doormat for their own expanding power. Consider the emperors of Rome, monarchs of Europe, the modern dictators, and the barons of industry of the Gilded Age, the Roaring 20s. They all use their power to mold government for their own self-aggrandizing ambitions and at the cost of the greatest good of society.<br /><br />A small group of people acquire wealth by various means, most often by unethical practices. Once these people obtain wealthy, they use its influence to gain more and more riches. This fact has made human history what it is, a struggle to garner more strength over others less fortunate. This power has always created inequality in society. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In modern times we should hope for a more rational, common sense approach to equality. It benefits everyone. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now we have fallen backwards where the wealthy take power and corrupt the rules to accommodate their greed. The clear signs of this regressive movement appear in the U.S. justice system where we often find a double standard. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />A handful of wealthy bankers commit fraud that brings the global economy to its knees. Yet, the judicial system fails to investigate them as if </span><a href="http://www.alternet.org/economy/bombshell-confession-eric-holder-big-banks-are-above-law" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">they are "too-important-to-jail," as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder claims</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. Individual bankers are responsible for plunging the global economy deep in recession and for creating an enormous, national deficit. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meanwhile a regular guy on the street goes straight to privatized jail for peddling marijuana. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The shareholders and top managers of privatized prisons profit from increasing the number of inmates. Ironically, inequality is one of the main reasons why the downtrodden take drugs. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The owners of capital--the barons of industry--can crush the peasants on the street by more ways than one. Today the 1 percenters have used their powerful financial influence to style their own new world order which started in a "free market" ideology and grew into today's corporatocracy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This tiny number of patricians among the population holds influence over the supreme court. <a href="http://legalworkshop.org/2010/07/27/why-the-supreme-court-cares-about-elites-not-the-american-people" target="_blank">The supreme judges support the powerful elite in many decisions.</a> Consider the overturn of <i>Citizens United v. FEC</i> which allows the leviathan, global corporations to buy our elected officials in the form of campaign contributions. Surprisingly these global corporations are often not even grounded in the U.S. as they warehouse their cash in <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15027-jack-lew-citigroup-and-the-ugland-truth" target="_blank">offshore Cayman</a> or Swiss banks. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy" target="_blank">In this new world order, "our government" has only more incentives to legislate laws for the interests of these 1 percenters</a>, the global elites, who rarely have any real loyalty to the U.S. Our public officials broker legislation with hardly any interest in the greater good of the country. We now see the results in the trend to weaken public infrastructures such as healthcare, retirement, education, and energy. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Extreme right-wing congressmen, like John Boehner or <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/03/11/scott_brown_makes_it_official_with_wall_street/?source=newsletter" target="_blank">Senator Scott Brown</a>, do their best to destroy these entitlements for the general public good. Meanwhile they work for the interests of huge corporations. Many of our elected officials, <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/right-wing-billionaires-behind-mitt-romney-20120524" target="_blank">especially the Republicans, fight for the entitlements for the ultra-wealthy</a>. In exchange for huge campaign contributions, politicians work for those rolling in dough. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These entitlements for billionaires and multi-millions come in the form of huge tax loopholes and impunity for massive crimes and competencies. Individual bankers caused the enormous financial break-down. Individual managers of <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/secret-memos-expose-link-between-oil-firms-and-invasion-of-iraq-2269610.html" target="_blank">defense contractors </a>and their lackey politicians--like G.W.Bush--pillaged the national coffers for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. None of these high-ranking moguls and politicians has been as so much as investigated for these catastrophes. Meanwhile the war in Iraq and the colossal financial scams costs the country trillions of dollars. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now austerity policies cut social infrastructure--healthcare, retirement, education, and energy--as a means to repair the national deficit. Those responsible for the deficit continue to profit from the damage they cause and are not even held responsible for taxes. They have become the untouchable rotting, cancerous tumors of our society. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Consider the case of <a href="http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17807-when-big-banks-like-hsbc-are-not-prosecuted-criminally-it-may-be-killing-us" target="_blank">banks laundering billions of dollars for the Mexican narcos</a> and Al Qaeda. This voracious greed has always existed. However, in our times the obsession for money and power has broken through the normal legal restraints and much less the limits of ethics. Emblematic of this is today's statement from Attorney General Eric Holder's unwillingness to prosecute powerful bankers or to mention antitrust laws. The cronyism and corruption between government and the leviathan corporations sets the entire country backwards at least a century to pre-New Deal times. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The examples of this corporate <i>coup d'etat</i> abound. Though most often the <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-world-today-exposing-the-lies-of-mainstream-media/24893" target="_blank">mainstream media ignore the truth</a> and report only what the private owners decide the general public should hear. This control of journalism only enables the <a href="http://ethicsalarms.com/2011/06/27/how-the-lack-of-ethics-cripples-democracy-reason-2-corporate-executive-greed/" target="_blank">barons of industry to conceal their disdain of laws</a> and morality. Ironically, at the same time the right-wing religious groups claim moral purity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The world has split into two. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One tiny part is the plutonomy, the super-rich; the other part is the precariat, the masses, insignificant, fungible humans, living in precarious conditions, dependent on whims or needs of employers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unfortunately, the government has lost all control over the lawless industrial moguls. It now mostly forfeits power to the corporatist status quo. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This mostly silent political movement against the middle class had retooled after the Roaring 20s, after the Great Depression, and after FDR's New Deal. <br /><br />By exception, FDR created a more equitable society as a means to remedy the Great Depression, like our own Great Recession. The economic solution included, for the most part, nurturing a middle class in the U.S., which really did not exist in such a high standard of living until then, culminating in the 1960s (see Figure 1 above), and now crumbles and dies under the weight of austerity policies designed to pay for the misadventures of defense contractors and bankers' greed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Once FDR was gone--and a lot of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler" target="_blank">corporatists aggressively wanted him dead</a>, those with the overwhelming financial influence began to undo the government's public service programs, including the judiciary and the political law-making functions. Now <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_Council" target="_blank">organizations like ALEC</a> enable corporations to set the nation's policies and to hell with the democratic process. Perhaps the overturn of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission" target="_blank"><i>Citizens United v. FEC</i></a> represented the last nail in the coffin of a reasonably balanced economy. </span><br />
<a href="http://biskeborn.com/blog_images/leviathan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img align="right" alt="Leviathan" border="0" src="http://biskeborn.com/blog_images/leviathan.jpg" title="Leviathan" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Plutocrats have always fought and won to dominate society. This recent power grab, the transformation over the last five decades, took hold on a slow path such that few people saw it happening as depicted in the Figure 1 above. One bolt at a time, the Gilded Class dismantled the cultural zeitgeist of the New Deal. The 1-percenters have always been destroying governmental functions that benefit the better good of society. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To wit: our healthcare system has become almost entirely owned by the wealthy business owners. <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries.html" target="_blank">The for-profit health care system in the U.S. is unique and increases costs by two and a half more than any other industrialized country</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As in the healthcare industry, many other private industries run more efficiently when the government manages them. All other industrial countries provide a highly efficient government managed health care system. This excessive, wasteful cost arises from the high-profit driven corporations. Compared to other industrialized countries, health care in the U.S. is two and a half times less efficient. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This metamorphosis grew in its own Kafkaesque pattern, mutating human beings into insects. Instead of communities, now we have ant farms, furnished with cubicles and stab-in-the-back job environments fraught with abusive bosses. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the American way, this "free-market" ideology grew and altered our entire culture. Now we have to deal with our own extremism. It has grown into a demented, devouring Leviathan, an overwhelming power of a corporate reign without restraint. The privatizing, corrupting giant, a Leviathan, consumes everything that once was beneficial to the greater good of society.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Can you pull in the leviathan with a fishhook or tie down his tongue with a rope?" Job: 41.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-88680173705702801752012-12-28T20:29:00.001-08:002013-01-22T11:42:32.115-08:00Breaking News: Lt. Col. Shaffer Accuses Former CIA Dir. Tenet <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The 9/11 catastrophe had seemed to take the path of many other national mysteries like JFK's assassination, but now Lt. Col. Shaffer accuses Former CIA Dir. Tenet for blocking the military's efforts to stop 9/11 terrorists. <br /><br />Many books, documentaries and Internet videos clearly present the unresolved issues about the 9/11 attack. The official report says one thing while clear observation and science tells a different story entirely. At least this topic might serve as a good background for a thriller, well, like my <a href="http://www.biskeborn.com/" target="_blank">upcoming novel, Mexican Trade</a>, available this Spring.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet now more secrets climb out of the darkness.(1) Just yesterday, a news-breaking report indicates that a line of high level government officials continue to reveal more evidence. Among many other whistle-blowers, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer now accuses former CIA Director George Tenet for taking some part in the 9/11 attacks as well as duping federal investigators.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Once the Judicial Watch successfully forced the DOD to declassify the Able Danger documents in late 2011 through a FOIA lawsuit, Shaffer is now able to disclose more information about how the CIA played a role in hindering the military's efforts against terrorist plots. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In mid-2005, a year after the 9/11 Commission, Congressman Curt Weldon delivered a <a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1505816/posts" target="_blank">special speech in Congress</a> about how the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) blocked the military and the FBI from using important information garnered from the Able Danger, a sophisticated program to track down terrorists. Once Weldon's colleagues began to attack Weldon's credibility, five Pentagon whistleblowers backed up his statements. The DIA also lifted Shaffer's security clearance and even remove his pay and healthcare benefits. Weldon requested an investigation into this "problem" as he called it. And without an investigation, no one would discover exactly why top-level managers in the DIA did not want to use any of this highly useful information to prevent the 9/11 attacks. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The question remains, though, when will our officials carry out serious, unbiased investigations? As time goes on, we learn more details that contradict the official narrative. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Various credible people and organizations have investigated this catastrophe and discovered evidence totally contrary to the Bush Administration’s official investigation, <i>The 9/11 Commission Report</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This controversy has become so frustrating and contentious that many Americans are exhausted and disappointed about not getting answers from elected officials. Some of the best documentaries on this event, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMT2CHSvyGw" target="_blank">9/11: Press for Truth</a> covers many of the questions and suggests some answers. </span><br />
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<img align="left" alt="9/11 Commission Report" src="http://biskeborn.com/blog_images/9_11_Commission_Report.jpg" title="9/11 Commission Report" /> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A handful of Bush cronies produced the unsatisfying "official investigation" of 9/11. Several public intellectuals, such as Gore Vidal, questioned if 9/11 were an inside job. Governor Jesse Ventura, in his TV series, <i>Conspiracy Theory</i>, found many holes in the official investigation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Governor Ventura interviewed several eye-witnesses and learned how G. W. Bush's friends at the CIA and elsewhere had classified many pieces of evidence--such as the aircraft black boxes--that might reveal new facts about the 9/11 event. It appears that G. W. Bush's account of the catastrophe might also be just another set of lies, an official Conspiracy Theory from the White House, like the various justifications to bomb Iraq. A red flag arises now as the government withholds important evidence.</span><br />
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<b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A Majority Demanded the Truth</b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We so easily forget how a majority of Americans demanded the truth about 9/11. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The polls show that a majority of Americans believe that 9/11 is an inside job. The lowest rates are in the 50% range. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlPweD6R3Cc" target="_blank">A collection of polls</a> from Zogby, Scrips, Time Magazine, MSNBC, Scientists for 9/11 Justice, and other organizations show that Americans believe </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">at the polling rates of over 60% and 80% </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">that 9/11 was a set-up. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The view of these authentic witnesses agree that the World Trade Center buildings were demolished in a controlled and prepared manner. Some of the best presentations of these views are detailed in the videos produced by the independent organizations like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh7pOrRr_3o" target="”_blank”"> 9/11 Consequences</a> and also <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XRMrMdn0NQ" target="”_blank”">Zero: The Investigation into 9/11</a> </i>among others.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some of these documentary videos are less than an hour. Others are two or three-hour documentaries on YouTube. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Every American should watch one of these at least as a new perspective on the 9/11 attack. If you don’t have the time to watch any of videos, the text below serves as a skeleton summary, based on several investigative documentaries. However, these documentaries are thorough and include detailed testimonies from eye witnesses as well as expert, scientists. </span><br />
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<b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Chomsky Weighs in</b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A highly respected public intellectual, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_fFkLcRrBE" target="_blank">Noam Chomsky</a> says, in paraphrased form here: 'G. W. Bush and his cabinet do not care about terrorist attacks. Bush and his cabinet would have to be insane to plan and execute such a horrible plot. There would be leaks from insiders. Also there would be scientists who examine the evidence to reveal the truth in scholarly journals.' Chomsky's criteria about uncovering the facts about 9/11 have surfaced. Chomsky seems to dance around the topic as if he were worried about losing credibility by speaking frankly. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, Chomsky's criteria for an inside plot has come to light. Insider whistle-blowers like </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68LUHa_-OlA" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Susan Lindauer</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkVWPxg71KA" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Tony Farrell</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrRXWmk49vU" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Annie Macho</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, Sibel Edmonds, and others have leaked insights and hidden facts. There are also many </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT5IOD17gN8" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">scientists, architects, and engineers</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, like </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am876W46u5M" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Dr. Steven Jones</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, who have testified in documentaries and written articles for science journals about many aspects of the 9/11 catastrophe, such as the highly suspicious</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> way the buildings collapsed so swiftly and neatly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>The Bush Strongbox</b></span>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Officials close to the Bush Administration try to discredit the facts that other independent organizations have discovered and presented from out of the secrets and darkness. Those close to the Bush Administration—mostly a group of neo-conservatives—consider any other perspective as a conspiracy theory. They strongly attack any independent analysis of the evidence. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Friends of the Bush Administration established a tightly packaged case of their official story—<i>The 9/11 Commission Report</i>. A longtime friend of the Bush family, Phillip Zelikow micromanaged <i>The 9/11 Commission Report</i> so much so that many officials in D.C. and others call it the Omission Report. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No matter how you understand the 9/11 attack, it was a carefully planned catastrophe. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>PNAC Strategic Plans</b></span><br />
<img align="right" border="0" src="http://biskeborn.com/blog_images/PNAC.jpg" /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Was it a coincidence that the neoconservative cabal created the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century" target="”_blank”">PNAC</a>, the Project for a New American Century? Was it a coincidence that they had laid out a plan to dominate areas of the world? Rove, Rumsfeld, Bush, Libby, Cheney, Kristol, Kagan, and many others are members of PNAC. Three years before 9/11/2001, they had already written and published an extremely right-wing manifesto to take control of the world. Did these elected officials and industry leaders ask the American people if we wanted to expand our empire into the oil rich Eurasia? Empires are costly. The American empire is now growing at the cost of domestic development. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In his book, <i>The Grand Chessboard</i>, Brzezinski contributes as one of the main architects of the PNAC’s plans. One of the first steps in this project consists of paving the path for occupying Iraq. In order to justify this aggressive invasion, the PNAC needed a massive catastrophe. Despite <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=lZyCSBd3inc&NR=1" target="”_blank”">a 70% majority public opinion</a> that the U.S. should follow the UN leadership and resolutions, the Bush/Cheney cabinet pushed to attack Iraq urgently and immediately after 9/11. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A false-flag attack on the U.S. would create some popular consensus for the military invasion. This approach to gain public opinion to wage war has worked in several other U.S. wars. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident" target="_blank">Bay of Tonkin incidence </a>serves as only one of many such well known examples. <br /><br />The neocons were driven to implement their PNAC goals as expressed in their manifesto: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Was it a coincidence that the Twin Towers and Building 7 appeared to be a terrorist attack—like a new Pearl Harbor? Or like the Bay of Tonkin incident to justify the war in Vietnam? By carrying out such a horrible plot, most people would find it possible. The very boldness of the idea makes it unthinkable. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Follow the Money Trails: </b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Insurance Claims Recently Setup before 9/11</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Was it a coincidence that the World Trade Towers and Building 7 were demolished or “pulled” down in a free-fall by thermate explosives on each floor in a timed sequence after the planes had hit the two towers? Firefighters in the buildings heard large explosions in sequence and on sequenced floors. Videos also show explosions on each floor.<br /><br />Was it a coincidence that Larry Silverstein increased the "terrorists attacks" insurance only a few months before the event? It was Silverstein who used the phrase “pulled” when journalists asked him about how Building 7 was destroyed. The word “pulled” in this context, is a trade term for controlled demolition. No plane, no significant debris or fire hit Building 7, nevertheless it fell exactly as any other demolition. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7, as the other towers, were not generating enough leasing income to cover the costs. Maintenance and other liabilities, such as the asbestos inside the buildings added another large financial burden on Larry Silverstein. Many offices stood vacant.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the Spring of 2001, not long before 9/11, Silverstein had arranged to add extensive insurance policies on the WTC Towers and Building 7, including insurance for any acts of terrorism. The insurance and lease agreements include Silverstein’s right to rebuild the buildings if they were demolished. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After the destruction of the towers, Silverstein earned several billions of dollars from insurance claims. His original investment was $15 Million. No airplane or any other significant debris had struck Silverstein’s Building 7, yet it collapsed in a free-fall manner and in the same time (6.5 seconds) as a controlled demolition, complete with a “classic crimp” or wedge that blows a seam in the building’s midsection so that it falls perfectly in its own footprint rather than falling outward onto neighboring buildings. The same type of “controlled demolition” occurred in the other WTC buildings.</span><br />
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<b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Controlled Demolition of the Towers</b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Many witnesses have reported that unidentified maintenance men had been working extensively on the buildings for more than a month before 9/11. Were they setting up a demolition (with thermate)?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The official report claims that the jet fuel caused the extreme heat required to melt the steel beams. However, engineers and other experts from around the world say this official report is not plausible. With a maximum of 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, jet fuel does not generate enough heat to cut or melt the steel beams. However elements of thermate was present in the Twin Towers, in the dust, in the smoke. Los Alamos scientists developed thermate, a concoction made to melt thick steel at degrees of heat far beyond temperatures generated by jet fuel—more than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Compared to thermite, thermate reaches extremely high heat quickly and it generates a huge amount of gray clouds like those during collapse of the Twin Towers. Steel melts at 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit. Thermate has a unique ability to heat quickly to over 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Nothing else could have melted the steel beams in the Twin Towers.<br /><br />Six weeks after 9/11, molten, liquid steel was found beneath the rubble of WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7. Many of the supporting beams in the Towers were cut—melted—diagonally exactly as in any other controlled demolition. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />In the case of Building 7, there was no jet fuel to cause the demolition. But Building 7 housed the CIA and FBI among other organizations. <br /><br />Was it a consequence that demolishing Building 7 destroyed piles of criminal evidence regarding all sorts of corporate fraud cases, such as Enron, WorldCom and others of this ilk?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Was it a coincidence that these types of steel-beam buildings had never collapsed in a demolition style before in the more than hundred-year history of this type of this construction? Experts recognize that these buildings were set up as a controlled demolition with a free-fall into each building’s footprint.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>No Boeing Jet Struck the Pentagon</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Pentagon has the largest network of surveillance of most any building on earth. Yet the Pentagon officials will not release any video footage to confirm what exploded part of the Pentagon. The amateur videos made by civilian bystanders show no airplane at all, least of all a Boeing 747. Not a single piece of any airplane appears in the rubble. The holes left in the wall of the Pentagon are far too small (16 feet in diameter) to be caused by a Boeing 747 which has a diameter of more than four times the actual hole in the wall. The most likely cause of the explosion is some sort of missile. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Stand-Down Command on 9/11</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On 9/11/2001, NORAD was already on day two of a week-long terrorist prevention exercise, called Vigilant Guardian. This exercise was a simulation of a real terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, including the use of hijacked commercial airliners. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the time, Dick Cheney took sole command of NORAD. This was the first time in U.S. history that a president or vice president took control of the Air Force or an agency like NORAD. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Generals always had the authority to shoot down any hijacked or menacing aircraft, except on 9/11 and for the previous three months. Generals were not allowed authority to shoot down any aircraft during that period. Coincidence? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For two years before 9/11, NORAD had been carrying out exercises to deal with scenarios identical to the 9/11 attack. This contradicts what Bush and his cabinet members had said, "No one ever imagined such a terrorist attack by the use of planes." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With a guilty demeanor, G. W. Bush said, “No one envisioned anyone flying airplanes into buildings.” Bush also mentioned in passing and seemingly in the slip of his tongue—on CNN TV, Sept. 15, 2006—that explosives were planted in the WTC buildings. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All fighter jets were ordered far afield from the real 9/11 attack. Only 15 fighter jets were left at Andrews Air Force Base, near the Pentagon. But these planes were ordered to fly long only after the Pentagon was struck. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hours lapsed between the time the WTC buildings were hit and when the Pentagon was hit by something—a Boeing commercial airline according to the official story. This is a staggering lack of any Air Force intervention while Cheney was in a unique moment of commanding the Air Force.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>The Congressional Investigation on 9/11</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Bush Administration had made every effort to avoid any investigation into the 9/11 catastrophe. Once the Congressional investigation did start, Bush and Cheney refused to testify under oath. Instead Bush and Cheney agreed to discuss casually the event only together and not separately. Obviously, they were concerned of providing any differing accounts of the events.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bush and Cheney attempted to appoint Kissinger to lead the Congressional investigation. Once the family members of 9/11 posed tough questions regarding Kissinger’s clients in the Middle East, he bowed out from any involvement in the investigation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean and former Congressman Lee Hamilton then took a lead in the investigation, while Phillip Zelikow took the executive lead. All three men were Republicans with longtime collaboration with the Bush I and the Bush II Administrations. This created a leadership in the Congressional investigation that was not in any way independent or unbiased. Zelikow had authority to decide which areas were worthy or not of any inquiry. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In other words, the Congressional Commission to investigate the 9/11 event was a complete hoax. Harper’s Magazine called it a "white wash."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Zelikow made sure that the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department were not investigated. Zelikow’s loyalties remain with the Bush Dynasty. For this reason, the investigation was made by and for the interest of Bush and his cabinet and not for the Congress or any other branch.
The Commission members were free to write their own story, their own conspiracy theory. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Who Benefits from the 9/11 Attack?</strong> </span><br />
<img align="right" border="0" src="http://biskeborn.com/blog_images/Dick_Cheney.jpg" /><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Osama bin Laden gained no benefit by the 9/11 attack. On Sept. 16, 2001, Osama bin Laden had said he had nothing to do with the attack. He was in need of medical care. In the Summer of 2001, he was treated in an American Hospital in Dubai, and around that time CIA agents had spent time with him in talks. He was a fugitive after 9/11, his life only became tougher as his stay in Afghanistan became more difficult. Osama bin Laden was a CIA asset since the 1980s. The CIA used al Qaeda members as field agents in the U.S.A. as well as in Eurasia. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sadam Hussein gained no benefit from 9/11. He was accused of producing WMDs and of participating in Al Qaeda—an organization created by the CIA to fight the Soviet invasion. No one ever found any link between Sadam Hussein and al Qeada.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Money Trail:</span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Larry Silverstein, on the other hand, would gain billions of dollars from the demolished WTC buildings, as mentioned above. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dick Cheney continues to benefit from the invasion of Iraq. As a shareholder in Halliburton, Cheney receives over a million dollars a year in dividends as Halliburton’s business drastically increases from war and restoration revenues. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Defense Contractors benefit greatly from the wars as the demand for weapons only increases. <br /><br />The Bush family has large investments in the Carlyle Group, a defense contractor brokerage. The Bush family has had business relationships, partnerships with the Saudi Monarchy for decades. Saudi princes have funded several businesses for the Bush family. The Saudi Monarch had no love for the Hussein regime.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">American oil companies benefit greatly as the U.S. military occupies the strategic areas in Eurasia. The military provides safe access to the oil reserves in the region for the American oil companies which had planned to build oil pipelines through Afghanistan before 9/11. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Defense contractors, the Bush family, Cheney, and American oil companies gain huge amounts of money for the invasion of Eurasia. The 9/11 attack served as a spring board, justifying the new and highly lucrative wars. And all this while current alternative sources of energy are available to replace the need for petroleum (solar, wind, wave, geothermal).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The extreme right-wing in the U.S. Government benefits from the specter of terrorism. It allows the neo-conservatives in particularly to expand their PNAC goals to control foreign countries as well as the domestic control over the U.S. citizens as they limit civil and constitutional rights by such new laws as the Patriot Act and the NDAA. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">People working in the secret services in Germany, England, in Saudi Arabia, in Israel, and in the U.S.A. and others, bought “put options” on American Airlines and United Airlines only a few days before 9/11. A put option means that someone can make a profit by buying a bet on a company’s stock value when it decreases. More than four thousand put options were made days before 9/11, while only about 700 “call options” were made in that time period. This only reveals that a number of people near or in the secret services agencies of certain countries had inside knowledge about the turn of events before 9/11. </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What Happened to the Planes and Hijackers?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pentagon Crash</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">American Airline, Boeing 757, flight 77, crashed into the Pentagon according to the official report. But there is no debris of any airplane crash. No pieces of any Boeing commercial aircrafts were present anywhere. The hole in the side of the Pentagon was approximately 16 feet wide. A Boeing commercial aircraft is at least 100 feet in width. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The FBI confiscated some 86 videos of the area. Only after a subpoena, the FBI released 4 videos. No airplane appears in any of the videos provided to investigators and expert witnesses. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Expert witnesses state that it is possible, a fighter jet crashed into the Pentagon or, even more feasible, a missile. Whatever it was that crashed into the Pentagon could have been controlled via remote control like a drone or a missile.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">According to many expert witnesses, the official explanation of the explosion at the Pentagon makes no sense at all. </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Flight 93 Crashed in </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Pittsburgh</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The official investigation claimed that Flight 93 crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pittsburgh where a whole in the ground was found but no airplane debris. </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Two Flights Crash into the Twin Towers</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The two planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175,that crashed into WTC1 and WTC2, could have been guided by GPS remote control, like drones. Technology to enable this type of flight was developed as early as 1984. In 2001, Raytheon Corporation had developed a refined and sophisticated remote control system for large commercial aircraft. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Many eyewitnesses and videos show that these planes were painted gray and without any commercial logos or identifications. Many witnesses on the videos say that the plans looked like military planes. There were also large black devices attached to the underbelly of the planes, clearly shown in the various videos available. </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Terrorist Hijackers</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Three days after 9/11, the FBI Director Robert Mueller claims to know exactly the names of all 19 hijackers. In smaller, less complicated crash of commercial aircraft, the FBI has taken weeks to resolve the cause of crashes and any people involved. <br /><br />Miraculously the passport of one of the hijackers was found on the street near the World Trade Center on 9/11. Somehow the passport slipped out of the terrorist's pocket or travel bag only to survive the explosion and flames from the commercial airliner. Did the terrorist roll down a window in the aircraft and drop it out on the side walk below just before crashing? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The FBI claimed that the 19 hijackers were Islamist fundamentalists, and extremely puritan in their belief. Yet many witnesses had seen these men drinking heavily and acting up as if they wanted everyone to notice them. Witnesses said that the men used cocaine frequently. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The FBI claims that Mohammed Atta was the leader of the entire hijacking team. Nevertheless Mohammed Atta was on the FBI payroll for decades. <br /><br />There are witnesses who saw Mohammed Atta and one of his hijacker partners, Ali Mari, drive from Boston to Portland, Maine, on 9/10 where they did everything they could do to make everyone notice them. There was an airport surveillance video of these hijackers presented all over the mainstream news. But the video is false—it was not a video from the Boston airport. <br /><br />On 9/12/2001, Atta called his father and said he was alive and well.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Shortly after 9/27, Salam Alhasbi was found working in Saudi Arabia. The FBI claims that, like the other hijackers, Salam Alhasbi, was one of the 19 hijackers. Another 6 of the 19 hijackers were found in various countries in the Middle East. More than another 5 of the 19 hijackers were mercenaries on the CIA payroll. They were trained on various military bases in the U.S., but they were not trained to fly.
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Months after 9/11, Former FBI Director Robert Mueller stated that there was no evidence to prove who the hijackers were. There was no evidence that the alleged 19 hijackers had any anything to do with the 9/11 catastrophe. <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/06/16/122289/-Robert-Mueller-let-the-cat-out-of-the-bag-and-no-one-noticed#" target="_blank">In September 2002</a>, Mueller told CNN twice that there is "no legal proof to prove the identities of the suicidal hijackers."
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> ***‡*** </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1) Ex-Army Officer Accuses CIA of Obstructing Pre-9/11 Intelligence-Gathering, Truthout.com, Sunday, January 20, 2013. I did not create a link for this reference because the Website went down for some strange reason and for this particular article. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">YouTube censored many parts of the video produced by 9/11 Consequences. But you can find the full, uncensored video at: YouTube.com/NufffRespect2 </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And at: LiveVideo.com/NuffRespec
See also: Zero: Investigation into 9/11: <br /><br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XRMrMdn0NQ
Where did the commercial flights go?: <br /><br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC9KZ2Yy5g4
<br /><br />Where did the passengers and airplanes go?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue-MLMnlTzY
<br /><br />Robert Mueller says there is no evidence regarding the alleged 19 hijackers:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/06/16/122289/-Robert-Mueller-let-the-cat-out-of-the-bag-and-no-one-noticed#</span>Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-44080474160861857092012-12-24T20:05:00.001-08:002013-01-11T12:43:29.466-08:00Movie Review: Zero Dark Thirty<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The director of this movie, Bigelow, demonstrates how skilled she is in putting a story on the screen. She masters the art and technique of creating an intense world that will probably reel in some box-office profits. However, she lost track of the big picture surrounding bin Laden. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bigelow is not much of an artist in search of the truth about Osama bin Laden’s role in the 9/11 attack and much less the neoconservatives’ PNAC plan to colonize Eurasia, starting with some “catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor." <br /><br />
Instead, she seems to ride on the surface of all sorts of issues associated with the alleged assassination of Osama bin Laden. We do know for a fact that Osama bin Laden was a CIA scion since the 1980s. The history of that relationship should not be lost in all the wild-west assassination of the man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In her previous movie, <i>The Hurt Locker</i>, Bigelow mastered the search for some glimpse of truth and she triumphed in movie-making technique. In <i>The Hurt Locker</i>, we learned how a blue-collar, factory worker, Sergeant First Class William James, found some higher meaning in his life. Defusing bombs gave Sergeant William James a sense of purpose, mostly derived from a narcotic type adrenaline high that consumed him and his family life. We see in this great movie just how <i>“War Is the Force that Gives Us Meaning</i>.” This phrase is the title for a book by Chris Hedges who begins by saying, "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug." </span><br /><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> Bigelow demotes herself to a mere technician in search of captivating an audience without considering big questions, particularly about evil torture. She succeeds in this approach. Although self-respecting movie-goers should demand more than the mere reenacting a stealth operation. <br /><br />
Whether intentionally or not, Bigelow gets caught up in the details of how the Special Operations soldiers carry out their business—in this case an assassination—just as she is blinded by her movie-making techniques. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In Bigelow’s new movie, she looks only at the trees and loses view of the forest. As a result she plays up to torture that the neo-conservatives want us all to believe as a useful, even noble tool.<br /><br />
It’s the muck that Dick Cheney proudly flaunts on mainstream media. He confesses to torture policies. Surprisingly he does so with impunity. Likewise, Jose Rodriguez, former director of NCS, was responsible for destroying the videotapes of the CIA’s interrogations. Both men are yet to face investigation for their actions. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bigelow ignores so much more about the flawed and destructive invasion into Iraq. It’s a pity to see such talent miss the bigger view or moral controversy or even just a bit of truth. For starts, many, if not a majority, of CIA and military personnel condemn torture. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bigelow and her script writer, Boal, had a golden opportunity at least to present any one of several mysteries about Osama bin Laden and, more important, about the highly dubious official story about the 9/11 attack. Most people believe the 9/11 attack was an inside job, considering <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh7pOrRr_3o" target="_blank">the evidence</a>.</span><br /> <br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We know that Osama bin Laden had a relationship with the CIA since the 1980’s. Questions arise from reports that the Hospital in Dubai provided bin Laden for kidney dialysis treatment during 9/11. A week or so before 9/11, CIA agents spent several days meeting with Osama bin Laden. The French daily newspaper <i>Le Figaro</i> confirmed this fact and reported it on October 2001. See Alexandra Richard, at http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/RIC111B.html , the source of this information: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO311A.html . <br /><br />
A CBS Anchorman ( http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-325887.html ), among others, confirm this. Most other “facts” about bin Laden and just about everything pertaining to 9/11 have not been clarified officially. (see: http://www.911myths.com/index.php/Bin_Laden_met_the_CIA ).
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There are many unsettled questions about America’s destruction and occupation of Iraq and other parts of Eurasia. And then there's that entire controlled demolition of the World Trade Center Towers with the use of thermate (a highly incendiary explosive, patented by the U.S. military). <br /><br />
This story of Osama bin Laden's assassination pales in comparison to even considering the thought that 9/11 was in inside job, a plan conjured up in the PNAC manifesto. By focusing on the mere choreographic of a Spec Ops' mission, the audience might feel thirsty for some higher purpose as to why our taxes pay for the killing.<br /> <br />
Director Bigelow and Script Writer Boal could have developed one or two main characters to focus a controversy, like they did successfully in <i>The Hurt Locker </i>.</span><br /><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Instead they seem inadvertently to portray the good guys, the CIA agents and others, as thugs who apply torture like underground mafia criminals. In the movie, Ammar seemingly provides the location of Osama bin Laden, but torture looms over his head like a bucket of water. The scene advocates torture as a useful tool. This approach undermines the story line. The audience cannot sympathize with "the good guys," assuming that the audience does not identify with brutal torturers. Boal’s script drips of such story flaws. The plot is as torturous as America's diplomatic policies. </span><br /><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a time of our history when regular Americans rightfully have little trust for their government officials and much less for large corporations, many people even doubt that this Seal Team actually did kill Osama bin Laden. And even if they did kill him, did he really have any input into to total demolition of the Twin Towers and Building 7? <br /><br />
Note the word—<i>demolition</i>. Note also how "the experts" never found any plane that allegedly exploded part of the Pentagon. Nor do we dare ask why Building 7 was demolished neatly in a free-fall and into its own footprint. No plane, no parts of the Twin Towers crashed into Building 7. So did Osama bin Laden do that? <br /><br />
Instead of questioning at least one major issue bundled up in Osama bin Laden's story, Bigelow and Boal merely reenact an assassination that you and I paid for in taxes while we still wait for the truth in a real 9/11 investigation.</span><br /><br />
Most Americans smell the filth of the corporatist power and dominance over our government, torture being only one of many symptoms of a corrupted justice system and government. Many Americans have learned to doubt our national moral compass as it spins helter-skilter. The corporatist form of empire has already bamboozled us long enough. <br /><br />
Most Americans did not just fall of the turnip truck. They are smart. They know that torture is as wrong as the false justifications for obliterating and occupying Iraq. </span><br /><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Maybe Bigelow and Boal were swept up in the excitement of working with a couple of hot-shot Spec Ops dudes. Maybe they have joined up with the extreme right-wing neocons who advocate many strange things like torture or lying to justify the bombing of a country without any legitimate reason other than a self-inflicted Pearl-Harbor type catastrophe.</span>Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-30726717351188803902012-10-21T16:23:00.001-07:002013-01-28T10:29:31.158-08:00Wild Sex, Drugs, Howling in the Desert<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As the every-man-for-himself capitalism grows stronger, the demand for drugs climbs higher.(1) America ranks number one for its guns, for its financial coup d’état and for Wall Street terrorist bums. Domestic shock and awe, a doctrine Friedman wrought, keeps the privileged at the top.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The robber barons profit by turning the country into the land of calamity. They ride high on bubbles and bursts of opportunity, while the drug trade shines most appealing </span><br />
<img align="left" alt="Shared Income" src="http://biskeborn.com/blog_images/Income_Share.jpg" title="Shared Income" />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to the middle class. The breaking-bad, big-dollar industry provides jobs in Amexican crassness. Cocaine, marijuana, meth—it’s the new opiate for the masses.(2) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With howling voices in the desert, we suffer highest rates of mental confusion, anxiety, loneliness, depression. The meaningless, dizzy disconnect spins people in the hectic congestion. <br /><br />Inequality drives up the burning craving for drugs, legal or illicit.(3) Advertisements push us to purchase more stuff, guzzling cars, the clothes, and a trinket. Buy some bling, impress the girls or enjoy wild sex on a junket. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the glow of my own sweat at night I howl in the desert. The Wall Street storm blew us into a wasteland of dirt. Millions of people walk the streets homeless by foreclosures. We look for comfort in a drug that reassures. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The 99 percenters run a treadmill for the dwindling carrot. We gravel and crawl for shiny chariots. For decades the frenzy continues to spin down an endless rabbit hole lost. It drives more souls caught up in the feel-good drugs in exchange for love. You just can’t win when you’re dealt a losing hand unless you bluff. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When Ryan came back from missions in Iraq, his mom found a shell of a man.(4) Among the millions unemployed like him, many opt in to fight the endless wars for oil in the sand. They learn to become an Army of one, all gung-ho, or so the recruitment</span><br />
<img align="left" alt="Shared Income" src="http://biskeborn.com/blog_images/Estimate_Drug_Consumption.jpg" title="Drug Consumption" />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">commercials go. The Pentagon creates a brave, warrior brand of honor and duty. Young men from the lower rungs join up for dignity. It feels better than flipping Big Macs. Ryan liked to wear that manly uniform, shiny buttons and a big hat. Ryan graduated from No-think High School without a goal, where they taught him nothing about the neocons. So he still believed in bravery and leprechauns. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These days the military hardly does more than serve corporate greed, securing reliable access to crude and other profit needs. It’s the new patriotism. For many out of a job, it’s a way to make a buck in our empire’s nihilism. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meanwhile the Wall Street terrorists bomb the global economy. It’s a laissez-faire market made by and for the neocons to count their money. Following that sick crowd only shows our blind insanity. It’s healthier to break free from behind the lies to reality. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like the shadow of a cloud, hardly anyone notices what happens over time, but the results become clear. History comes back to haunt us with the Gilded Age so near. “It’s just business,” says the Trump, “nothing personal.” The military recruits only fleshy machines for the arsenal. And when the soldiers return home and settle, they look for jobs and often pick up a needle.(4) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Take a few Xanax pills. It makes a bad job feel like sliding down hills. Wash them down with vodka to deaden the verve. A little smack can go a long way, calming shattered souls and spliced nerves. It’s the elixir for the shell shocked. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Overdose on smack, and all your nightmares are shot. Your sweaty tremors, your spirit-eating flashbacks vanish. Soldiers return home and get locked out, go off their leash. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">More soldiers leave this world by suicide than by combat.(5) They fly over the cuckoo’s nest on the wings of a bat. Civilians try to keep up with the numbers with forty thousand a year. Overdose on smack, coke, meth, crack, or on Zoloft, Prozac, Ambien, Zyprexa, just to shut off the voices in your ear. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In our self-proclaimed freedom we all hustle like one-dimensional zombies. We conform more than any other countries. We sing and salute along to the tune of party lines. The lords bully us like Big Brothers, got us all heads down in the paradigms. The trend rushes face first into the abyss of trillions of dollars. We get high to feel normal and cope with our tight collars. We do our best to blend into this insane asylum. The patricians spend billions to stop drugs, stop Occupy Wall Street protesters with war drums.(5) America’s primo solution to any problem is the Pentagon’s droning hums. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The nobles wage war on American workers. But us, the servants, we enjoy the mind-escaping drugs, like good midnight tokers. I demand to trip out with TV, zone out on pot. It’s the new portal to infamy. Only the barons can make a move in a world of inequality. Floating on meth’s smoke, we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, defy gravity and fly over the crushed mobility. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The robber barons wage war, police guns hot, against the very drugs that Americans crave to survive in their failing lot. The dog-eat-dog corporate state took all the power and now reigns. While the corporate-owned elected officials give Big Oil and Wall-Street terrorists free rein. The bandits have been plundering the middle class for decades. Mex-American druglords and officials have been trafficking even before renegades. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The country ranks first in child poverty. The poor, the uneducated, prefer the use of crack to tread through the stormy waters of inequity where the Fates determine their harsh horizons.(6) They buy crack at discount basement bargains. The poor can’t afford a legal pharmaceutical. They might as well drink through the darkness with mescal.
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Crack nurses the growing numbers of outcasts to feel good from time to time. It gives us delusions of hope and a sense of rhythm and rhyme. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The upper middle class prefers cocaine. The attorneys, architects, and Wall Street brokers enjoy pure snow to play the game. They snort a line when they have to meet a short deadline. They work hard for their lifestyle, worshiping Bacchus’ behind.(7) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bounding from the top of the tall buildings, the 1 percenters never mingle with the rabble below. Big Jim Dimon stops at Wall St. and Board, howling and </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">steps from his limo</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. He does a little blow, flanked by his entourage of Senators protecting his hoard.(8) With his presidential cuff-links, Big Jim has diamonds embedded in his teeth. A felon holding a silk purse of impunity, Big Jim chews on a pig’s ear as he claims he’s not a cheat. His buddies gamble billions with taxpayer bucks. Big Jim sits on a pyramid of blackmail and risky luck. One senator told how farmers lost it all in Big Jim’s derivative schemes and how entire towns like Birmingham and Stockton became graveyards of dreams.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The senators called Big Jim to a hearing, but he’d already bought all the senators in the Banking Committee. Big Jim just rolls his eyes saying, “It’s a pity.”(9) Big Jim has a lot of friends at the top of tall buildings. They take exclusive elevators up to avoid contact with proletarian landings. Reagan, Bush, Kissinger, Mozilo, Geithner, Summers, Greenspan, Paulson, Bernanke, Romney. So many neocons love that rush of the card deal and racketeered money.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s a high like a cocaine feel. When they win, they reel in the gold pot. When they lose, they win; they take the taxpayers’ lot. Either way Big Jim stays at the top with his mansions, jets, islands and yachts. He and his buddies own the Federal Reserve and the keys to Fort Knox. He and his friends like their blow pure and their escorts dirty and tight. They can crank it up, chill on boo, and ride young ponies all night.(10) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Beyond laws, neocons thrive in their secured penthouse in clouds. They are players, gamblers swingers, hiding behind their self-serving shrouds. They own Congress and the circus of public hearings. Their power soars beyond Gods’ blessings. They fly without limits and swoop near the sun without scorching a feather. They prop up the country’s debt and decide Greece or Iceland’s weather. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The world kneels down to these lords of unbridled enterprises. They are the aristocracy and the monarchy taking the prizes like the Spanish kings. They want America to work just like Mexico where for them the bell rings. It does not toll for you or for me. The lords own their own feudal islands—entire and for themselves and against the good of the lands. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Each one is a maker of the market. Their lobbyists clothe and launder their fraud and profit. They blow up the World Trade Towers and then party until late hours. They are the heirs of oligopoly and monopoly and crush any innovations and mobility. They regulate individual behavior—abortion, contraception, speech and protests—while keeping their corporations covered in secrets of self-interests.(11) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Us regular folks, most of us, are savages and respect nothing more than those in power. I dream of becoming just like them every hour. When I become aware of my impotence, I anguish under the weight of cement and iron and turn a blind eye sour. I look for escapes that allow me to give up my dreams by burning them in the sacrificial fires. I crave drugs and get high. It calms my own desires. Without the drug prohibitions, my sex drive would run like wolves wild. I lose myself in alternate universes, working hard to become a good consumer with debts piled. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So we ignore how the privileged loot our coffers. The crowd respects nothing more than those money mongers. We invite these vampires to suck the blood from our minds as they claim to let it trickle back down to us, a tiny drop at a time. The rich piss down on us from their high towers and call that economic policy so fine. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We sacrifice our children, if not their lives in endless wars, then in their education, health and in a failed environment. We prostrate before these medieval lords as if they were the lineage of royal sacrament. We hardly inquiry whether they are worthy of our worship. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Moloch raises his hands, the bestial, horned god, grabbing for sacrificial lambs, </span><br />
<img align="left" alt="Moloch Bull" src="http://biskeborn.com/blog_images/Moloch_Bull.jpg" title="Moloch Bull" />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">eating raw flesh and rot.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Heirs of Moloch, the barons practice a long history of war crimes, torture and demonic lordship. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We deny our own thoughts and tremble to the core in the hope to placate these demi-gods. We pull the oars for the ship of state but lose sight in all the fogs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We grow up in this world of cheats and remain penniless. As believers in what the schools teach, we are clueless. We easily give up what is most precious—our own conscience. We strive to appease these banksters and generals and officials without common sense. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We empower those born into the high places, loaded with blood money. The more we give up our freedoms, the patricians demand more honey. They say universal healthcare only makes government bloated. In the same breath they call for more bailouts whenever they engorge their cookie jars sugar-coated. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The robber barons want more military machinery, and more profitable private prisons to lock us up—those who sell and buy drugs on the streets. They send in the plebs, the well-intended police, to wage war in the dark-alley beats, but never to touch the cartel lords and the cash laundering discreet. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Banker Bagley washes that blood cash for his vaults too big to fail, while they send the little dopers deep into jail. Banker Bagley grants loans to build private prisons, while attorneys, police and paramilitary make up a new industry to chain us down. They make prohibition profitable while they protect the drug lords in the nice parts of town.(12) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is the source of Moloch’s power. The cringing slaves of the working classes create the platform for Moloch’s heirs and they stand and pronounce their demands. We, slaves, build the schools and then we teach our children the nation’s history according to Moloch’s versions.(13) We plebs build their high towers, their yachts, planes and mansions. We pay the taxes. We shrug our shoulders like Atlas. Meanwhile they read a book by Aryan Rand and recite it like some bible-cult full of greed and twisted religious rant. </span><br />
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<br />
<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level, New York, Bloomsbury Press, 2009. “To understand our vulnerability to inequality means discussing, some of our common psychological characteristics” pg. 31. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ibid. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ibid. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Veteran Suicides: A Predictable Epidemic? Truthout.com, 15 June, 2012: http://truth-out.org/news/item/9808-veteran-suicide-a-predictable-epidemic </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Veterans Suicides, New York Times, 14 April, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/kristof-a-veterans-death-the-nations-shame.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tom Feiing, <i>Cocaine Nation,</i> Pegasus Books LLC, New York, NY; 2009. See chapter 9, The Demand for Cocaine, starting on page 217. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ibid. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are many stories about Wall Street Executives (brokers) consume cocaine and other drugs, living the life of excess. New York Times, March 25, 2000; http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/25/nyregion/broker-admits-selling-drugs-on-floor-of-stock-exchange.html Wall Street turns a blind eye to drugs, The Vista, Nov. 3, 2011: http://www.theusdvista.com/business/wall-street-turns-a-blind-eye-to-drugs-1.2682973#.T-StpxdfHNo </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why the Senate Won’t Touch Jamie Dimon: How JPMorgan props up the US Debt, 19 June, 2012; http://truth-out.org/news/item/9876-the-jpmorgan-derivatives-propping-up-us-debt-why-the-senate-wont-touch-jamie-dimon </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Inside Job, a Documentary, Charles Ferguson, 2010. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">William Deresiewicz, Capitalists and Others Sociopaths, Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/fables-of-wealth.html pp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyarchy . And see also: Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World, p. 247, London: Vintage UK Random House. ISBN 0-09-944839-4 Also see the video of Noam Chomsky describe polyarchy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaFozS93Syo </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are numerous articles in the press about this topic of how the too-big-to-fail banks are desperately increasing their assets by laundering—mostly Mexican—drug cartel cash. Here are a few articles: <i>The Guardian / The Observer</i>, How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs, 2 April, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs The Costs on the War on Drugs: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/countingthecost/2012/04/20124158040361814.html And there’s always more: <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i>, HSBC Executive Steps Down at Money-Laundering Hearing, July 23, 2012 </span></li>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> http://www.sfgate.com/business/bloomberg/article/HSBC-Executive-Steps-Down-at-Money-Laundering-3728171.php</span></ol>
<ol><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">13. Howard Zinn, </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The People’s History of the United States</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, Harper Perennial Modern Classics (August 2, 2005). Consider reading this book by Howard Zinn to obtain a more realistic version of the U.S. history. Most public and private schools in the U.S. teach the history with a sugar coated perspective.</span></ol>
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Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-45581597812517380972012-05-03T17:35:00.001-07:002012-05-03T17:35:18.509-07:00Bradley Manning—A Case of Class-based Justice SystemWhile U.S. leaders claim that the American military fights for American freedoms, Army Colonel Denise Lind, the judge in this case, nevertheless, allows military prosecutors to litigate secretly from public view. This is not surprising especially since U.S. citizens do not own and operate their own government like citizens do in real democracies.<br />
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Judge Lind would normally be a public servant in any free country instead she functions as a tooth in the big bad gears of the military-industrial machinery. The prosecution’s documents and other evidence filed in the case are not open to public view. Judge Lind also keeps her trial orders “top secret.” Somehow Judge Lind operates by an alternative set of laws since she obviously marches to the tune of her dictating chain of command. (1) She operates in a class-based judicial system and Bradley Manning lives in the lower class. So, Judge Lind follows procedures accordingly. She follows the rules of the powerful, not the rule of laws. She is a spoke in the powerful wheels of the big green machine that rolls over the First Amendment right of public access to criminal proceedings which applies both to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions and to courts-martials. (2) <br />
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On April 25, 2012, Judge Lind denied the defense motion to dismiss all 22 charges during a pretrial hearing in Bradley Manning's court martial. Defense Attorney Coombs, whose fees are paid by supporters, argued that the prosecution failed to follow discovery procedures for evidence. The Army still sniffs through the thousands of so-called “top secret” documents for a proof that Manning ‘willfully intended’ that the leaks damaged U.S. interests. (3) Judge Lind has scheduled the trial from September to October this year, allotting the Army time to sift out a reason to throw away the key to Manning’s cell.<br />
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Private First Class Bradley Manning, 24, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, was arrested at a U.S. base in Iraq on charges of leaking classified material to Wikileaks, a whistleblower website.(4) Manning sits in a cell since May 2010 without a trial. To date that’s more than 700 days, including fourteen months of mind-bending solitary confinement from May 2010 until July 2011. That was solitary confinement with suicide prevention, meaning mostly without his clothes, making for a humiliating torture in the same ilk as at Guantanamo. According to most treatises—Geneva Convention, the UN, etc.—this is torture, war crimes, and grounds to throw out the case.<br />
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After protests from constitutional law groups, the Army moved Manning to a medium-security prison, allowing interaction with other “detainees,” a term the government uses these days for people held indefinitely for “suspicions”—a perversion of fundamental American rights reflected in the totalitarian Patriot Act and the fascist NDAA of which the Taliban would be proud. (5) Several powerful people, including Pres. Obama, have already condemned Manning publicly. This is a grounds for dismissal.(6)<br />
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The Army got around to arraigning Manning in February 2012 with the most serious charges: communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source, and aiding the enemy, a capital offense. Military Prosecutors argue that the leaks helped al Qaeda. (7) So far the prosecutors say that they would not seek the death penalty. <br />
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Judge Lind knows how to play the political games. Like many others, she crawled her way up the military ladder to make colonel, inching her way now toward more power. She must have become one tough cookie, pursuing a career in an organization founded on testosterone-ladled machismo. As an organization, the military is paradoxically the farthest thing from any whiff of democracy with its dictatorial and draconian chain of command that demands soldiers get the dirty work done—and even while it claims to protect American freedoms. And while many soldiers, like Manning, (8) increasingly see the U.S. invasions of the Middle East as a perversion of truth and of American values by dint of its secrecy, its use of torture, its murder of thousands of civilians of all ages.<br />
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The U.S. military along with its justice seems to enjoy taking exceptions to the law when it needs its top security in the politically darkened court room as well as out on battle fields made soggy by the blood for oil exchange.<br />
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Some of the documents that Manning allegedly leaked include videos of Apache helicopters pilots killing unarmed Iraqis and Reuter journalists as if they were mere targets in a video game. (9) The secrecy of information in Manning’s case and about everything else in these endless wars delivers an indictment against the U.S. systems of justice and governance by its massive volumes of secrets.<br />
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It was secrecy that enabled powerful people to demand that the U.S. military bomb more than 2 million Vietnamese and Cambodians, mostly rice farmers. Even big fancy U.S. aircrafts that drop bombs from the sky can also commit terrorist actions. We cannot forget the Bay of Tonkin incident, a false-flag justification to initiate war in Vietnam. Likewise, the invasion of Iraq was planned in 1998, four years before 9/11, as part of the NPAC. (10) <br />
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It just so happened that the 9/11/2001 disaster created the much needed false-flag justification to invade Iraq and Afghanistan in order to secure the oil reserves—even though applying the same money and effort to develop a clean energy industry would be a much more beneficial solution, not to mention moral. At the detriment of the world, the powerful people who own the status-quo oil industry have vested interests in acquiring and selling more oil even if it means killing for it.<br />
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Retaliation plays a part into this farcical prosecution of Manning because the classified documents, whoever leaked them, reveal the incompetence and bad faith of many powerful people as was the case in the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. (11) And since Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers leak, the military now stamps even its toilet paper as “top secret” to the point that the American public doesn’t have the slightest clue about its country’s history or what they pay in lives and taxes for wars.<br />
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The U.S. military has drifted away from its moorings to any accountability and far from the civilian world. (12) “A foreign policy based on secrets and spin has manifestly failed us. In a democracy, statecraft cannot function if it is shrouded in secrecy.” (13) Perhaps the only way to regain a glimmer of democracy is to require a general election for all U.S. invasions, especially since the U.S. “elite” are totally incapable of foreign policy or domestic policy as well considering the financial terrorism on Wall Street.<br />
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With so much use of dark secrecy and manipulation of the laws and the media, powerful people crush the checks and balances like ugly road kill. Without proper oversight, regulations and investigations, America has become an empire in which we live not by rules of law, but by rules of powerful people.<br />
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In Glenn Greenwald’s recent book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, we find case after case revealing how powerful people apply the justice system differently for two social classes, the regular citizen, like Bradley Manning, and the powerful people, like G.W. Bush—the latter blatantly broke the law by colluding with telecommunication corporations to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens’ emails and telephones in 2005—a serious crime—without the slightest legal action: (14) “…the problem extends well beyond such inequalities. The issue isn’t just that those with political influence and financial power have some advantages in our judicial system. It is much worse than that. Those with political and financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions whatsoever.” (15)<br />
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The case of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame resembles the mirror inverse of Manning’s case in several ways. (16) G. W. Bush and his cabinet had contracted Wilson, Plame’s husband, to investigate the Nigerian government as a seller of (yellow cake) plutonium for Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMD developments. When Wilson reported the truth that no such link between Niger and Iraq existed, the Bush cabinet retaliated by leaking Plame’s cover as a secret CIA agent specialized in WMDs.<br />
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Plame and Wilson called for an investigation, claiming that this leak put Plame and her informants and colleagues in a perilous situation. The Bush cabinet played a frat-boy prank on the judicial investigation by using Scotter Libby—a longtime member in the neocon fraternity house (PNAC)—as the patsy.<br />
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Libby was convicted on a handful of felonies. But good’ol frat-boy G.W. Bush commuted Libby’s felonies after only a few weeks in a high-class jail. “This rare triumph for equality before the law could not have happened but for an improbable set of circumstances. First, Libby had made the mistake of crossing the CIA, which loathes any outing of covert agents. Because it was the CIA that had asked the Department of Justice to investigate the leak, the request had to be taken seriously….These circumstances combined to produce the rarest of all Washington events: the prosecution of a truly powerful individual for serious crimes committed while in office.” (17)<br />
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Our so-called leaders still attempt to justify aggressive invasions and occupations in unrelated Iraq and Afghanistan as if the 9/11/2001 disaster called for colonizing and controlling the oil regions. We remember that 15 of the 19 hijackers were born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and that none of them had anything to do with Iraq or Afghanistan.<br />
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Powerful people in the U.S. used 9/11 to hijack the American people’s imaginations and fears into frivolous war and succeeded in doing this by using a “false flag” like the Bay of Tonkin incident in Vietnam. “Consider our invasion of Iraq, a war based on willful distortions, government secrecy, and the complaisant failure of our major media to ask the important questions.” (18) The powerful people in the U.S. carry out state terrorism. "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad." (19)<br />
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The more the U.S. military invades foreign countries, the more the invaded and occupied foreigners—the Taliban or Khmer Rouge, ragheads, gooks or whatever—will fight to defend their country. The more powerful people can make a farce of American justice, the more the regular Americans become as oppressed as Bradley Manning and the unarmed Iraqis shot down by those Apache helicopters pilots. (20) Bradley Manning is a national hero for shining a little light on an America groping in the dark without a moral compass.<br />
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Sources:<br />
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1) The Passion of Bradley Manning, by Chase Madar, Or Books, 2012, Kindle page (location) 54.<br />
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2) Secrecy in the trial: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-hafetz/bradley-manning-trial_b_1450955.html<br />
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3) Defense motion denied: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/25/bradley-manning-defence-motion-denied<br />
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4) http://wikileaks.org/ <br />
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5) National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA): it strips away many of the most basic civil rights in American law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012<br />
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6) Officials publicly condemn Manning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0<br />
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7) Judge refuses to dismiss: http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/6811592/Judge-refuses-to-dismiss-soldiers-WikiLeaks-case<br />
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8) The Passion of Bradley Manning, by Chase Madar, Or Books, 2012, Kindle page (location) 494.<br />
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9) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0<br />
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10) PNAC: Project for the New American Century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century<br />
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11) Pentagon Papers, by Daniel Ellsberg, Penguin (Non-Classics), Sept. 2003. And a recent documentary on this story: The Most Dangerous Man in America: http://www.amazon.com/The-Most-Dangerous-Man-America/dp/B00329PYGQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335641885&sr=8-1<br />
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12) Drift, by Rachel Maddow, 275 pp., Crown Publishers, NY, New York. And a New York Times review: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/books/review/drift-by-rachel-maddow.html<br />
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13) The Passion of Bradley Manning, Ibid, Kindle page (location 62-63). <br />
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14) With Liberty and Justice for Some, by Glenn Greenwald, Metropolitan Books; Oct. 2011; Kindle page (location) 30<br />
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15) Ibid.; Kindle page (location) 25.<br />
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16) Joe Wilson & Valerie Plame vs Dick (Chickenhawk) Cheney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqGoaORCuLM See also the movie <i>Fair Game</i>.<br />
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17) With Liberty and Justice for Some; Ibid.: Kindle page (location) 516-518.<br />
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18) The Passion of Bradley Manning, Ibid. Kindle page (location) 52. See also the documentary on secrecy: WikiRebels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9xrO2Ch4Co<br />
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19) Letters and Other Writings of James Madison; J.B. Lippincott & Co.; 1865; Vol. II, p. 141. Available on Amazon.com<br />
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20) With Liberty and Justice for Some: Kindle page (location) 63-66. “Alexander Hamilton did not often see eye to eye with Paine, but on this he heartily agreed. “The instruments by which [government] must act are either the AUTHORITY of the laws or FORCE,” he wrote in 1794. “If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government there is an end to liberty!” Like Paine and Hamilton, Adams, in his 1776 Thoughts on Government, put the rule of law at the top of his list of core principles for a free and legitimate government: “The very definition of a republic is ‘an empire of laws, and not of men.’…Good government is an empire of laws.”<br />
<br />Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-28190329933083391142011-10-18T11:49:00.000-07:002011-10-18T15:42:59.748-07:00Drones Enable Corporate Power<span style="font-family:arial;">Several articles have recently appeared in the news about the legality of using drones to assassinate U.S. citizens and foreigners. The article by Jean MacKinzie at the Global Post </span><strong style="font-family: arial;">(1)</strong><span style="font-family:arial;"> recently considered the question, “Are our drone attacks legal?” The article provides insight into the legal justifications or lack thereof. However, as attorneys go, they look mostly at the laws on the books or the precedence or juris prudence. This view certainly has its limits.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The military does not need new laws to allow the assassination of people by drones or by any other clever means. As many times in recent events, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act">Patriot Act</a> allows the U.S. to capture and/or kill anyone considered a terrorist and without a fair trial, due process of the law, or even solid evidence.</span><br /><img src="http://biskeborn.com/images/predator_drone_300x240.jpg" alt="Drone_control" align="right" /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Roll up the Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta and bury them in the dust on a dark shelf. These “patriot” laws greatly expand the powers of the president, the military and law enforcement with the ability to assassinate or detain anyone considered associated with terrorism. The laws make it convenient for “authorities” to identify just about anyone as a terrorist by relatively vague criteria and, without due process or evidence, to kill people from a remote control, virtual reality video gaming seat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">This includes the several recent cases in which the FBI coaches and coaxes vulnerable individuals. “Time and again, the FBI concocts a Terrorist attack, infiltrates Muslim communities in order to find recruits, persuades them to perpetrate the attack…only to heroically jump in at the last moment, arrest the would-be perpetrators whom the FBI converted, and save a grateful nation from the plot manufactured by the FBI.” </span><strong style="font-family: arial;">(2)</strong><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">These dark and dubious FBI sting operations </span><strong style="font-family: arial;">(3)</strong><span style="font-family:arial;"> are now being used to trump up justifications to impose sanctions against Iran. For various political reasons, President Obama has jumped on this bandwagon with such casus belli—justifications for aggression. The use of trumped up justifications for U.S. sanctions and military invasions has become a cookie cutter process for presidents throughout American history. </span><strong style="font-family: arial;">(4)</strong><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Laws are overwhelmingly made to protect those in power—call it "national interests." Money provides power and power protects those with the money.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">U.S. government policies are overwhelmingly skewed to protect the investors and owners of wealth, especially for those dealing in fossil fuels which provide unprecedented returns on investments and even more so as the crude reserves diminish and the profits increase.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Unfortunately, fossil fuel is flagrantly obsolete simply because it causes endless wars for the resources and it destroys the environment on which life depends. Climate change and oil spills cause ecological catastrophes, which in the long, and also in the short run, have begun to destroy the planet. The only way to avoid these lethal and toxic events is to develop alternative technology.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Alas, the country's power elite avoids rapid changes in energy technology because the investments to develop new energy sources, renewable and clean, might require a short-term reduction on their returns on investments. This is a simple rule of capitalism, especially in the "free" and unregulated capitalism in the United States.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">If the United States were to develop alternative, renewable, clean energy sources on a massive scale—wind, hydrogen, solar, etc.—and be the first and most advanced in this technology, the investors would gain a huge and global competitive advantage. But this change in technology requires short-term reductions in returns on investments before the profits increase.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">While spending trillions of dollars in futile, endless wars in order to control access to fossil fuels, our elected officials ignore the opportunity to invest public resources to develop the renewable energy sources and so too, create more good jobs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Instead of a national and rational energy policy, our elected officials, motivated by Big Money corporations, cater to the ruling class, which wants to use any type of military actions, drones or otherwise, to defend their access to the highly profitable fossil fuels.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Faceless corporations are ready to stop anyone who stands in their way to harvest the profits from the crude and this applies to any other industry such as healthcare or finance. The owners of wealth—the 1 percenters—are reluctant to reinvest into new energy sources. It's a lot easier to maintain the current and highly lucrative status quo, even when that means the ruling class needs to kill anyone standing in the way of their profits.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The financially powerful ruling class—however irrational their policies—writes the laws that enable the owners of wealth to carry on with their business and maintain their short-term and enormous profits. Or they simply ignore laws such as the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. Their irrational and greedy operations reveal just how short-sighted unregulated, unguided capitalism is. Big Money corporations like Koch and Exxon serve as just one of many examples how the U.S. system favors the rule of powerful men rather than the rule of rational laws that benefit the greatest good of the entire country. </span><a style="font-family: arial;" href="http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/21/275206/koch-exxon-state-legislation-climate-change-laws/">Koch and Exxon write state legislation</a><span style="font-family:arial;"> repealing climate change laws.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The purpose of government—at least in a democracy—is to allow rational use of resources for the greatest good of the nation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Since the Big Oil barons want to control their grip on petroleum no matter where it’s found, the U.S. government's policy, by default, is to support their wishes, despite any democratic process. The simple and obvious truth is that the U.S. government offers the country’s people no rational energy policy for the greatest good of the country. On the contrary, the U.S. elected officials take their commands from the large and financially powerful corporations which, in turn, compensate the elected officials by large campaign contributions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Since the death of FDR and the New Deal, U.S. elected officials—Democrats and Republicans—have turned their functions away from democracy.</span><strong style="font-family: arial;">(5)</strong><span style="font-family:arial;"> The United States has become an inverted totalitarianism—a corporate ruled state—as the government provides services first and foremost to the wants and needs of the 1 percenters, the owners and investors of corporations.</span><strong style="font-family: arial;">(6)</strong><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Since the U.S. elected officials—congressmen, senators, president—cater to the wants of the members of their own ruling class instead of the general population, and since the elected officials command the U.S. military, then also the public’s military provides killing services—security or defense—first and foremost for the benefits of the 1 percenters. This New World Order in the United States now resembles a totalitarianism like that of the old Soviet Union, even though it’s called by euphemistic names like “free market.” There’s nothing free about it, especially as the middle class pays the brunt of the taxes to finance these oil-motivated military escapades into endless wars.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">As it stands then, any American who joins the military thinking patriotically and heroically that he or she is “serving the country" is gravely—no pun intended—mistaken. You join up with the military, you provide protection for large corporations, most of which are not even American (CACI, Halliburton, KBR to which Cheney gave no-bid contracts in Iraq, and this list of war profiteers is long). </span><strong style="font-family: arial;">(7)</strong><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">To break this down into pragmatic and simple terms, the military, with all its clever toys, like the drones, only serves the interests of the few, extremely wealthy…the 1 percenters. The military, following commands from the ruling class, which includes the elected officials, enables these patricians to pursue their search for greater profits today in the Middle East and tomorrow elsewhere. The Big Oil lords do so with government subsidies and special tax breaks on top of all other services.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The rest of us plebs—the 99 percenters—have all learned to avert our eyes and thoughts about this simple truth. Our democracy is no longer in the hands of the voting citizens. Us 99 cent-ers are mere subjects obeying the demands of corporate fiefdoms.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">So, no matter how you parse the legal arguments about drones or other clever killing tools, the answer to such debates carries a foregone conclusion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The Big Oil lords, the wealthy barons of Wall Street—the ruling corporate class—this small group of elites makes the rules by simple force of financial power. They determine the laws and often act regardless of the laws.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The unjustified, preemptive invasion of Iraq serves as one blatant example of disregard for the laws. And there are many more such examples from Cheney’s war crimes regarding torture to Rumsfeld’s blind military and nation building blunders.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Likewise, the Supreme Court also demonstrates how the highest ranks of the justice system adjudicates not in the interests of the greatest benefits of the citizenry but rather in favor of the interests of their own ruling class by allowing corporations all rights as individual citizens. Big Money corporations are seldom American and most often global and without any national loyalty.<br /><br />With the 2010 judgment on </span><a style="font-family: arial;" href="http://storyofstuff.org/citizensunited/">Citizens United v FEC</a><span style="font-family:arial;">, we find again how the “authorities” in America give corporations the right to spend unlimited funds to influence elections despite the wishes of 85% of the citizens. </span><strong style="font-family: arial;">(8) </strong><span style="font-family:arial;"> The Supreme Court justices give corporations all the rights of individual citizens, such as free speech, even through they are hardly "American citizens," as they are almost all global and mostly based in tax-evading islands, and they are</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> never prosecuted as individuals when they break the laws.</span><span style="font-family:arial;"> </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">None of these military policies or the energy policies—not to mention the "too big to fail" policies on Wall Street—serve for the greatest good of the nation but rather for the interests of those who possess the billions and millions of financial force. Elected officials—both Democrat and Republican—serve the barons of industry more so now than ever before and to hell with anyone who stands in their way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Drones are effective tools as they ultimately enable the tycoons in their pursuit of greater profits.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The well-heeled attorneys can debate all they want about the legalities of drones or Patriot Acts or torture or preemptive invasions based on lies or massive fraud in the banking or in the healthcare industries. Our current perversions of the system of justice and of politics, is determined not by rational laws but by powerful barons of industry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Bigger forces trump the laws.</span><br /><br /><br /><span style=" font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sources:</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">(1) MacKinzie, Jean. Are our drone attacks legal?, Global Post, Oct. 11, 2011, http://news.salon.com/2011/10/11/are_our_drone_attacks_legal/?source=newsletter</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">(2) Greenwald, Glenn. The FBI again Thwarts its own Terror plot, Salon blog, Sept. 29, 2011, http://politics.salon.com/2011/09/29/fbi_terror/</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">(3)</span><span style="border: 0pt none; padding: 0pt; margin: 0pt; border-collapse: collapse; clear: none; float: none; outline: medium none; position: relative; display: inline; width: auto; height: auto; text-decoration: none; cursor: url("http://cdn.apture.com/media/imgs/crsr/socialLink.png"), default;" class="" id="apture_prvw2"><a href="http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php#" style="border-width: 0pt 0pt 1px; border-style: none none dotted; border-color: -moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color rgb(0, 102, 204); -moz-border-top-colors: none; -moz-border-right-colors: none; -moz-border-bottom-colors: none; -moz-border-left-colors: none; -moz-border-image: none; padding: 1px; margin: 0pt; border-collapse: collapse; clear: none; float: none; outline: medium none; position: relative; display: inline; width: auto; height: auto; text-decoration: none; cursor: url("http://cdn.apture.com/media/imgs/crsr/socialLink.png"), default; color: inherit; top: -1px; border-radius: 2px 2px 2px 2px;" class=" snap_noshots"><span style="border: 0pt none; padding: 0pt; margin: 0pt; border-collapse: collapse; clear: none; float: none; outline: medium none; position: relative; display: inline; width: auto; height: auto; text-decoration: none; cursor: url("http://cdn.apture.com/media/imgs/crsr/socialLink.png"), default; left: 0px; top: 1px;">Porter, Gareth</span></a><span style="border: 0pt none; padding: 0pt; margin: 0pt; border-collapse: collapse; clear: none; float: none; outline: medium none; position: static; display: inline; width: auto; height: auto; text-decoration: none; line-height: 1px;"></span></span>. <span style="font-family:arial;">Alleged Iranian Assassination Plot Appears an FBI Sting, Real News Network, Oct. 15, 2011. Take a look at this recent report on the Real News Network:</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7452</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">And here is an article explaining how President Obama is running with this dubious FBI sting operation: </span><span style="font-family:arial;">Feller, Ben. “Obama says Iran must be held accountable for plot,” Associated Press. Oct. 13, 2011.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_AMBASSADOR_PLOT?SITE=AP&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_afternoon&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_afternoon&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">(4) See my article posted of various blogs: “Church of Later Day Neocons.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">“This is how the American industrial military complex works. It’s become a cookie cutter process for presidents since the Mexican American War when the Thornton Skirmish arose between the U.S. and Mexican military, handing President Polk a justification of war against Mexico in 1846. The sinking of the USS Maine gave Teddy Roosevelt a trumped up reason for the Spanish American War just as the Tonkin incident helped justify the Vietnam War.”</span><br /><br />http://www.opednews.com/articles/Church-of-Later-Day-Neocon-by-Mark-Biskeborn-080725-949.html<span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">(5) Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Feb. 2010.</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">“Before the war, during the first two terms of FDR’s presidency (1933-41), a substantial attempt was made to establish a liberal version of social democracy. Looking back upon that experience, one has difficulty recognizing an America in which, unapologetically, public debate and discussion centered on matters such as planning; focusing resources on the poor and unemployed; bringing radical changes agriculture by limiting production; regulating business and banking practices while not fearing to castigate the rich and powerful; raising the standard of living of whole regions of the country; introducing public works projects that created employment for millions and left valuable public improvements (libraries, schools, conservation practices, subsidies to the arts); and promoting all manner of participatory schemes for including the citizenry in economic decision-making process.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">(6) Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Feb. 2010.</span><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">“Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation. …that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">(7) See the short lists on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_profiteering</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">(8) See the video that explains this: http://storyofstuff.org/citizensunited/</span>Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-62239841896992400462010-09-25T20:55:00.000-07:002010-09-25T20:57:26.552-07:00Corporations in the U.S. and in Mexico an Inverted Totalitarianism: Devour, Prey, SeduceThey are mammoth carnivores, dark power brokers, and, as proven time and again, without tough governing, they devour the earth, seduce public officials, and prey on human greed. They can hold everyone in their crushing jaws, smash innovation in one sweep of their tails, and pack off entire nations back in time some 66 million years as hostage for the release of Tyrannosaurus Rex herds, reaping chaos. <br /><br />Corporations are beneficial forms of business. They provide almost equal investment opportunities for everyone—although without equal decision information—and they sometimes even create "economies of scale" by delivering useful products most efficiently at low, competitive prices. By leveraging capital, they are able to build products otherwise unimaginable, like Adobe software, Boeing aircraft, Apple Computers, and then others like BP, Goldman Sachs investments, AIG insurance, Merrill Lynch investments, or Enron energy. <br /><br />They are giant businesses. Without regulatory limits, they wield monstrous power. In the U.S., as in Mexico and in other countries, they have become stronger than the government; their money can overrule environmental laws, influence and even control our public officials and judiciary. They prey on our most treasured democratic institutions and values. The patrician owners, leaders of corporations, have their own self-interests and agendas, and they rarely set a priority to improve the greater good of society. <br /><br />On the other hand, government's job is to balance the competitive markets so that they comply with the needs of society in general such as clean environment, health, or whatever the majority of citizens set as social goals. Today this balancing is not working. And it's a problem we need to fix in our current system of government. <br /><br />The stewards of industry always spread a certain ideology to protect their interests. Consider the privately owned Koch Industries, valued in the billions, the Koch brothers own patented processes, mostly by inheritance, to convert oil into gasoline; you can guess why they lobby against any awareness of global warming. (1) <br /><br />The captains of industry believe in magic. They have become the tribal high priests of our culture, while our enfeebled democracy fails to set boundaries and rules to develop our society in general. One of the most glaring ideas that corporate elitists hold close to their hearts is that a "free market"—one that is uninhibited by government policy—always corrects itself to the most efficient conditions. This notion about a "free market" arose from something Adam Smith said way back in the 18th century in terms of "the invisible hand" that guides markets to correct themselves as they satisfy the needs of individuals. <br /><br />Meanwhile, the neoliberal corporatists ignore that they are neither concerned nor equipped to solve larger economic and social problems. The more contemporary, post-WWII economists, like John M. Keynes, emphasized that government must play a crucial role in markets in order to point industries toward the optimal levels of wealth, the greatest good of society, and away from abuses of power. American has miserably butchered its social development, while nurturing rampant consumerism for individuals and predatory corporatism. Right-wing activists, like the middle-class Tea Baggers, are woefully misguided and unwittingly only abusing themselves.<br /><br />Corporate managers are generally not wise, altruistic saints looking for the best possible benefits for society at large. No. Their job is to keep their firms competitive and increase profits and stock values by any means. Today, one of the popular methods includes "investing" obscene sums of money in lobbying to slacken labor laws, taxes, and the bridles of government regulations. And as individuals, corporate managers do not possess the will or the power to make rational decisions for an entire society's best interests. They work for their own self-interests to own more preferred shares and to promote their careers, salaries, and bonuses. As they sip martinis at their exclusive country clubs, they joke about the stupidity of middle-class Tea Baggers.<br /><br />Today's military and economic crises reflect many others in U.S. history. In the 1920s bankers and investors raised speculation into a feeding frenzy of greed leading to a Wall Street bubble, burst, and Great Depression in the 1930s. Likewise, the delusional bubble years of Reagan/Bush led to the same false gods of free-wheeling corporations taking power over the balancing controls of government oversight. <br /><br />Reagan's empty speeches about "no government is best government" are still praised as great oratory by the wealthy, who benefit from it. The empty discourse continues even after all the hypermedia has crashed down around the ankles of the middle-class workers, who now pay for the excesses of the wealthy and their sycophant policy makers. America's history of bubble-and-bust business cycles allows no one to plead ignorance. No one can act surprised, least of all the well-heeled financial wizards responsible for the premeditated busts for profits. <br /><br />American politics repeatedly shows the world that brain-dead incompetence is tolerated, the more its consequences are colossal and costly to working-class families. <br />The dazzling myth in today's America is that the U.S. government is empowered to direct the economy for the benefit of all people since the government is--theoretically--for and by the people. <br /><br /><blockquote>"They argued perhaps naively, that in a democracy, the people were sovereign and government was, by definition on their side. The sovereign people were entitled to use governmental power and resources to redress the inequalities created by the economy of capitalism." (2)</blockquote><br /><br />FDR's New Deal supported this conviction and "a wide range of regulatory agencies were created, the Social Security program and a minimum wage law were established, unions were legitimated along with the rights to bargain collectively." (3)<br /><br />Since the 1950s, the U.S. government has become weaker than corporate power. Its democratic processes no longer serve the interests of its citizens. During the 80s, Reaganomics (a.k.a. neoliberal economic policy) weakened and dismantled most of FDR's New Deal, "socialist" policies, which resulted in less equality. From the time of Reaganomics to the present, government policies distributed 200 times more wealth to the top 1 percent of the population, back to the robber barons—a return to the Gilded Age—while the middle class' income barely increased, if at all.(4) <br /><br />During the 90s, Clinton continued this neoliberal trend. While looking to gain support from the Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs, he hired Robert Rubin for help, which resulted in Rubinomics—the overturn of the regulatory Glass Steagall Act, thus enabling free-wheeling banking to run off the tracks by 2008. Banks like Goldman Sachs only used this major catastrophe first to fleece the middle class and then to take its tax-paid bail-out as the spoils of a corporate coup d'état.<br /><br /><blockquote>"Rubin has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having f**ked up virtually every project he ever got his hands on. He went from running GoldmanSachs (1990-1992) to the Clinton White House (1993-1999) to Citigroup (1999-2009), leaving behind a trail of historic gaffes that somehow boosted his stature every step of the way." (5)</blockquote><br /><br />Recent crises show us how both Republicans and Democrats sing the same hymns in order to garner financial and political support from corporate lords. Does America now have a single party like, say, China or Cuba? If not, at least the differences are now little more than staged soap-opera dramas to maintain the American myth that voters have a choice—one between the neoliberal or the neoliberal policies—and that America is still a functional democracy, home of the free and the brave. <br /><br /><blockquote>"Why has capitalism become so triumphant and democracy so enfeebled? Are the two trends connected? What, if anything, can be done to strengthen democracy?" (6) </blockquote><br /><br />The U.S. government is weak. It cannot control its own military-industrial complex, which has grown its own power base by lobbying, despite what citizens might vote to stop the endless wars and colonial occupations, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Andrew Bracevich points out in his book, <em>Washington Rules</em>, the American empire has become an unbearable burden, almost impossible to shake off our shoulders. <br /><br /><blockquote>"The global military presence is ostensibly essential to the defense of American freedom even in places where the actual threat to American freedom is oblique or imaginary. Americans take all this for granted and so are blind to its significance. Like corruption or hypocrisy, this national security consensus has long since become part of the wallpaper of national life, attracting attention only when some especially maladroit escapade comes to light. So, too, with the Washington rules: It's only when something especially egregious occurs—most commonly a botched war—that members of the public take notice, and even then only briefly."(7)</blockquote> <br /><br />Business leaders almost all sing from the same hymn book of fixed-ideas. Since before the Gilded Age, they have always used their power to lobby against government regulations, except for the few who dare heresy, only to risk their careers. "But Shiller's views conflicted with conventional thinking in a more profound way."(8) <br />The "smart" economists sing in harmony in order to keep their cushy jobs, they advocate economic policies beneficial for corporate agendas. No. This is not a conspiracy, it's just business as we know it in America.<br /><br />The ideology has become a religion in America. Many public officials, economists, and industrialists have joined "the Family"—an elitist social prayer group—which cleverly brought God into their ruthless business ideology, where any means justifies their profits. In their world of elitist religion, the idea of the "invisible hand" is not government intervention, but it is God's providence, God's invisible hand guiding His chosen leaders, and to hell with Christ's middle-class morality; theirs is a new world order of "Christ plus nothing." For them, Christ is a God-chosen leader just as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, or Hitler.<br /><br /><blockquote>"James A. Farrell or Henry Ford, commanding Pinkertons and the police; in Seattle, it was Dave Beck, Teamster, who owned the law, "Beck was living evidence that God's invisible hand blessed the ruthless as much as or more than those whom he considered the deserving." (9)</blockquote><br /><br />The wheels have fallen off American democracy. The vast majority of corporations, like religions, are not organized in any profit-sharing, democratic process. Quite the contrary, corporations "manage personnel" much more strictly than churches "shepherd their flock," and neither organization asks their participants to vote on issues. <br /><br />Does the Catholic Church ask its members to vote on abortion, gay marriage or preemptive war? Pat Robertson asks his congregates for donations, but does he ask his congregation permission to buy a personal jet? Does the CEO of XE ask his employees what mercenary contracts to take on? And yet these are the primary types of organizations to which a large number of Americans voluntarily, and perhaps unwittingly, adhere as if they prefer living as automatons with prescribed moral and behavioral codes that provide simply a veneer of ethical professionalism. Middle-class working families seldom find the time to consider how our democracy hobbles along while industrialists devour any economic equality. Castaneda describes how inequity cripples democracy in Mexico. It directly applies to the U.S.:<br /><br /><blockquote>"Economic mistakes, political abuses, and the dramatic increase of inequality in what was already one of the world's most unjust societies might not have been entirely avoided through democratic rule and authentic accountability, but they were absolutely inevitable in the absence of representative democracy." (10)</blockquote> <br /><br />Corporate advertising creates a society with freedom to consume. Many business theorists, like the blundering and famous Milton Friedman, found this "free market" ideology to be highly appealing material for bestselling books. Friedman promoted the fetish of a market enabling consumers a "freedom of choice." This became especially attractive for most captains of industry looking to increase profits by any means, advertising and popularizing unbridled commerce. <br /><br />At the same time, despite or because of this ideology of "consumer freedom," an eerie conformity—Babbittry—in how people think develops as we Americans behave as consumers more in line with marketing research rather than as citizens with individual critical thinking. Consumerism destroys communities where each individual competes to outdo the other. The alienation leaves people lonely and craving for some source of fulfillment. Drugs, alcohol, shopping or religion become the options in a mass market without any other culture than to work and to consume. <br /><br />This surreal society, made up of androids, driven by purchase power, reveals itself now more than ever as some corporations in many industries crash after devouring their own food chain. <br /><br />Many of the Wall Street bankers are terrorists. Al Qaeda's financial investors made millions by "going short" on stock purchases in U.S. airlines before 9/11, because they knew that, after the attack, the value of the shares would plummet. Following the example of the Islamic terrorists, our own investment bankers "went short," investing in the failure of the very same bad mortgage and credit card loans they sold to working families. Many Goldman Sachs employees probably attend mass or synagogue at least once a week, people drinking from our mainstream founts of moral courage and spiritual strength. Nevertheless, they contrive clever methods to fleece the consumers of America's spectacular, neon-lit disposable society—the middle-class workers jostling to buy stuff, living for celebrity bling, driving guzzling SUVs manufactured by an industrial dinosaur.<br /><br /><blockquote>"The upper classes in this country raped this country. You f**ked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said "This is wrong'." (11)</blockquote><br /><br />The American aristocracy sets the rules, not the democratic system. A cabal of elitist economic advisors, like Rubin mentioned above, usually set policies of immense public consequences and more often than not, we--the general citizenry are hardly given a voice in the decision process or, if we do as in the 2008 elections for Obama, our voices were ignored as the campaign promises slipped on the occupation of Afghanistan or the futile 2009 surge in Iraq, and on the promise to raise the minimum wage, or on the mediocre healthcare reform, or the closure of Guantanamo. <br /><br />In the recent financial catastrophe on Wall Street, policy makers made status quo assumptions, a blind faith in their ideology, and yet, despite their colossal blunders, they still remain in public office with their erroneous policies about free markets, torture, preemptive invasions, endless war, and wire tapping. <br /><br /><blockquote>"Indeed, major actors such as Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner [Robin's pals] still are in leadership positions, with their past conduct receiving remarkably little criticism despite their having helped design the policies that precipitated the meltdown." (12)</blockquote><br /><br />Money trumps reality. Policy makers, like the ones named above, work in government or in think tanks or universities, which are often heavily influenced by the corporations that sponsor their jobs and research. This corporate influence has increased over the decades as corporations pay tax deductible "donations" to organizations and thus find a strong voice in how research findings are presented or not. Consider U.C. Berkeley's findings on how "new microbes" are eating up the oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico and then look at BP's $500 million donations to the same research center. Consider the millions of dollars BP spent on lobbying to both Republicans and to Democrats, and then consider how the White House now fails to pressure BP to pay a high premium for the damages. Consider also how the Supreme Court recently overturned <em>Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</em>, enabling corporations unlimited and direct campaigning for political candidates. <br /><br /><blockquote>"Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury." (13)</blockquote><br /><br />In his book, Democracy Incorporated, Wolin describes how these important institutions from think tanks, universities, and news media as well as the government were taken over or suppressed, and brought into a central control to create a total center of power, a totalitarian state, like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Stalinist Russia, which monopolized the power in order to restructure society. <br /><br />Wolin considers how a new form of totalitarianism can arise in a superpower, which loses its sense of limits and morphs into an empire out of touch with reality. It's a country where civil rights, due-process of law, and habeas corpus are revoked and imprisonment and torture are sanctioned. It's a place where a vice president can publically boast of supporting this torture and "new world order." Government intelligence agencies produce fictional reports, as happened in W's administration, in order to please the president, who, in turn, pleases corporations, like Big Oil, by attempting to occupy the world's second largest oil reserve. In order to obtain more financial sponsorship, politicians, news media, universities, and think tanks provide corporations with the news and information they want the public to hear. <br /><br /><blockquote>"Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private' governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power." (14)</blockquote><br /><br />Take the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA was signed by George Bush, Sr. in 1992 and put into effect in 1994 by Bill Clinton, making it a bipartisan agreement. It encapsulates many of the false assumptions that the prominent, and, unfortunately, influential policy makers of the last fifty years—from Volker to Greenspan and on to Bernanke—have blindly advocated while advising stately politicians. <br /><br />Policy makers created NAFTA based on erroneous ideology. The "free trade" part of NAFTA reflects the old hymn that free markets do godly miracles when left to their own entrepreneurial devices. Years later, Canada might boast as a winner relatively speaking, if there was one. Although U.S. businesses justified the agreement as a means to become more competitive by reducing labor costs, even though America lost millions of middle-class jobs, devalued wages, and increased inequality. Meanwhile, other industrialized countries like Japan keep their own citizens employed by innovating and by responding to market demands, instead of the short-term profits gained momentarily by short-term labor cuts for which American management is infamous. Consider the innovative electric car, the Nissan Leaf, compared to the now extinct Tyrannosaurus Rex, GM's Hummer. <br /><br />Mexico lost the most from NAFTA. Mexico's American-trained economists expected that the agreement would boost manufacturing and economic growth by setting up the maquiladoras. Many peasants moved from their farms to the U.S. factories in border towns and worked with hardly any labor laws to protect their interests only to see that the U.S. firms decided to outsource their work to countries where wages were even lower at the time in India and China. Consequently, many Mexican peasants lost their jobs and they could not return to their peasant farmlands because the U.S. farms began exporting to Mexico large quantities of agricultural products at even lower, subsidized prices.<br /><br />Castenada describes the affects of NAFTA and how Mexico already resembles an "inverted totalitarian" state:<br /><br /><blockquote>"And this would happen, they warned, not in a nation magically propelled toward the First World by irresponsible headlines or high-level trade agreements, but in a country as firmly anchored as ever in the Third World, a country consisting of several segregated nations, plagued by injustice and inequality, authoritarianism and corruption, poverty and marginalization. The Chiapas uprising became a symbol of that crisis—which was not, however, confined to Chiapas." (15) </blockquote><br /><br />NAFTA motivates peasants to cross the border. The next job opportunity for most any blue collar Mexican worker is to cross the border for jobs paying less than minimum wage or to stay in Mexico to take a job in the only rising industry—the drug cartels that manufacture and traffic illegal drugs. The drug cartels operate much like any large corporation, except that their products are illegal, which attracts entrepreneurs only slightly more ruthless than the leaders at such businesses as XE, Halliburton, BP, or Goldman Sachs. <br /><br />From Castenada's description, in Mexico, there are few regulations for the large corporations. It is a dream paradise model for many of the American neoliberal elitists. If they visited Mexico they would find that the government even provides guarantees for many monopolies such as Carlos Slim, who became one of the richest men in the world by acquiring almost all—94 percent—of the telephone companies in Mexico. With proper "arrangements" made with the public officials, many billionaire monopolists thrive in Mexican industries. One company owns 70 percent of the tortillas/cornmeal market, another controls Telmex telecommunications, there is the now state-owned Pemex oil, and only two corporations hold 80 percent of all pharmaceuticals, and on and on. Better yet, for the wealthy, even religion holds a monopoly by the Catholic Church keeps the Great Unwashed gullible and submissive to the providence of God's will. Those in power stay in power and garner larger and larger pieces of the pie. <br /><br />Meanwhile taxes on these monopolies and oligarchies are extremely low compared to income taxes on the dwindling middle class. Almost half the population—more than 102 million—lives in poverty. The rich continue to gain more wealth while the peasants sink deeper into poverty. (16) <br />NAFTA did serve at least one benefit for Mexico. With the free trade, it is easier to export drugs into the U.S., making it the most lucrative industry, second only to the rapidly depleting oil business. As the drug business increases in value, the Mexican government takes greater pieces of the profits in the form of bribes or "la plaza," in which the drug lords pay government officials not to intervene in the commerce, while legitimate corporations pay a tribute—called lobbyist contributions in the U.S.—to gain favors. <br /><br />The drug industry overwhelms the Mexican government. Once the drug industry rose into the billions of dollars, the government became weaker, less able to control its own army because the drug lords now earn more money, and able to bribe public officials and law enforcement at all levels, they conduct their business as a true "free market," one without any civil authority, much less regulations, and the competition between the cartels rages to all-out civil war, where drug dealers use all types of violence imaginable--kidnapping, rape, murder, torture, beheadings—to gain market share over the competitors. Since January, 2007, 29,000 people have been killed in drug-related activity. (17) The growing drug violence boosts the U.S. weapons industry, which conducts business without much oversight. <br /><br />When a country is unable to protect its own citizens' interests, it is a failed state. The Mexican government is too weak to corral the violence and lobbyist money—bribes—to influence public officials, and unable to protect the regular citizens; it is a failed state. Now officials in the Mexican army partner with certain cartels in order to obtain a substantial part of the profits. For the time being, the Mexican army provides favors for the Sinaloa cartel and against the Juarez cartel. <br /><br />Like all countries, Mexico's history is unique. If it ever had a functional democracy, it was only during brief and unusual moments. Since it transitioned from a monarchy to a pseudo-democracy, it has always been an "inverted totalitarian state," where the elite reign over the lower classes, and where the public officials serve their fellow elites, the barons of industry. If the U.S. continues on its current trend toward a system in which the Democrats and Republicans serve the interests of corporations instead of the citizens, we, too, will reap all the benefits of pseudo-democracy as in Mexico, where lobbyist money speaks louder than votes. <br /><br />Mexico operates with a truly free market. The government hardly intervenes except to help well-paying organizations. Its religious culture keeps the lower classes submissive and more interested in the next life than this one here and now. It's an ideal business environment for the American neoliberal elitists. <br /><br /><br />(1) Mayer, Jane, "Covert Operations," The New Yorker, August 30, 2010<br />(2) Wolin, Sheldon, Democracy Incorporated, Princeton University Press, 2010, Kindle edition. Preface.<br />(3) Ibid.<br />(4) Wilkinson, Richard and Pickett, Kate, The Spirit Level, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2010 and at The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. <br />(5) Taibbi, Matt, "Obama's Big Sellout," Rolling Stone Magazine, Dec. 10, 2009.<br />(6) Reich, Robert, Supercaptialism, New York: Vintage, 2008, page 5. <br />(7) Bracevich, Andrew, Washington Rules, <br />(8) Smith, Ives, Econned, New York: PalgraveMcMillan, 2010, pg. 19.<br />(9) Sharlet, Jeff, The Family, New York: Harper Perennial, 2008, pg. 100.<br />(10)Castaneda, JorgeG.The Mexican Shock, New York: The New Press, 1995, pg. 34.<br />(11) Lewis, Michael, The Big Short, New York, W.W. Norton Co., 2010, pg. 197.<br />(12) Smith, Econned, Ibid., pg. 43.<br />(13) Hedges, Chris, Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction, Truthdig (blog), January 25, 2010. <br />(14) Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, Kindle edition. <br />(15) Castaneda, The Mexican Shock, Ibid., pg. 80.<br />(16) Llana, Sara, "Calderon's Challenge: Confronting Monopolies," Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 23, 2007 <br />(17) "Mexico under Siege," Los Angeles Times onlineMark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-65433416340057571632010-09-24T18:24:00.000-07:002010-09-24T18:28:13.349-07:00Rapture of CharlatansThe overwhelming readership of the <i>Left Behind</i> series of novels by Lahaye and Jenkins reveals to what extent our “exceptional” American culture cannot distinguish between reality and illusion. A huge swath of the American public has gone out and bought these and other similar escapist novels by the millions. Many Americans seek to escape reality by drugs or by religious fantasies or both. <br /><br />It may well be a sign that many of us have died morally, spiritually, and intellectually. No other culture of industrialized countries is so hoodwinked by the vagaries of born-again evangelical cults.<br /><br />Eventually, we Americans will have to wake from our state of self-indulged juvenility. Delusional interpretations of the <i>Book of Revelation</i>, which John wrote as an allegory of his spite for the Imperial Romans, who imprisoned him, has turned into public policy about the most crucial areas of civilization’s survival on earth: nuclear arms and global warming. <br /><br />We Americans love to avoid the real issues and, instead, focus on sensational gossip about celebrity stories, which pass for news and information. Today’s middle-class Tea Party members participate in mass delusions as they support the despotic right-wing agenda, in the hope that, yes, they too can become multi-millionaires simply by sounding like the wealthy corporatists who, in turn, deteriorate the middle class’s own standard of living. In reality, the original Bostonian Tea Party members of 1773 committed acts of terrorism against the British imperial despotism—taxation without representation. <br /><br />As the corporatist, neoliberal, economic policies have undermined American ideals and institutions, our government has weakened to the point of losing its ability to bridle the corporations that impoverish our economy and destroy our environment. Many Americans prefer to cling to fantasies that God will snatch us up from this harsh reality and take us to a Disney World in the sky. <br /><br />In times of despair and turmoil, many Americans have turned to demagogues, like G.W. Bush, who gave lip service to shallow notions of Christian faith, and charlatans like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, or Joel Osteen who entertain us with reassuring wet-dreams of Christ coming down to enable us with wealth and prosperity or to swoop up only those among us who care less about our community and our own political interests so long as we get right with God.<br /><br />These demagogues—like W —an American president who took a nation to war on the pretext that “God told me what to do”—they have led the gullible middle-class crowds throughout American history to destroy the very American ideals that enable us to become educated, wise, critically astute, and free citizens of a functional democracy, and not enslaved in the stupor of delusions and religious superstitions.<br /><br />The word “rapture” appears only once in the <i>Book of Revelation</i>, yet, in America, it has taken on a life of its own, far from the actual text written by John. Without critical thinking, without a culture of literate, thinking people, we are doomed to enslave ourselves to the fear stirred up by charlatans, who sell us one version or another of one “sacred text” or another and keep us locked up in the shackles of fear that we might be left behind unless we conform to some televangelist conniver.<br /><br />Now at the end of the war in Iraq, we have to dig our way out of the hole in which the evangelical, born-again Christians and neoconservatives buried us all. In wagging the preemptive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the policies that W’s administration established only undermined America’s Constitution and its values, from the justice system to national defense.<br /><br /><blockquote>“When it came to constitutional checks and balances, to the powers of the executive branch, lines had been crossed, fundamental principles violated, putting at risk precisely what made America so special. Dick Cheney had led Donald Rumsfeld and the neocons in creating a separate, shadow national security apparatus to create a disinformation pipeline putting forth its own wished-for reality as a mechanism to start the war.” (1)</blockquote><br /><br />The neoconservative, born-again Christians take liberties to invent a reality when it is needed to carry out Armageddon type actions, but creating a reality in order to justify the death of thousands of people and wasting trillions of dollars is nothing less than lying. Lying on a national scale like this equates to criminal fraud and deception.<br /><br />How did W succeed in misleading the American people only to establish radical, extremist policies that bankrolled our economy and destroyed thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives? W explained why he pursued the policies of radical extremists, “There is a higher father that I appeal to.”<br /><br />During W’s presidency, the neoconservatives and the right-wing Christians teamed up to manipulate the wishful thinking of an America that no longer knows the difference between TV drama and reality. There are two worlds in America, the fantasy view of right-wing religious fundamentalists who spin their own reality and act on it without considering the consequences even when engaging in war, and the pragmatic, humanists who work from rational sets of known facts as a basis for public policy that serves the greatest good of all citizens, including the poor and the middle class, not just the wealthy.<br /><br /><blockquote>“Hitler, to the Family [a secretive fundamentalist Christian organization in which many right-wing power brokers participate], is no more real than Attila the Hun as drafted by business gurus who promise unstoppable “leadership” techniques drawn from history’s killers;” (2)</blockquote><br /><br />In the hindsight of the W administration, the most dangerous threat from extreme fundamentalists arises not from the Islamists, but the neoconservative, fundamentalist Christians. W’s administration has proven this.<br /> <br />(1) Craig Unger, The Fall of the House of Bush, (Simon & Schuster, 2007) pg. 14. <br />(2) Jeff Sharlet, The Family, (Harper Perennial, 2008) pg. 3.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-48023078884314840492010-05-14T19:47:00.000-07:002010-05-14T19:57:33.433-07:00Mexico: God Is Murdered Somewhere between the Chihuahua Desert and El PasoA drug lord tied him to the back bumper of his old Ford pickup and dragged him across the rugged desert terrain until nothing remained of his carcass.<br /><br />After struggling for generations to improve their lot, many Mexicanos have stopped praying. Instead, they are selling drugs to the wealthy gringos in <em>el norte</em>. Meanwhile the Mexican government keeps a choke hold on the middle class in order to enrich the ruling class and use a clever public relations machine to conceal their mafia-type operations from the rest of the world.<br /><br />Operating from Ojinaga, a remote desert pueblo, Pablo Acosta developed the first multimillion-dollar exporting business from the harshest desert in Mexico. As a teenager in 1958, Pablo Acosta saw his father gunned down in the street in a small Texas town for no particular reason. Pablo learned early about toughness. Although his father was illiterate, he taught Pablo about business, how higher business risks often yielded higher profit margins. After his father’s abrupt death, caused by a bullet between his eyes, Pablo began to apply his business savvy to a fledgling drug business during the 1960s.<br /><br /><blockquote>“Pablo Acosta would later tell how his father and Macario Vazques, the most<br />famous of candelilla [desert plants used to make wax] smugglers, once shot it<br />out with forestales [government forest rangers who often robbed peasants] in the<br />mountains above the river village of Santa Elena.”(1)</blockquote>Smuggling has a long tradition in the Mexican border towns since before the Revolution of 1910, when guns were brought from the north to fight the authoritarian, almost fascist, government.<br /><br />Like the violent fights against a tyrannical regime, smuggling also represents one of the links between the popular Villa-Zapata Revolution (1910) and the growing drug industry that first began by selling cactus moonshine, sotol and mescal to Americans during Prohibition in the U.S. The drug business picked up in the 1960s.<br /><blockquote>“For him [Regela, an FBI agent] the investigative experience became the thrill of traveling backwards in time. Smugglers wearing sombreros and crisscross bandoleers studded with high-caliber cartridges used tactics their forefathers had employed even long before the Mexican Revolution to evade detection.” (2)</blockquote>The revolution of 1910, like its predecessors, aimed at transforming Mexico’s charade of a democracy into a government for the people, where the regular Mexican citizen might have a chance on an equal economic playing field with the generations of landed Spanish aristocrats, and where peasants might obtain a small parcel of land to cultivate a viable living standard, almost like a middle class.<br /><br />That never happened. The status quo, elite class picked apart the revolution and then reinforced its authoritarian regime once again and to this day. In place of the failed revolution, peasants, like Pablo Acosta, found a new marketplace, where they have a chance at a middle-class, if not higher, standard of living—despite the risks.<br /><br />For peasants, ambitious to improve their situation, drug trafficking has become the surest work that pays the mortgage, nice cars, and education for their many children. It’s the Mexican dream. Running drugs north is the ticket to success and, if a guy plays his cards right, he can move up in the organization. It’s the fast track, like earning an MBA or a JD in the U.S., more risky but more lucrative.<br /><br />Guys like Pablo Acosta hitched their wagons to this gravy train. The more cut-throat and aggressive drug runners learned to branch out, develop their own operations, and, most importantly, earn enough money to dominate <em>la plaza</em>, the marketplace.<br /><br /><em>¿Quién està manejando la plaza?</em> Who is in charge of the marketplace? To Mexican drug traffickers, this expression takes on special meaning. Who pays the government authorities the license to operate, to kill competitors, and to control a territory?<br /><br />The protection money goes up the ladder, with percentages shaved off at each level up the chain of command until it reaches the highest levels, including the Mexican presidency, judiciary, police, and military.(3) The more a trafficker pays, the more he gains in territory and latitude to operate. A drug lord like Acosta, a Padrino or Godfather, can dominate an entire state like Chihuahua or Sinoloa, as reported by journalists, who risk their lives to reveal the dangerous secrets.<br /><br />Contrary to reports in the mass media, the Mexican government has always been complicit in helping certain entrepreneurs to develop strongholds in their marketplaces. Even monopolies like Slim Helu’s telephone business is supported by a government guarantee, so long as the officials are handsomely bribed. Likewise, Mexican government officials all the way to the presidency receive bribes to protect certain entrepreneurs in the lucrative drug industry, as we see in daily news reports ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFDVV1YxKuI ) exposing the government support for the powerful Sinoloa cartel.<br /><br /><blockquote>“The story of Mexico is a predictable story of absolute power corroding absolutely. It is the story of awesome accumulations of wealth by a miniscule fraction of Mexican society derived through the advantages of power, through the systematic plundering of the wealth of its own people and through the exploitation of weaknesses in the United States. It is the story of a deliberate orchestrating of drug trafficking to flood those neighbors with drugs, for gain but also to satisfy a twisted thirst for vengeance. It is the story of the resulting impoverishment of a potentially great nation whose people are forced out of desperation to flee, bringing about one of the greatest migrations in North American history.” (4)</blockquote>From its Spanish colonial origins, the Mexican government has grown over centuries into the regime it is today. It is not a democracy for and by the people. It is an extreme right-wing government, holding power by an iron fist. Except for rare anomalies, the presidents are selected among the ruling class and then passed through an electoral charade. Opponents to the selected presidents are not allowed to win the election. The process is fixed one way or another to make this happen. The proof of this lies in scandals that occur during elections, when ballot counting is fixed by various methods or where campaign funds are overwhelmingly stacked against the opposition.<br /><br /><strong>An Evil Use of Branding and Marketing</strong><br />The word “corruption” does not apply because the government operates by systematic self-enrichment of a dominating ruling class. “Corruption” implies some criminal exception to an otherwise principled government serving the interests of the general public. On the contrary, Mexico’s regime operates in secret from the general public and especially the United States. A clever use of branding, marketing, and public relations strategies, applied in Machiavellian tactics, enables the authorities to maintain a veneer of a disciplined and ethical system, while in reality the plutocracy, unaccountable to anyone, has always profited from operations like the harvesting of <em>candelilla</em> a century ago to supplying cocaine today. Drug trafficking operations in Mexico are now a billion-dollar business and offer so much profit that those in power cannot reject the drug trade as unethical or illegal. It is so attractive to everyone, it is unstoppable.<br /><br />Today the government—the judicial system, the police, the military, and even the executive branch—participates in trafficking to further its ambition to garner wealth for the ruling class. Over centuries of rule, the Mexican government has developed a steadfast power arrangement in which a tiny group grabs the wealth at the cost of the rest of the population.<br /><br />The Mexican government corrupts its own people by reaching down to the ambitious peasant classes and enabling and even sponsoring organized crime. Traffickers like Pablo Acosta or Amando Carrillo Fuentes, men from peasant backgrounds, did not buy and intimidate their way into power over <em>la plaza</em>. Rather, the government officials, from the local police all the way up to the president, allowed them to do what they do; they were encouraged, almost employed, to generate wealth for the men in positions of powerful authority, men who normally should protect and serve their country’s citizens. The Mexican government, under veils of secrecy and under-the-table deals, has refined its ability to tap into the ambitions and energies of individuals of lower classes and to channel them to increase the gains of their more educated and powerful masters in authority. When drug lords and others like them reach the end of their dangerous and glorious careers, the same system that sponsored them, now moves to kill them or jail them, and seize whatever wealth they may have accumulated.<br /><br />Mexican officials and their civil servants fighting the war on drugs are part of a clever illusion, a public relations campaign. They call the media to witness and document how they ceremoniously burn marijuana stalks as a great stride in the battle against crime, but only after they have harvested the lucrative tips of the plants. When staging cocaine burnings, it is almost always corn starch, while the real coke is already sold to a favored cartel. They will seldom ever genuinely cooperate with U.S. drug enforcement officials beyond a mere charade of professionalism.<br /><br />In one report to the next, from books like Drug Lord by Poppa (5) to Murder City by Bowden(6), Mexican officials vehemently deny any complaint or accusation of involvement. As proof of their commitment to fighting the war on drugs, they will pick out an ineffective drug runner to sacrifice in the name of the law and their own reputation. To hell with the drug-addicted victims in Mexico and much less in the U.S. Business continues, and it is good.<br /><br />Like centuries before, today’s Mexico is a country of illusions, where public relations and marketed perceptions are tools in maintaining the status quo.<br /><br /><strong>The GOP’s Use of Branding and Marketing</strong><br />Just as Mexico’s ruling class covers its tracks through the drug industry by staging drug busts and jailing unreliable traffickers, so too, the ruling class in the U.S. creates the illusion that its political party, the GOP, advocates policies to improve the standard of living for the American middle class. The GOP greatly outperforms the Democratic Party by using consistent and harmonized talking points.<br /><br /><br />The GOP claims to stand for Christian beliefs and good, old-fashioned American traditions:<br /><ul><li>It wants to reduce taxes and maintain fiscal responsibility—even though the last Republican president drove up historical deficits. </li><br /><li>It wants to reduce government power and size in order to enable the middle class worker to obtain a higher standard of living, even though weak governmental regulation of big business can ruin the economy for the middle class as we have seen recently. </li><br /><li>It wants to give more freedom to big business to create a stronger economy—leading to a further reduction in industry regulations, an increase in economic disasters, and an even more inequitable distribution of wealth. </li><br /><li>It seeks to create a unified Christian culture and society based on wholesome values, even though an overwhelming number of recent ethical scandals arise from conservatives such as Catholic and other Christian fundamentalists. </li><br /><li>It promotes solid Christian morality as a means to take away individual rights such as women’s choice about abortion and other individual liberties. </li></ul>As if in a choir, members of the GOP consistently repeat these points of communications through all channels of media to such an extent that a large portion of the middle class voters actually come to believe in these policies, even though they have little to do with supporting the middle class. The GOP has created a propaganda machine so dominating that most Americans believe that any government intervention in the economy is socialism and thus intolerably evil.<br /><br />The GOP need look no further than south of the border to see their talking points in action. The Mexican ruling class has always maintained the policies that the GOP in the U.S. advocates. Both the right-wing in Mexico and in the U.S. seek to increase power for businesses and to weaken government, which only intensifies the distribution of wealth away from the middle class and into the hands of the wealthy. The policies have made Mexico third-world country it is today.<br /><br /><blockquote>“Mexicans,” he explains, “know the army is a bunch of brutes. But what is going on now is a coup d’etat by the army. The president is illegitimate. The army has installed itself. They have become the government….The president has his hands tied, and he has tied them.”(7)</blockquote>Except for a few periods, Mexico’s right-wing plutocracy has succeeded to maintain its status quo since the Spanish conquered the native Indians centuries ago. In the U.S., the right-wing ruling class has also maintained its power to a lesser extent, especially during the period after WWII, when a middle class began to prosper from the industrial expansion.<br /><br />But this is changing. The standard of living for middle-class families has dropped drastically since the 1960s.<br /><br /><blockquote>“Most American families are worse off today than they were three decades ago. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 destroyed the value of their homes, undermined their savings, and too often left them without jobs. But even before the Great Recession began, most Americans had gained little from the economic expansion that began almost three decades before. Today, the Great Recession notwithstanding, the U.S. economy is far larger than it was in 1980. But where has all the wealth gone? Mostly to the very top. The latest data shows that by 2007, America’s top 1 percent of earners received 23 percent of the nation’s total income—almost triple their 8 percent share in 1980.”(8) </blockquote>This economic trend is eroding much of the American middle class. It continues increasing numbers of families will no longer find the means to assure their children’s health and education. This deteriorates our society in general and can destroy our democracy and economy, whose strength depends on critical thinking skills for all citizens. Reducing government means reducing social infrastructure, and leads to the dumbing down of America to the level of a Sarah-Palin culture of ignorance and greed.<br /><br />By eliminating the social infrastructure that a democratic government is designed to maintain for and by the general population, the right-wing in the U.S., particularly organizations like the Heritage Foundation, has carefully dismantled Roosevelt’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal, and Johnson’s Great Society. These initiatives, and others like them, were created to allow all American citizens access to opportunities to improve their living standard and to level economic barriers restricting access to education and healthcare.<br /><br />Many of today’s right-wing organizations have their roots in the Christian Fellowship movement, also known as The Family, which took hold initially in the 1930s and grew in strength as it indoctrinated the wealthy as well as powerful politicians, including G. W. Bush.(9) The Family can trace its origins to even older American conservative organizations, including the KKK and Opus Dei, among others.(10) Like the twisted operations of the powerful mafia-style plutocracy that permeates the Mexican ruling class and government, a nefarious religious movement has now begun to seize control over the American government, including all its branches—the executive, Congress, the Supreme Court—and even several state governments.<br /><br />The Fellowship, like any church, interpretes the Bible and its prophets in ways suited for their own goals. The Family’s agenda focuses on gaining power by furthering the ambitions of many right-wing politicians. Since Jesus is an extremely popular, charismatic prophet, the Family uses Christ as a branding icon, a logo. It helps immensely in gaining votes. A large part of the American population follows most any agenda that includes an association with Jesus. The Family uses Jesus as a branding strategy just as McDonald’s uses the clown Ronald McDonald, although the Family’s political policies and agenda stray far from the ideals of love, peace, and equality that Jesus preached. The Family sees Jesus as a powerful, charismatic leader who captured a following of gullible masses just like other great men of history, including Genghis Khan and Mussolini.<br /><br /><blockquote>“Look at Hitler,” he [Doug Cole, a leader of the Family] said, “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, bin Laden.” The Family possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.</blockquote>A quote from Genghis Khan sums up much of the Family’s fascist mission, especially in light of the neoconservative, preemptive invasion of Iraq:<br /><br /><blockquote>“The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.”</blockquote>(1)<em>Drug Lord</em> by Terrence E. Poppa, 1998, at 22.<br /><br />(2)Id. at 222.<br /><br />(3)Id. at 44.<br /><br />(4)Id. at 336.<br /><br />(5)Id.<br /><br />(6)<em>Murder City</em> by Charles Bowden, 2010.<br /><br />(7)Id at 204.<br /><br />(8)<em>The Spirit Level</em> by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, 2009; Forward by R. B. Reich, at v.<br /><br />(9) <em>The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power </em>by Jeff Sharlet (2009)<br /><br />(10)<em>The “Christian” Mafia</em> by Wayne Madsen.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-1517498174827420082010-04-18T16:30:00.000-07:002010-04-18T16:33:31.067-07:00Mexico: What Do Third-world Countries Share with the U.S.?Now it’s official. General McChrystal has been placed in the pantheon of American icons, sanctified next to the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and John Wayne. He now aligns with the many American gods that are manufactured as fast as a Big Mac or an Egg McMuffin. Heroes like these are not human. They only play the image of what America wants them to be, but mostly they reflect the self-delusion of the American culture, a bubble where we are morally superior, smarter, and therefore richer. <br /><br />This month <em>The Atlantic</em> magazine published an article, “Man Versus Afghanistan,” elevating General McChrystal to the heights of a Julius Caesar, the man who determines the course of history and who can rebuild Afghanistan into a democracy as prosperous as many imagine America to be, or as Rome was before it crumbled into history’s dust. <br /><br />Kaplan describes General McChrystal as a man who “has never submitted to fate” (p. 26). With such a job title for McChrystal, we might believe that he can also leap over tall buildings in a single bound. As our newly anointed Superman, the general sleeps four hours a night, runs eight miles, and eats one meal a day. McChrystal is America: the country no longer conceives new ideas because its vision is blurred by lack of sleep; the country can only run mechanically one foot in front of the other because it no longer innovates; the country eats its daily meal devoid of taste and nutrition. <br /><br />In his story about General McChrystal, Kaplan takes the predictable and enjoyable job of describing the apparent virtues of the general whose “physical regimen…itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic determination.” <br /><br />By attempting to create a cult hero of McChrystal—the Army of One—Kaplan enjoys the easy road of fantasy and fanaticism while the rest of us scratch our heads and ponder. Why the hell did the Bush administration spend trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, nor had WMDs, nor harbored terrorists until after U.S. troops invaded. Despite this, Kaplan boldly states his preference for imperial war—“The 2003 invasion of Iraq, to which I subscribed,…”—as he bizarrely twists this invasion into “Balkan antecedents.” <br /><br />Yet we wonder. Now that the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, almost ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than one million civilian lives, when are we finished? What’s the goal? What results do we expect? When the U.S. leaves Iraq and Afghanistan, will these countries be stable? What’s to stop them from simply returning to despotic, theocratic regimes? <br /><br />Kaplan doesn’t consider any of these questions. Not once does he mention America’s dependence on oil and, consequently, its dire need to occupy much of the Middle East to ensure a stable supply. Instead Kaplan bloviates about how the most powerful military in the world can overcome fate thanks to the likes of General McChrystal who lacks sleep. Kaplan ignores the atrocities by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who now brags on mass media how he authorized the same sort of torture as Afghan and Mexican authorities use for power and plunder. <br /><br />Kaplan describes a few characteristics of Afghanistan, which we find also in Mexico and other third-world countries, such as, “the country is so decentralized,…it is extraordinary complex, with different tribal and sectarian reality in each district.” <br /><br />Likewise, Mexico’s history and current situation reveal how it has always plodded along with a weak central government. Each region in Mexico has always had its autonomous leaders (caciques), which, as in Afghanistan, have become drug lords reaping billions of dollars in the drug trade. As these drug lords gain wealth, they carry more power than their federal governments. The large profits of such unrestrained businesses are able to usurp governmental authority. This has happened in both Afghanistan and in Mexico. Whether they sell opiates, cocaine, or oil, the successful businessmen ply their power to increase their wealth and to impose their own politics, usually fundamentalism to the point of fascism, and ignore the freedom and development of the less privileged classes. The scenario resembles the U.S. Republican agenda. <br /><br />Kaplan writes, “McChrystal believes that the ‘ideological piece’ of al-Qaeda is ‘truly scary’: that a new brand of totalitarianism—al-Qaeda the franchise—is running amok and motivating small secretive groups around the world, and that victory in Afghanistan is necessary to deliver a ‘huge moral defeat’ to it” (p. 62). <br /><br />Clearly as we invade and occupy foreign countries in order to control their resources, the more they will resist. Instead of fighting for reliable oil supplies, America must do what it does best: innovate and create renewable sources of energy. <br /><br />If certain bellicose Americans were so concerned about moral defeats or moral responsibilities to carry the imperial burden and set the world straight, why didn’t the Bush administration invade the dictatorship of North Korea or China, or any other unjust government? Like many other neoconservative knuckle draggers, Kaplan refuses to state the crass and simple truth that the U.S. occupies Iraq and Afghanistan in order to secure stable oil supplies and, above all, to keep our enemies from taking control of the vast wealth the petroleum reserves represent. Making this clear to the otherwise beguiled, American middle class would only shatter America’s moral self-image, albeit mostly self-delusional. <br /><br />If the U.S. were so altruistically concerned about saving other countries from dysfunctional governments, why not invade Mexico? Instead, under the Merida Initiative, we continue to pour billions of dollars ineffectively into the Mexican government, which morally defeats the U.S. because the Mexican government takes bribes from the various drug lords and explicitly supports the Sinaloa cartel over the others. As Mexico slips over the edge of complete anarchy and unbridled capitalism, the U.S. blindly funnels money without oversight as to how it is used. <br /><br />Just as the U.S. props up a corrupt and crumbling Mexico, so too, it supports the Karzai government in Afghanistan, a mere racketeer operation. As Kaplan quotes, “’Afghanistan was a cakewalk in 2001 and 2002,’ says Sarah Chayes, former special adviser to McChrystal’s headquarters. ‘We started out with a country that hated the Taliban and by 2009 were driving people back into the arms of the Taliban. That’s not fate. That’s poor policy’” (p. 64). <br /><br />The U.S. merely empowered the mujahedeen commanders to transform into gangster-oligarchs and drug lords under the American-supported Karzai. So long as the U.S. occupies Afghanistan, the people will enlist and fortify al-Qaeda and the Taliban as a form of resistance to protect their country. That’s exactly what Americans would do if they were invaded. <br /><br />In the midst of all-out war between competing drug businesses in Mexico, the U.S. Homeland Security Department can only sit on its hands as billions of dollars of illegal drugs cross the border along with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens while millions of dollars of weapons are exported to support the Mexican chaos. Among the illegal aliens crossing the southern border, how many are al-Qaeda operatives carrying various types of WMDs? Let’s ask Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano. <br /><br />Mexico and Afghanistan rank among the desperate third-world countries. Both countries enjoy strong religious traditions permeate through every fiber of their cultures, if not making them outright theocracies. As God’s dark humor goes, this means that corrupt men rule in an arbitrary legal system with authoritarian misconduct. Like Afghanistan, Mexico has a weak government, unable to control its own military and police, much less the marauding drug gangs grabbing power and wealth. Such weak governments have little to offer their people and are unable to restrain the barbarous greed of unbridled businesses such as monopolies and drug cartels. <br /><br /><br />In the U.S. a central debate rages. Made wealthier than the Democrats by corporate lobbyists, the Republicans are especially eager to keep government small, even weak, and to oppose regulating the otherwise unchecked greed of big business such as the healthcare industry, Big Oil, and Wall Street bankers. These elitist groups in America argue that large corporations should have more power than government—as if businessmen volunteer selflessly for the development of society. This political ideology, known as neoliberalism, calls for the rule of a small, wealthy social class—the patricians and the ruling political nobility. <br /><br />This debate rose to a new height when the majority right-wing Supreme Court justices voted to overturn two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations. The mostly extremely conservative Supreme Court ruled that the government may not regulate corporations’ spending for elections. As President Obama said, this court ruling gives “corporations more power to drown out the voices of regular Americans” in political debates where already most have lost their sense of citizenry in the face of mammoth businesses. Now more than ever before, big business can buy the votes of congressmen and senators in the form of campaign contributions and additional investments in political advertisements. <br /><br />This new, highly political ruling by the Supreme Court moves the U.S. another step closer to a complete coronation of power for 10 percent of the population that owns 80 percent of the nation’s wealth. This class power and inequitable distribution of wealth represents one of the defining characteristics of third-world countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered more power to the corporations while weakening the government’s ability to check corporate greed in the best interests of society. <br /><br />All over the globe, the rulers of third-world countries from Arabia to Zimbabwe squander and squelch the good will of the broader lower classes. Out of some 200 sovereign countries on the globe, more than half operate with hugely inequitable distribution of wealth, where the vast majority of people live on poverty-line income, live with hardly a chance of education, and consequently live without much self-determination. Ironically, the larger social classes at the lower end of the income ladder are the ones who bear more children who, in turn, have fewer chances of education, and less freedom and autonomy. <br /><br />Often the lower classes become so beguiled by the media, especially the likes of Fox News propaganda, that they ignore their own place in society and their rights. Instead they behave as if they are part of the highest social class, supporting the political interests of right-wing patricians. Perhaps by playing the part, they sense the tingling sensation that maybe they are affiliated with the wealthy at least for a moment, even as many are paid to badger Democrat congressmen at city hall meetings or choose to participate as Tea-Baggers and White Supremacists revolting against the government instead of taking part in the political system to defend their rights as regular citizens. The same is true for the middle-class, born-again Christians who vehemently oppose abortion, demanding that the government regulate individual women’s choice. At the same time, these confused activists oppose government regulations on the very industries—such as healthcare and banking—that devour them financially. <br /><br />Meanwhile, a tiny social class rules society. The elite enjoy the power and privileges of education, usually secular, and of wealth. Given this inequality, corruption, and arbitrary rule, the governments of most third-world countries are weak. These governments often lack adequate social infrastructure to provide the broader population, the lower class, with healthcare and an education unfettered by religion, which would allow them freedom to choose more clearly about life-defining decisions such as reproduction, careers, and life-style in general. <br /><br />Instead as, in Mexico, most of Central and South Americas, in Afghanistan, and in most of the Middle East, religious doctrine proves to be the most available form of education, and its authoritarian rules dictate almost all aspects of individual life, rendering the lower class submissive and ignorant. This, in turn, benefits only the wealthy class. <br /><br />The various policies of the Republican Party in the U.S. serve no purpose for regular Americans. The American right wing has never worked for the best interests of the middle class. Born-again Christian fundamentalists generally want the government to dictate all aspects of an individual’s personal life from abortion to sexual orientation, and at the same time, they want to reduce government regulations over corporate power. From their contradictory belief system, we discover how their goals resemble closely the same theocratic ideology prevalent in countries like Afghanistan and Mexico. The Republican agenda also includes deceiving Americans to justify invading, occupying, and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring the simple fact that the real purpose these wars is mainly to control the world’s largest oil reserves. <br /><br />Like the government in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. government is weak. President Obama struggles against the overwhelming industrial power of the defense contractors pushing to sell more invasions while the Big Banks and insurance companies lobby to reduce regulation. As in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. is in the grip of a right wing whose goals are to increase theocratic authority and ensure “less government.” As an icon of America, General McChrystal is fighting a war of morality which only lightly veils a war for power and plunder, while enjoying meals void of nutrition, sleepless nights that blur vision, and long runs on empty. <br /><br />Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-11098511153844146702010-03-04T07:51:00.000-08:002010-03-19T19:14:27.496-07:00Mexico: Sex Slavery (Part II)As noted below (<a href="http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/26106">Part I</a>), Octavio Paz emphasized how Mexico’s economic policies favor monopoly. Industry monopoly and its sister, oligopoly, enable a handful of wealthy business owners to set prices and permit control of certain goods and services to maximize their personal profits. With neoliberalism, otherwise known as Regeanomics, government hardly dares to challenge the power of certain corporations that are so overbearing that they succeed in altering every aspect of our lives, our society, and culture.<br /><br />In the U.S. this situation has become blatantly clear as the oligopolistic healthcare industry does everything possible to avoid a public option that would only encourage competition in an otherwise tight-knit, ol’boy industry. America’s political leaders and pundits strongly promote the idea of free-market enterprise, although their speeches provide the rest of society with just enough hope only to ponder the American Dream and how the regular guy might achieve a comfortable spot in the sunshine. “Change you can believe in.”<br /><br />Meanwhile a handful of the world’s largest insurance companies spends billions of dollars to block the public healthcare bill because it would break the oligopolistic choke hold on faceless millions of Americans. Corporations like Cigna, Aetna, WellPoint, and AHIP dominate the industry and consequently increase prices faster than in any other industry or economic trend. They pay the hooligans like Joe Lieberman—via his wife—or the automaton Harvard medical professors, like Joseph P. Newhouse, one of Cigna’s board of directors, and other paid puppets to defend the policies of market domination, stagnation, and out-right highway robbery.<br /><br />Contrary to their ideals of competitive, efficient capitalism, the salesmen of neoliberalism only talk about the theories while they defend their privileged and protected position, and in doing so, they defeat the very neoliberal principles they espouse about an open, innovative, free market where buyers have choices and suppliers are forced to innovate and cut costs. Politicians and pundits for the corporations lie to the public because the insurance companies pay them to spread the gospel that government is evil, bureaucratic, and inefficient and only big corporations can manage our society and our economy.<br /><br />The corporate-bought talking heads take the money and live in comfortable houses near the country club and send their children off to expensive schools where they learn corporate etiquette to insure that they land upwardly mobile jobs at powerful corporations. The picture we see in this represents how our society has devolved into a place where materialism overwhelms us while it destroys our environment, our democratic system, and our community.<br /><br />A vast majority of the middle class dreams of a career in a large corporation because, in America, it’s where the greatest social benefits are offered, healthcare, retirement packages, and vacations. These are all the benefits that the government provides its citizens in European democracies. As this trend continues, American becomes less and less a democracy and more a corporatist welfare state.<br /><br />The broad chasm between what the paid pundits say and what they do reminds us of the Communist propaganda about how everyone must sacrifice today for a greater, more equitable tomorrow. A free democracy is mere myth when corporations overrule the democratic processes.<br /><blockquote>"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." –Thomas Jefferson, 1812 </blockquote>The U.S. Senate and Congress meekly kneel to the will of the corporations at the cost of the will of the people.<br /><blockquote>Democratic leaders dropped a government insurance option and the idea of expanding Medicare to younger Americans. Reid also omitted language that would have eliminated the federal antitrust exemption for health insurers -- another nonstarter for Nelson.—The Washington Post, December 20, 2009<br /></blockquote>The U.S. Supreme Court Justices ruled recently on the <em>Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</em> to determine whether to overturn a 1990 ruling that had upheld the ban on direct corporate contributions (1). As the bill has recently passed, corporations can weld immense power over our democracy by paying millions of dollars in propaganda campaigns in which advertisements, as we most often seen, are not held to truthful information.<br /><br />Likewise, in Mexico the government almost never steps in to regulate the large land owners, much less powerful corporations.<br /><br /><b>Nothing New about Neoliberal Economic Policies</b><br />Variations of what we currently call “neoliberalism” have always existed throughout history. Indeed, history is mostly a study of how the privileged few impose their authority by various shams and tricks to overrule the gullible populace. In the U.S. when an elected official, like Sarah Palin states in a public speech that Obama’s healthcare bill includes “death panels,” a certain part of the gullible public believes the drivel. It’s the depraved and perverted segments of fanatically money-driven Americans that allow dishonest scam artists to continue their criminal careers like Dick Cheney—the former vice president who granted no-bid billion dollar contracts to his own corporation, Haliburton.<br /><br />Mexico’s history contains its share of such flimflammery in rude and violent acts. Since Cortes dropped anchor in a Yucatan bay, a class of Spanish nobles has always managed to dominate the masses of the poor and uneducated. In many ways, the Spanish monarchy and aristocracy, in cooperation with the Catholic Church, have imposed policies similar to what we call neoliberalism today. And even after Mexico established its independence from the Spanish monarchy and formed a constitutional democracy, it has still maintained a government that strongly promotes the interests of the caudillos, the wealthy few who reign over regions or industries in Mexico.<br /><br />Even more so in Mexico than in the U.S., a small number of huge corporations dominate the economy and the democratic processes with a heavy political and financial hand.<br /><br /><b>Monopoly and Neoliberalism </b><br />Pemex holds a monopoly on the petroleum in Mexico. As the Wall Street Journal reports on April 7, 2008, any talk of stimulating competition in the oil industry is unheard of in Mexico.<br /><blockquote>Such heresies cannot even be whispered in Mexico–though not because the Mexican people can't be convinced that there is a better way to run things. The reason is because the guardians of the status quo–politicians, suppliers and labor–would suffer if competition hit the market. Private Mexican contractors who "supply" Pemex are used to business transactions tied to political connections. If there were multiple buyers in competition with one another, those political profit margins would evaporate.<br /></blockquote>Even though Mexico’s President Calderon delivers noble speeches about breaking up monopolistic industries that dominate its economy, he continues to apply neoliberal policies by privatizing many industries—from petroleum to tortillas and telephones. By definition monopolies own markets and that means they can charge high prices without pressure to improve or innovate. They turn economies into murky swamps that move slowly to a standstill.<br /><br />At any moment in their daily routine, Mexicans cannot avoid the monopolies that plague their lives. When they fill their gas tanks, they pay homage to Pemex, the only supplier of petroleum (2). When the average Mexican, Jose, makes a phone call to reserve a table at his favorite restaurant, he pays a high price to Telmex, which owns 94% of landlines, a de facto monopoly. And when Jose drives his family to the restaurant—on overpriced gasoline in his car—and then orders tortillas, he pays dearly to the main supplier of corn and flour, Roberto González Barrera, owner of the Maseca flour monopoly and Banorte bank, who controls more than 70% of the market. A desire for tacos leads to extortion, because the price of corn has risen more than 700% since NAFTA’s start in 1994. When Jose’s family watches the news about inflation on TV, their only choice for cable channels is owned by the Grupo Televisa, which controls an overwhelming part of the industry. The denim jeans that Jose wears were most likely manufactured by “Mexico's ‘Denim King,’ the textile magnate Kamel Nacif, who exercises so much power he was able to save himself from a child sex abuse case and get the whistleblower journalist, Lydia Cacho, thrown into jail, but that’s another story (3).<br /><br />Mexico’s captains of industry, the business elites, enjoy a tight grip on the economy while the country sinks deeper into its original feudal state when the Spanish monarchy ruled. A few dominating corporations own the economy (4). By accumulating power with political contributions and other bribes, these corporations also control most of the government. The distribution of wealth has remained in the hands of the owners of the feudal domains—which in modern terms are the oligarchic corporations. The concentration of wealth in the barons of fiefdoms keeps competition away. Since they own their own industries, they can continue to extort the general population, reduced to peasants in an economy that increasingly resembles the landscape of the Middle Ages.<br /><br />Carlos Slim Helu, the owner of Mexico’s telecommunications industry, enjoys a government-granted guaranteed monopoly, making him one of the richest men in the world with over $60 billion.<br /><br />Mexico’s super-rich class includes at least twenty-four billionaires and over 85,000 millionaires, not counting the billionaires and millionaires who prosper from the drugs and sex trafficking. Much of this skewed distribution of wealth began with Mexico’s President Salinas’s privatization and NAFTA policies in the early 1990s. At the same time that a handful of billionaires emerged in Mexico, more and more of the common people fell below subsistence level. More than fifty million Mexicans live on less than $4 per day and another fifteen million live on $1 or less per day (source: CONAPO survey of 2005). In like manner, many American citizens still prefer to live in a Disneyland vision of the U.S. by denying the failures of the popular, though poorly understood Reaganomics, while the middle class sinks deeper and closer to the same situation as in Mexico.<br /><br /><b>Feudalism and Capitalism</b><br />The privileged Mexican lords of industry represent the same special interest groups we know and despise so much here in the U.S. Just as in the U.S., the Mexican government—which is right-wing regardless of its political party and imposes neoliberal policies—blocks liberal groups at every turn when they propose changes to the system for a more equitable distribution of the wealth that reduces crime and creates a more efficient and productive country. The government, in collusion with the captains of industry, crushes any such attempts to chip away at their stronghold, built up over the centuries when Mexico was a closed, one-party state—from monarchy to make-believe democracy.<br /><br />The authoritarian government in Mexico has continued a centuries-old tradition to serve and to protect the wealthy few. This cozy, collusive relationship between the government and the wealthy began when the Spanish colonized Mexico. At that time the Catholic Church played a prominent role as the governing authority. The encomienda system granted Spaniards with a “trusteeship” over the common people. In exchange for spreading Catholicism, the Spaniards could tax the “blue collar people” for their labor, forcing them to work the haciendas.<br /><br />As the constitutional government gradually overtook certain authoritarian roles from the Church, similar arrangements continued regarding how the privileged class dominated the common folks. One of the few opportunities left for the destitute middle class is to enter the illegal businesses such as sex and drug trafficking. As the U.S. Border Patrol reveals on its Web site, the practice of slavery has since then grown and now we see that the U.S. is one of the largest markets for sex slavery.<br /><br />When confronted with these facts, economic theorists, like Milton Friedman, and other neoconservatives from Bill Crystal to Joe Lieberman and to Podhoretz, G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney—or the right-wing religious fanatics of the 700 Club like Pat Robertson or Joel Osteen—defend the neoliberal’s new world order by claiming that the spoils of the wealthy few will eventually trickle down to the masses, so long as liberal politicians do not interfere with the neoliberal policies that, ironically, only intensify the economic calamities. On the contrary, the neoconservatives promote their neoliberal economic policies by demanding a fanatical faith in the infallibility of laissez-faire and unregulated markets.<br /><br />Large corporations use enormous funds in commercials and public relations to influence mainstream media. As a consequence, the entire U.S. culture is drastically influenced by emphasizing the commercial and consumer motivations in our lives.<br /><br />Although the neoliberals claim that profits are the essence of democracy, people need to sense a connection to fellow citizens in order to maintain a civil responsibility. Without citizens finding respect for their community, democracy loses its foundation. Instead of citizens, people lose their connection with other people as they become preoccupied with their personal interests as consumers. The neoliberals promote consumerism by means of consumer credit, unregulated finance products, and shopping malls.<br /><br />In this new world order, people lose sense of their identity. They change their beliefs by following the commercial propaganda and adopt perceptions that they are what they possess. In a culture immersed in commercials and consumer products—one that shows only a marginal resistance—we identify ourselves by our cars, clothes, and other possessions more than by our principles about freedom, democracy and other values that the neoconservatives claim to protect, while, on the contrary, they manipulate and destroy them to such an extent that regular Americans value more what we own than the principles we might be ready to defend to the death in preemptive wars.<br /><br />Individuals in modern society have always struggled on a balancing line between enjoying the surface of beautiful appearances and considering the underlying reality of our lives. When commercials, like some dogma, overrule our lives, we become alienated and competitive in a struggle to obtain more products than the next guy. We become exactly what corporations want from us, consumers, not citizens of a democracy. As people identify themselves more with products they buy, it becomes easier for us to see each other as products. This makes it easier for us to take the next step by buying one of the fastest growing imports from Mexico, a sex slave.<br /><br />1) (source: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09251/996295-84.stm#ixzz0bHjivXS3 ).<br />2) (source: Christian Science Monitor, January 23, 2007, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0123/p12s01-woam.html ).<br />3) (source: The Washington Post, Sunday, April 1, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/31/AR2007033101359_pf.html )<br />4) (source: New York Times, June 2, 2009, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/monopolies-holding-mexico-back/ ).<br />5) (source: http://www.internationalist.org/tortillazo0701.html ).Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-77710575522580364082010-01-10T19:49:00.000-08:002010-01-10T19:58:44.431-08:00Mexico: Sex Slavery (Part I)Smugglers bring thousands of young women from Mexico into the U.S. and force them to provide sexual services without pay. At any given time, at least 10,000 women from Mexico provide sexual services as slaves mostly for depraved men in the U.S. who just can’t get enough.<br /><br />Much like the large drug trafficking enterprises, sex trafficking cartels, like Los Lenones, represent a billion-dollar industry that caters to specific orders from American perverts with money to burn. Gangsters prey on girls who dream of going to El Norte. After a gang member cajoles the girl a bit, he gets her alone and then beats, drugs, and kidnaps her. Most of the women sold are Mexican, though hooligans smuggle women from all corners of the globe into the U.S. via Mexico because the border is wide open, the easiest route into the affluent gringo market (1).<br /><br />It happens on a regular basis. Take the Los Angeles Times story of October 27, 2009. Federal officials arrested almost 700 people, including 60 suspected pimps, in a three-day crackdown on child prostitution. The youngest victim was a 10 years old Mexican girl, authorities say.<br /><br />Like the drugs Mexican Mafiosos sell to their gringo neighbors, so too, the sex trade signals how impoverished Mexico’s middle class has become, if there ever was one to begin with. Kids don’t become mobsters for the love of a criminal career. Ask most any gangster why they commit horrible crimes, they’ll tell you they join a gang because it’s the family they never had. They live outside the law for the money that gives them some sense of dignity and respect. Almost all have no education, but even if they did, the Mexican economy has always been in such shambles that schooling would not necessarily improve their lot. The most seemingly logical solutions to the poverty of many are the drug and sex trades.<br /><br />Slavery has been a part of Mexico’s history since at least the arrival of Cortez and continues not only as sex slavery but also as a crushing exploitation of the cheap labor from the poor and uneducated.<br /><br /><blockquote>“Slaves had the royal brand as well as their successive owners’ initials seared into their faces.”—Mexico Unconquered by John Gibler </blockquote><br />Out of desperation large parts of the Mexican population have turned to destructive and illegal business operations in order to piece together a viable living in a brutal culture of presidential sell-outs to the wealthy and economic policies favoring the feudal lords.<br /><br /><blockquote>“Some people claim that the only differences between the North American and ourselves are economic. That is, they are rich and we are poor, and while their legacy is Democracy, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, ours is the counterreformation, Monopoly and Feudalism. But however influential the systems of production may be in the shaping of a culture, I refuse to believe that as soon as we have heavy industry and are free of all economic Imperialism, the differences will vanish.”—The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz.</blockquote><br />Why is Mexico so different from its northern neighbor? This is the question that essayist Octavio Paz attempted to answer decades ago. Since Paz’s insights, many developments have widened the gap between Mexico and the U.S. Paz probably never imagined that large organized crime syndicates would generate one of the largest parts of Mexico’s economy by exporting drugs and sex slaves to gringoland’s lucrative buyers who crave exotic experiences to escape the dog-eat-dog reality they inhabit. Yet, the more we look into the apparent chasm between the two countries, the more we find similarities.<br /><br />Fifty years after Paz’s observations, Mexico is still under the yoke of the Catholic Church. It is still not free of economic imperialism and hardly has any heavy industry. Its economy reflects only increases in monopolized industries. Mexico’s authoritarian theocracy has not evolved much since the Spanish conquistadors converted the Indians to Christianity at the point of a sword and established a feudal society despite a revolution or two.<br /><br />Meanwhile Americans’ obsession with religious fervor often pulls the U.S. into the same elitist cesspool, as most obviously demonstrated during W’s administration when the neoconservatives had their decade of neoliberal economic policies—liberal only in the sense that a few corporations enjoy unleashed, laissez-faire freedom to dominate our society and to overrun democratic processes. This is what drove the U.S. into its current financial disaster. This is only one of many things that the U.S. shares with its southern third-world neighbor.<br /><br />The U.S.’s penchant for a theocratic, authoritarian regime resembles the on-off cravings of a cocaine addiction, a hate-love thirst for a self-destructive escape from the real world. Another point that America holds in common with its southern neighbor is the perverse love affaire with neoliberal-style economics shared by its two political parties—the Democrats and Republicans. This has become especially flagrant now that Barack Obama and the Democrat-majority Senate and Congress have not found the will to impose a healthcare bill that meets the standards of other industrialized countries, including Japan and all of Europe. Compared to Europeans, Americans pay double for a less effective healthcare system. Some fifty-thousand Americans die every year because they have no access to healthcare. That’s many times more American casualties than in ten years of the so-called war against terrorism.<br /><br />Nor has our two-party system been able to solve the financial meltdown. The banks do not want regulation and our government bows in submission to their request. Our government obeys the dictates of the large corporations by not reforming and regulating the financial system that remains in its current status quo of a cannibal capitalism, characteristic of both Mexico and the U.S. Millions of Americans have lost their homes and their jobs. Meanwhile, we do not want “socialism,” cry out the neoliberalists in their billion dollar propaganda machines, so to hell with consumer protections and any other kind of government oversight:<br /><blockquote>Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign adviser off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people caused the crisis in the first place. The new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle –up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.—Rolling Stone magazine, December 10, 2009, Obama’s Big Sellout, Matt Taibbi.</blockquote><br />Obama can now be sautéed in a skillet over hell’s stove as it is ironic that our two-party system resembles the one party system in communist China while we, as voters, have a choice between neoliberal economic policies or neoliberal economic policies. Obama and other Democrat politicians campaigned to offer new alternatives to Milton Freidman’s version of the world. Once in office, though, the promise of “change you can believe in” falls into the shadows as the dominant corporations flash wads of campaign contributions to our political leaders.<br /><br />Just as in Mexico, where the leaders of as many as three or four political parties are enthralled with neoliberal economics, so too, in the U.S. the leaders of the Democrat and Republican parties act as twins in their lust for the same policies that allow corporations to take over the role of government and that make politicians and the captains of industry richer at the expense of the middle class. Politicians in both Mexico and the U.S. are happy to placate the common, bovine populace with varying forms of comfortable religious spin about their moral foundations.<br /><br /><strong>Counterreformation and Democracy</strong><br />The Catholic Church began its crusade to hold a strong hand in all aspects of a Mexican’s life from the moment Cortes dropped anchor in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mayan soil, in 1518. At that time, the King of Castile held supreme power under the authority of the Church and his divine right as monarch to a special, direct, and open line with almighty God himself.<br /><br />It was the same sort of monarchy against which George Washington revolted while struggling to establish a democracy in the late 1700s. Once Washington became immensely popular for his success, many early Americans hoped that he would usurp power and appoint himself king, just as his Mexican counterparts did in the early 1800s, from the priest-king Hidalgo to Iturbide and on through monarchical presidencies of Porfirio Diaz and his successors to the current President Calderon.<br /><br />One of the single most distinguishing moments in America’s adoption of the Enlightenment Era arose when Washington, a deist, declined monarchy and helped to form a democracy with a legal system of checks and balances, unencumbered from any particular religion and with a state ruled by laws and not by man. This is the fundamental principle that distinguishes America from Mexico, although Americans, especially American politicians and corporatists, often slip and trip on their own foundations, and when they do jump over the laws that form America’s pillars, they pull America into Mexican traditions and into the third world.<br /><br />Like capitalism, religion has little to do with democracy. Quite the contrary, it most often operates as a pseudo-fascist society in which the participants voluntarily give up substantial parts of their free will in exchange for becoming part of the group and group-think. You visit your local mosque, synagogue or church with the intention to question or change the beliefs, dogmas, rules or leadership, and most often the appointed authorities will eventually impose social sanctions, censors and stigma upon your mortal and spiritual existence until you submit your soul and your critical thinking to those anointed with the powers of God or you will be banned from the society—or worse.<br /><br />In capitalist, theocratic societies like fascist Saudi Arabia, the consequences of questioning religious authority often leads to capital punishment in public places known commonly as chop-chop square where, among many other cases, a woman loses her head because she’s considered a witch for listening to music by the Beatles.<br /><br />As in most of Latin America, in Mexico theocratic law has always maintained an authoritarian and pseudo-fascist hold over most of the culture and over almost every aspect of an individual’s life from contraception to birth and to death. By imposing its political authority, the Catholic Church had acquired a majority of Mexico’s land ownership, which included slavery.<br /><br /><blockquote>“Large numbers of career men came over from Spain to take what they could get out of the newly conquered country, and although slavery was not countenanced, something which was actual slavery was introduced—the Indians came with the land, and they were used with the land.”— Zapata by John Steinbeck</blockquote><br />During President Juarez’s administration in the late 1800s, the Catholic Church was prohibited by law from participating in politics, so strong and domineering was its hold on the country. Under President Juarez’s short political career some of the Catholic Church’s land was redistributed to the common people in a noble attempt to develop a middle class in a society where a huge gap divides the wealthy from the poor.<br /><br />When Porfirio Diaz, Strong Man of Mexico, appointed himself president, he reversed most of Juarez’s short-lived policies and made sure that the land was returned to the Catholic Church and to the wealthy hacienda owners. The feudal lords, caudillos, converted the peasants into slaves again.<br /><br />President Diaz continued the Mexican tradition of maintaining a strong theocratic regime while imposing right-wing economic policies, the type we now call neo-liberalism or Reaganomics, which made the captains of industry extremely wealthy by doing business in Mexico—such as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil or Morgan and Carnegie’s U.S. Steel. And now, neoliberal economics have brought America, including Mexico, to its knees and bowing to the policies and processes in which a small group of private investors profit from social services—education, healthcare, military, retirement, and housing—that government normally provides or at least regulates for the greatest gains for society in general and not just for the privileged few.<br /><br />During his thirty-year dictatorship, Diaz controlled the traditional caudillos, feudal lords, to maintain authority in a system of power resembling, if not replicating, organized Mafias. Diaz created Mexico’s Gilded Age, which had first appeared in the U.S. after the Civil War and lasted until the early 1900s, leading up to the Great Depression of the 1930s. By using an alternative to neoliberal, right-wing economic policies, FDR pulled America out of the Great Depression by implementing Keynesian economics that calls on government to bridle corporate greed and power.<br /><br /><blockquote>As one of Diaz’s “scientificos,” or economic advisors, from the U.S. explained:<br />The Mexican must be ruled from above because he is not fit for democracy, must be enslaved for the sake of the progress, since he would do nothing for himself or the world if not compelled by the whip.—John Kenneth Turner</blockquote><br />As in Diaz’s time, this same neoconservative and theocratic regime continues on in Mexico to the present. Mexico’s current President Calderon, like Barack Obama, may give politically correct lip service to policies that develop the middle class, though he privatizes everything from public utilities to daycare centers, allowing business investors to increase their profits at the expense of the society.<br />The same can now be said about Barack Obama and the Democrat-majority Congress and Senate, which campaigned on tough regulations to bridle large corporations and on stimulating more competition in the powerful, oligopolistic healthcare industry. Meanwhile backstage of mainstream media, powerful Cigna, WellPoint, AHIP, among other insurance leviathans buy U.S. politicians with advisory salaries and campaign contributions—otherwise known in Mexico as bribes.<br /><br /><br />1) Source: U.S. Border Patrol, http://www.usborderpatrol.com/Border_Patrol880.htm).Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-30233536874203861162009-11-12T21:30:00.000-08:002009-11-14T13:30:14.854-08:00Mexico: Land of Dire Straits and ReaganomicsFor more than the last four decades Mexicans have been risking their lives to migrate in larger numbers every year into the United States, escaping life below the poverty level and seeking better pay. Why has Mexico failed to develop its own people? <br /><br />On September 23, 2009, <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/09/san-ysidro-border-shooting.html">according to the Los Angeles Times</a>, a convoy of three vans packed with at least 76 Mexicans sped through the San Ysidro, California, border crossing, prompting police to open fire at the overloaded vehicles, making them crash. Police shut down the nation’s largest border check point, calling it a crime scene. All 76 immigrants were detained or arrested. Most of them will probably find a better method to enter the U.S. next time. <br /><br />Every year, some half million Mexicans leave their families, communities, and towns to risk their lives trying to enter the U.S. Mostly they seek, at best, the U.S. minimum wage, which can mean as much as 40% more than what they might make in Mexico if they are lucky to find a job in their own country. Per year, they send more than a billion dollars back to their families in Mexico, who depend on the remittances to survive. <br /><br /><strong>Is the U.S. to Blame for This Failure in Mexico? </strong><br />Is the U.S. at least partly to blame for Mexico’s political and economic disaster? Or is America’s recent economic and military catastrophes the fault of some other country, such as Saudi Arabia or even Mexico? Who is the victim? Is Mexico some passive roadkill on the global highway? Not completely. Each country has its element of self-determination, otherwise what’s the point in calling it a sovereign country? But U.S. policies have pushed Mexico to the brink—and Mexico has returned the favor. The two countries dance to the same macabre song taking them both down. <br /><br /><strong>How Could the U.S. Possibly Contribute to Mexico’s Failure? </strong><br />The powerful forces of financial institutions, mostly influenced by the U.S.—like the World Bank, the Inter-American Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—have imposed neoliberal—Reaganomic—policies on third-world countries like Mexico. This argument stands on some solid ground, especially in light of cases like Chile, where the CIA supported a coup against the popular Allende regime in 1973 in order to prop up a government sympathetic to U.S. corporate interests. <br /><br />The U.S. has applied such neoliberal colonizing tactics in many countries, though, without much success. Most recently, this process failed miserably in Iraq after an unprecedented preemptive bombing and invasion—motivated by the prospect of gaining access to the oil reserves (and justified falsely by claims of WMDs, terrorism, dictatorship, and other lame excuses). In carrying out these bellicose acts, the Bush-Cheney administration took <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism">neoliberal policies</a> to a new extreme, what Naomi Klein calls the <em>Shock Doctrine</em>. <br /><br />The term “neoliberalsm” can be confusing and misleading. Political strategists have presented economic liberalism, or neoliberalism, to the middle class in branding terms like “Reaganomics” or “Coca-Cola,” as if it were some friendly, good-tasting sugar-water as compared to “rightwing.” However, economic liberalism—neoliberalism—is rightwing and not friendly to the working class. Over the last forty years, it has shifted the distribution of wealth from the middle class to the elite wealthy class. <br /><br />In some ways, the largely U.S.-promoted NAFTA program—a neoliberal policy—ultimately affected Mexico negatively as early as its first year, when wages dropped 40 to 50% while the cost of living rose by some 80%.<br /> <br />Likewise, NAFTA also affected the U.S. negatively by moving U.S. manufacturing jobs south of the border. At least in the short term, the cheaper blue collar labor in Mexico did help to maintain U.S. industry status quo and profits, especially the automobile sector. In the long run, though, cheap labor in Mexico was not enough to prop up a lagging, stogy industry that failed to innovate. <br /><br />On the other hand, Japanese automakers now dominate the U.S. market because they constantly change. Japanese improvements and innovations (<em>kaizen</em>) include government supported developments of their own work force and adapting to market needs such as fuel-efficient vehicles. <br /><br />The key determining factor is how U.S. policy makers –mostly neocons—drank pitchers full of Reaganomics (neoliberalism) like Kool-Aid. Japan did not implement neoliberal policies, which include relying on the notion of wealth trickling down from the rich and allegedly wise elite. Many of Japan’s industries are supported and guided by its government’s MITI (Minister of International Trade and Industry), which ensures that certain industries (<em>keiretsu</em>) dominate. Likewise, in Germany and France, government plays a key role in maintaining the social infrastructure (transportation, education, healthcare), and in maintaining a stable economy. On the other hand, in America, many political leaders present this type of policy as an evil socialism to be avoided like Satan. <br /><br /><strong>Mexico Especially Vulnerable to Reaganomics</strong><br />Reaganomics is merely a clever name for an economic policy that is much larger than the B-grade movie actor. Witty political strategists rebranded neoliberalism with the name Reaganomics because, during most of the 1980s, Reagan gained immense popularity among gullible groups of the American middle class. Using his name seemed like a great marketing ploy to promote policies that had little to do with benefiting the working classes. Little did many of Reagan’s fans know at the time that Ronald Reagan used his actor’s shoeshine-and-smile charm to sell an ideology that later would prove disastrous to the American people and cause the worst economic crisis in 2008 since the Great Depression, far surpassing the recession of 1979. <br /><br />Although the mainstream media rarely uses the word “neoliberalism” in the U.S., anyone can see the effects of its policies today, which became widespread over the last thirty years. It is the direct cause of the massive failures in the U.S. financial system as well as extremely high rates of unemployment, bankruptcy, and foreclosures. Because of neoliberalism, we have seen drastic erosion of the middle class’s standard of living since the post-war boom, while the upper five percentile of the population, the elite plutocracy—CEOs, Senators, Congressmen—has greatly increased its wealth. In short, the rich became richer, the poor, poorer. <br /><br />Conservative politicians—predominantly Republicans but also some Democrats—might say they hate “liberals”—the political liberals—while they love economic liberals or neoliberals. By using the word liberal in economics—the Milton Friedman type—political strategists manage to dupe many people with the confusing label. <br /><br />The main tenets of neoliberalism are: <br /><ul><br /><li>Reducing or eliminating social services like education, healthcare, and other programs to avoid government involvement in maintaining a social infrastructure or the development of the middle class—and doing so while financially favoring large business entities. This destroys any sense of citizenry and civil rights as pressure is placed on the individual to “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” The U.S. culture now has little sense of civility as many individuals believe that our society has to be a dog-eat-dog environment where they can become millionaires by working hard at Starbucks or in a cubicle and by aggressively and rudely competing in the workplace.</li><br /><li>In the 1980s Reagan became the poster boy of neoliberalism by cutting taxes and social benefits while loosening government regulations. At the same time, he increased defense spending by more than 40% during a rare period when the U.S. was not waging a war, although he could have invested that same 40% in education or healthcare and still stimulate the economy out of the recession. Reaganomics—neoliberalism—is socialism for the wealthy. Reagan’s policies to cut social services while financing the military-industrial complex only provided a huge government subsidy to defense contractors, infamous for their waste of tax money—the F-22 fighter jet being a more recent and blatant example. In doing so, Reagan gained credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan pushed the communists over the edge. The mastermind behind U.S. support of the Afghan mujahideen’s resistance was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as humorously portrayed in the movie <em>Charlie Wilson’s War</em>.</li> <br /><li>Avoid government involvement in the social infrastructure. This is most blatant in how the Bush-Cheney administration granted no-bid contracts to private contractors, including Halliburton and, notably, Blackwater, whose mercenaries were sent to Iraq rather than doubling the number of U.S. military. This served to soften public opinion against the war by using uncounted, stealth soldiers. Today, we see how both Republican and Democratic Senators and Congressmen (e.g., <a href="http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/glenn-greenwald-lieberman-and-bayh-enrichi">Lieberman and Bayh</a>), motivated by lobbyists and industry money, despise healthcare reform, especially the public option—a threat to the oligopolistic industry of private health insurance. <br /></li><br /><li>Liberating private enterprise from regulations. The government could impose regulations in order to maintain the highest social benefits but instead, neoliberalism encourages hoarding profit among the lords of capitalism—the CEOs who garner millions in compensation—as was common during America’s Gilded Age at the end of the 1800s. The most recent example of this economic policy is allowing banks free rein to sell confusing balloon mortgages, which increased their profits in the short term while increasing costs over time to homeowners forced into foreclosure. This is the type of laissez-faire economics that was pervasive during the monarchies in Europe, benefiting mostly the royalty, feudal lords, and aristocracy. It was the main reason for the American Revolution, when “taxation without representation” was an operative slogan aimed against the ruling elites who collected the wealth while the workers toiled without any means to determine social policy through election. Today’s oligopolistic corporations in certain industries—such as petroleum, healthcare, banking, and defense—are merely the new fiefdoms of the feudal lords of our global economy.</li><br /></ul> <br />Mexico has been particularly vulnerable to economic liberalism because monarchy ruled the country for centuries once the Spanish colonized the territory. The monarchy maintained a type of feudal economy in which many peasants worked the land and only the elite Spanish aristocracy owned or managed the land for the royalty. There was little or no social infrastructure for the peasants, the mixed bloods, or the native Indians. <br /><br />In the last decades, Mexico’s government has implemented several neoliberal policies by privatizing many industries such as telecommunications, which has only allowed large corporations to grow into monopolies and their owners to become multibillionaires—a prime example being <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2006/04/03/slim-telmex-verizon-cz_hc_0403autofacescan10.html">Carlos Slim Helu, owner of Mexico’s telecommunications, the world’s third richest man</a>— while the middle class is left with few options other than to immigrate to the U.S. in search of sustainable wages. We can draw many parallels between old Mexico’s feudal economy and its more modern, large haciendas, where wealthy land owners profit from field workers and where large, unregulated corporations benefit at the expense of the greater social good. <br /><br />Today’s neoliberalism has all the same economic policies as in old Mexico, where there was practically no social infrastructure to develop the poor, to educate them, to provide them with healthcare or programs to give them skills to expand the national economy and create a middle class or, at least, to help them plan their families—the number of children they can afford, despite the Catholic Church’s dogma prohibiting contraception. <br /><br />Today, although Mexico benefits from some version of democracy with elected presidents, the government has become weak almost to the point of a failed state, especially since the drug lords operate much like the caudillos, regional leaders, whose centuries-long rule resembled the earlier Spanish feudal leaders. <br /><br />Mexico’s first federal constitution was drafted in 1824, and the first president was elected. Nevertheless, just after Mexico first attempted to gain its independence from foreign monarchs, presidents appointed themselves into office, from Iturbide (1822, Constitutional Emperor) to Juarez (1867), who overthrew the empire that Emperor Napoleon III had established. “It was there that the future of the country would be determined, through military conspiracy, bribery of deputies, the rigging of elections, and the use of public money and institutions to back electoral campaigns” (Mexico by E. Krauze, p. 130). These traditions of corruption continue to the present, and the large haciendas of the old Mexico still exist like remnants of its feudal past. <br /><br />Neoliberal policies carry on many of the same practices of the monarchy and the hacienda—based economies. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/15/AR2009101503634.html">Mexico’s President Calderon recently moved to privatize the central electrical utility in Mexico City</a>, breaking up the labor union, a tactic to reduce labor costs and to increase profits for private investors. <br /><br /><blockquote>"There's no doubt that Light and Power is an inefficient company," said John Ackerman, professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "But the fact that he has decided to go against the union that historically most clearly represents the achievements of union rights and the left in Mexico is very much a political decision." </blockquote><br /><br />In explaining the company's losses, Ackerman pointed out that Mexico City and its surrounding areas are the most industrial in the country but harbor a huge informal economy, in which pirating electricity is common. <br /><br />“The revolutionary intent of the Mexican people, now as then, has not changed. It is a desire for the distribution of the land and resources of Mexico among the Mexican people.” This is one of the observations John Steinbeck made in the 1950s when he researched the story of Zapata for his first and only movie script—a 20-year project. Despite a dramatic history of attempts to revolt against oppressive traditions in Mexico, little progress has been made. <br /><br />So long as Mexico remains stuck in its feudal, plutocratic traditions, it will never develop its people and pull itself out of its own trap of greedy caudillos, be they church leaders, politicians, drug lords or entrepreneurs and military generals. <br />Something similar can be said of the U.S., which too often slips into its own self-destructive periods from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age">Gilded Age</a> to today’s Bailout Age.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-65951277457643011452009-10-17T16:28:00.000-07:002009-10-17T16:30:35.097-07:00Choice Resort Opens the Sanford Juarez Vacation Exclusive<p><strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'">Press Release—for Immediate Distribution</span></strong></p> <p><strong><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'">Choice Resort Opens the Sanford Juarez Vacation Exclusive</span></strong></p> <span style="font-size: 11pt">JUAREZ, Mexico, Choice Resorts Mexico continues to bring exceptional and charming lodging options to U.S. travelers with the opening of the former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s new resort in Juarez, Mexico—the Sanford Suites Pavilion Resort.</span> <br /><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt">Former Gov. Sanford, who separated from his wife in the wake of his affair with an Argentine woman, has opened a new luxury resort hotel here in Juarez, a franchise with Choice Resorts Mexico. Sanford built a political platform in the U.S. based on staunch religious, family values while fiercely attacking his Democrat opponents as immoral.</span> <br /><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt">“The Sanford Suites,” explains the former governor, “offers 35 Spanish-style guest rooms by designer Alberto Gonzalez, the former Attorney General who resigned his post to pursue a new career. Guests can take advantage of the resort’s tranquil lounge bar, decorated with religious artifacts dating back centuries, while attractive waitresses and waiters cater to your every need in a Christian atmosphere.”</span> <br /><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt">The resort represents the perfect place for both business and leisure travelers visiting the border town. “It’s ideally located in the center of town,” Sanford says, “close to where the action is and near the Cathedral, dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron of the cities.” When asked why the former Governor moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to Juarez, Sanford explains, “Mexico is one of the freest countries. No matter what people say about the drug lords, they have eradicated the government here. And as Ronald Reagan often said in his speeches, and I quote, ‘government is not the solution, government is the problem.’ And,” continues Sanford, “whatever you may have heard, Juarez, Mexico, is full of good people, interesting attractions, fine restaurants, a fascinating history, and <em><span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'">very </span></em>impressive shopping values. Cocaine is less expensive here and so too are the exotic, Latin women who are not only less costly to date, what with the reduced prices in the restaurants, but they also add a spicy twist to an otherwise boring marriage. The women here understand that man holds dominion over them, as laid out in Genesis 1:28. None of that women’s liberation nonsense here. The Church has engrained this as truth in Mexico’s cultural DNA. No need to debate it.” </span> <br /><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt">Sanford notes that, like extended stays, a permanent move to Mexico is financially advantageous for a business owner because the higher the income bracket, the lower the taxes. <span> </span>Plus there are few labor laws and minimum wages, which can sometimes amount to a couple bucks a day to keep the servants happy. “That means higher profits,” says Sanford, who was known, during his political career back in the U.S., for letting loose a group of live pigs in the state house chambers as a visual protest against the Democrats’ ‘pork projects.’ Here, favors can be bought,” he quipped, “without the hassles or having to qualify them as campaign contributions. In fact, there’s hardly any regulation here to speak of. It’s truly paradise for plutarchy, where the wealthy elite rules and can even buy the best men from the military. You think the United States is the purest form of capitalism, look again.” </span> <br /><span style="font-size: 11pt"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt">Sanford adds, “Although there has recently been a spike in competitive struggles between the various entrepreneurs in the drug industry here, the economy is robust. In fact, the drug industry is one of Mexico’s most competitive, innovative, and lucrative, giving a vibrant boost to exports and fueling the overall well-being of a stable GNP. Even the little man on the street has a chance to make a buck by trafficking.” </span> <br /><span style="font-size: 11pt"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt">“I want to clarify also,” says Sanford, “that, despite rumors, this resort has no affiliations with the C Street group or the Family. But like the Family, at the resort we focus on Christian values. Mexico is a God-chosen country where its people, though mostly down and out, take pride in their nation, where the wealthy are the privileged few, chosen by God. Mexico is a Christian nation, ruled mainly by Christian-based laws and centuries of tradition, where the peasant understands the dominion of God’s selected few. The wealthy are tasked with the duty to shepherd the flock. This understanding is in everyone’s blood, as taught by the authority of the Catholic Church that stretches back to the Spanish monarchy whose power originated by divine intersession. Fortunately for Mexico, its founding fathers were disciples of the Baroque era and not the Enlightenment, unlike those agnostic, deist fools who founded the United States.”<span> </span> <br /><span><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt">To celebrate its opening, the resort is offering an enticing “All in One” package for services. Guests who book this limited package will receive a welcome glass of champagne, complimentary access to the resort’s breakfast buffet, and an invite to a special evening buffet that includes two lines of blow, three hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes, and one free hour of Wi-Fi access. </span> <br /><span style="font-size: 11pt"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt">“I want to stress that the Sanford Suites welcome not just Republicans, but Democrats as well,” says Sanford. “In fact, last month, Congressman Mike McIntyre, a North Carolina Democrat, stayed here. Mike is a good ‘ol boy, believes that the Ten Commandments are ‘the fundamental legal code for the laws of the United States’ and thus ought to be on display at schools and courthouses.” </span> <br /><span style="font-size: 11pt"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt">The Sanford Suites is fast becoming a meeting place for influential U.S. elected officials, the perfect spot where high-powered CEO’s and international business professionals can find a sympathetic ear and broker the kinds of deals that require complete privacy and discretion. Recently, prominent men of influence have taken extended stays at the Sanford Suites, such as John Ensign, Republican Senator from Nevada, who needed a time-out after the media portrayed him as having an extramarital affair. <br /><br />Other very important people to frequent the resort are Republican Congressmen and Senators Larry Craig, Mike Foley, David Vitter, John Boehner, and Richard Curtis. And, of course, Oliver North, who is well known for brokering deals south of the border. Current prison inmates, Jack Abramoff and former Congressman Duke Cunningham are both planning a visit as soon as their time is freed up. Scooter Libby has leased a permanent suite here where he is free to make a new start. In the eventuality that an indictment might actually be issued against him for war crimes, former Vice Pres. Dick Chaney has bought one of the suites.<span> </span></span> <br /><span style="font-size: 11pt"><br /></span><strong><span style="font-size: 11pt">About the Sanford Suites</span></strong><span style="font-size: 11pt"> <br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt">For more information on the Sanford Suites or to book your stay today, visit <a href="http://www.biskeborn.com/">http://www.biskeborn.com</a></span> <br /><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt">Choice Resorts, Choice Resorts Mexico, and Sanford Suites International are proprietary trademarks and service marks of Mark Biskeborn’s fictional imagination. Many of the prominent men named here have been involved in public scandals regarding sexual crimes or bribery and other forms of corruption—and many of them are convicted felons. Some of them have been pardoned.<span> <br /> </span></span> <br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'">2009 Choice Resorts Mexico International, Inc. All rights reserved for the Foundation of a More Equitable Democracy.</span>Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-1542210515535001682009-09-26T14:10:00.000-07:002009-09-26T14:30:26.749-07:00Mexico: the Model Country for Today’s RepublicansIf you like the U.S. right wing and want to see its ruling philosophy in action in its purest form, look no further than the cruel, failing state of Mexico.<br /><br />The Republican-style, conservative government in Mexico has always favored the wealthy ruling elite, with no real policies to improve its almost nonexistent middle class. The salient characteristic of the Mexican economy is inequality. “Mexico contains one of the greatest, most obscene gulfs between its wealthiest and most destitute citizens of all the nations on the planet,” (<em>Mexico Unconquered</em>, John Gibler).<br /><br />This gap between the haves and the have-nots has a past reaching back through centuries of history. It’s a tradition where a ruling Spanish elite took power and forever retained its conservative, right-wing reign over the country, much to its detriment. The Mexican ruling class with its authoritarian theocracy, like the Republican Party in the U.S. today, has always been populated with the privileged making policy decisions, those who, for their own profit, widened the economic gap intentionally and continue to push its divide.<br /><br />“The privatization process created a new class of super-rich in Mexico. In 1991, the country had two billionaires on the Forbes list. By 1994, at the end of Mr. Salinas’s six-year term, there were 24,” (“The Secrets of the World’s Richest Man,” D. Luhow, <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>, August 4, 2007). In the U.S. the Republicans would prefer to privatize practically every aspect of the government, including even the military, as is shown in their penchant for billion dollar contracts with Blackwater, and their disgust for public healthcare.<br /><br />In Mexico there have always been those who rebelled against the conservative choke hold that represses dissent from groups like the recent Zapatista Army of National Liberation. The on-going desperation of the vast majority of the Mexican people who live in poverty has made the drug trafficking business extremely popular. In many ways it serves as a new platform supporting an ongoing popular revolution for equality. A risky business on the streets, pushing dope helps elevate the poor to some semblance of a middle class where social mobility is otherwise impossible, except for those already in a position of wealth. In today’s Mexico, the rich get richer and the poor learn to make money by selling drugs—though, even in the illegal drug business, the bosses at the top of the Mexican Mafia, the drug lords, or what the media likes to call drug cartels, are making billion-dollar profits.<br /><br /><strong>Sow’s Ear Policy </strong><br />Mexican drug trafficking has grown to an enormous industry and a force that outstrips the country’s military, with revenues exceeding $40 billion per year and rising. It’s the country’s top export. Mexico’s drug business is one of the most important economic generators. Were the drug trafficking shut down today, it would contract the Mexican economy by at least 63% by some estimates. The same study found that the U.S. economy would shrink by 19% to 22% without the illegal drug business (<em>Down by the River</em>, Bowden).<br /><br /><blockquote>“A 2007 U.S. government study found that Mexican drug cartels earn about $23 billion in revenue, making illegal drugs Mexico’s number-one export, bringing in more money than either oil or the remittances sent home by Mexicans living in the United States,” (<em>Mexico Unconquered</em>, John Gibler, pg. 54).</blockquote><br /><br />Considering its history and economic impact, the so-called “war on drugs” is not a war at all—it is the use of law enforcement agencies, and the military, to regulate an overwhelming underground market which operates as one of the purest forms of free market enterprise. The demand for the products is unstoppable. The drug industry in Mexico enables millions of people to survive and to crawl out of the abject poverty that the conservative, right-wing Mexican government created for them by economic policies enriching only more millionaires in the elite, ruling class than ever before. The illegal drug lords prosper so well as to afford employing not only the Mexican police as well as the army but also the Special Forces units, luring them with higher salaries than their meager government paychecks.<br /><br />The greed that motivates the drug merchants resembles the “sow’s ear,” a phrase that Adam Smith coined to characterize the worst aspects of capitalism for which he, and later John Keynes, called for government intervention “to transform the sow’s ear into a silk purse.” In the case of illegal drug trade, there is no such “silk purse,” a metaphor for how government regulation tames humanity’s bestial greed to yield the highest benefits for all of society. The obvious result of this “sow’s ear” policy, favoring the wealthy, is the currently failing state of Mexico.<br /><br />We read news reports daily about criminal, violent avarice in most every aspect of Mexican society, including more casualties in the drug wars than the fallen U.S. soldiers in Iraq. And this extreme self-interest has also become a prominent feature in U.S. culture, where high-ranking political leaders such as G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied to the American public in order to wage a preemptive war where they granted no-bid contracts to select corporations (e.g., Blackwater, Halliburton, and others) that returned the favor with lavish campaign contributions.<br />Bestial Greed Not Contained at the Mexican Border<br /><br />One of their favored CEOs was Bush’s former classmate at Yale, Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, <a href="http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/05/20/is-chinas-investment-in-blackstone-a-bush-payback-to-schwarzman/">who paid Bush $1.2 million in campaign contributions</a> as tribute for Bush having brokered a $4 billion investment in Schwarzman’s Group.<br /><br />For their own benefit, Bush and his GOP lied to allow banks complete freedom to sell high-interest-rate mortgages and push consumer credit to middle-class Americans who obviously could not afford them. Ameriquest, one of the nation’s largest mortgage banks, <a href="http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/12/31/does-ameriquests-campaign-cash-tie-bush-to-the-subprime-mortgag/">paid Bush and his GOP</a> $7.8 million as tribute for having promoted the Ownership Society initiative, marketing it as a means for poor people to own their own home. Despite its lofty title, the policy only enabled Ameriquest and the rest of the mortgage industry to act like sharks in a collective feeding frenzy, selling more loans that increased the prices of homes, inflating the housing bubble until it burst into a national financial failure with unemployment and foreclosure rates higher than those during the Great Depression of the 1930s.<br /><br />Meanwhile in television news interviews, Dick Cheney often said, “Our economy is robust,” the strongest in the world because of its free enterprise system. In the U.S. the Republican Party has made it clear in its unified, well coordinated messages that it calls for small or no government intervention, except in military matters that benefit large defense contractors.<br /><br />In step with the GOP policy, Bush cut tax revenues by $1.3 trillion in a war-time economy, creating a rapidly deepening deficit while 33% of those tax cuts favored the top 1% of the wealthiest people. The result of these policies merely allowed that top 1% to become richer without benefiting the larger part of society. This “sow’s ear” policy is based on the theory that if government allows more wealth to rich capitalists, they will use the money wisely to benefit the general well-being of the country. <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/jan-june06/cheney_02-07.html">As Dick Cheney explained during a television interview</a>:<br /><blockquote>“We are generally not enthusiastic about big tax increases. Big tax increases impose burdens on the economy, and the money being taken out of the hands of private citizens and spent by government, and government oftentimes doesn't spend it nearly as efficiently or as effectively from the standpoint of long-term economic growth and the creation of jobs and so forth as will the private sector.”</blockquote><br /><br />This theory has been proven false over and over again in history and in third world countries like Mexico.<br /><br /><strong>Presidents with Sow’s Ears </strong><br /><blockquote>“Twenty days after Salinas left office on November 30, 1994, the Mexican economy crashed; on December 22, the peso fell by 20%, $5 billion left the country in forty-eight hours. By the time the benefits of Salinas’s economic design had time to trickle down, two million farmers had left their land, poverty had risen from 45 to 50% of the entire population, and some 3.3 million children under the age of 14 had been forced to work,” (<em>Mexico Unconquered</em>, John Gilbert). </blockquote><br /><br />Despite the destitution, malnutrition, and total lack of affordable healthcare, the theocratic culture that reigns over the spiritual state of virtually all Mexicans still promotes large families and condemns the use of contraception. Little wonder now that many Mexicans living in poverty rebel even against the Catholic Church to worship their own Santa Meurte, patron saint of those who struggle outside the law to survive.<br /><br />Similar to Salinas’s legacy, a striking parallel of disaster occurred when G. W. Bush left office in the U.S., having squandered trillions of dollars on an unjustified war. Where once there was the largest economic surplus in U.S. history, now the deepest deficit falls lower than ever before. The financial industry’s collapse caused millions of middle-class workers to lose their homes to foreclosures, to lose their jobs by the millions (over 7 million unemployed to date), and to lose their healthcare, if they even had it to begin with, while the rich became wealthier than ever before in American history.<br />G. W. Bush is responsible for an economic inequality in the U.S. surpassing even that of the Roaring '20s:<br /><blockquote>“In 2007, the top .001 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages— about twice the figure for 2000,” notes <a href="http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/">Emmanuel Saez</a>, an economics professor at University of California—Berkeley. Saez also found that the top 10 percent of American earners pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages: a level "higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928," (<a href="http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/14/another-legacy-of-president-george-w-bush-massive-income-inequ/">“Another Legacy of G. W. Bush,” Peter Cohan, <em>DailyFinance</em></a>, August 14, 2009).</blockquote><br /><br />Following the Mexican tradition of running a country into ruin, the Republican Party used the public treasury to feather their own nests over the last eight years and sent the bill to the American middle class to pay for generations to come while bailed-out banks continue to pay million-dollar bonuses to their employees. The sow’s ear policies of the GOP make the drug wars in Mexico pale in comparison. But the worst of this is that an unusually high percentage of the American middle class believes in the policies even when they work against their own interests.<br /><br />The GOP has applied powerful consumer marketing techniques effectively to American consumers. Many Americans believe that national healthcare is socialism. Few people consider the fact that the industrialized countries least harmed by the current economic collapse are places like Germany, France, and Japan. The ones hardly engaged in the preemptive Iraq war. The ones with more stable economic policies. The ones where citizens enjoy efficient national retirement pensions, healthcare, education, and transportation.<br /><br />Despite their so-called socialism, Japan and Germany own the global automobile industry. Toyota could acquire GM and Ford in a heartbeat, if the company decided it was a good investment. Probably not.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-26509668754428731522009-08-09T16:04:00.000-07:002009-09-07T11:13:35.385-07:00Mexico: Heads Will RollThese days we see news reports on a regular basis describing how members of one Mexican drug gang behead members of another gang or the police. “Mexican President Felipe Calderon hailed eight soldiers who were decapitated in Guerrero state as heroes who died at the hands of criminals growing increasingly desperate amid his government’s crackdown on drug cartels,” reports Andres Martinez (LA Times). Yet, throughout most of Mexico’s history, heads have been rolling as a tactic among battling factions.<br /><br />“The heads were displayed in cages on the four walls of the Alhondiga de Granaditas, where the Spaniards of Guanajuato had been massacred. There they remained for ten years until Mexico won its independence in 1821” (Krauze, Mexico, Biography of Power). Hidalgo led the first battles in Mexico’s war of Independence until Spaniards captured and killed him, and then placed his head along with those of his three closest aides in public display as a message to terrorize the insurgents. Despite the buzzing flies swarming around the decaying caged heads hung on the city walls, the War continued under the command of Morelos and his ragtag groups of parish priests, mostly mestizos.<br /><br />By leading the earliest revolts, Hidalgo became the George Washington of Mexico. These two revolutionary giants shared courage and leadership, yet their differences shine brightly on how the foundations of the two countries contrast in culture and ideologies.<br /><br />Once Hidalgo gained popularity, he allowed his followers to treat him as royalty. “He lavishly made official appointments; he lived surrounded by guards; he would walk arm in arm with a lovely young woman and allow himself to be addressed with the title Most Serene Highness” (Enrique Krauze, Mexico, Biography of Power).<br /><br />Hidalgo replaced the pomp of King Joseph Bonaparte (one of the last Spanish kings to rule over Mexico) with his own. Many considered him the Sun King. Hidalgo showed a dubious interest in religion despite his being a priest. Nevertheless he used the image of the Virgin Mary, the most powerful religious symbol in Mexico, as his military standard in an opportunistic ploy to garner a fervent militia, ready to die for their ardent devotion to Her Lady.<br /><br />Hidalgo’s military successor, Morelos, was a passionate believer in the Virgin as protector of his cause, attributing his victories to the Empress of Guadalupe, as the Zappatistas would do a century later. He used the emblem of the Virgin of Guadalupe as the seal of the Congress of Chilpancingo to which he stated: “New Spain puts less faith in its own efforts than in the power of God and the intercession of its Blessed Mother,…that had come to comfort us, defend us, visibly be our protection.” As they did to Hidalgo, the Spanish crushed Morelos, forcing his crumbling rebellion into guerilla warfare.<br /><br />As a sign of hard times, today’s downtrodden peons are showing more faith in the Holy Death (Santa Muerte) than in the Virgin for the same sort of intercessions, only more tailored to fit the needs of the poor, the alienated, the street hookers, criminals, and drug traffickers.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Mexico Founded on Conservative Religion—U.S. Founded on Progressive Elitism</strong><br />A half century earlier, George Washington led an insurgency similar to those waged by Hidalgo and Morelos, but with a much different philosophy. Like Hidalgo, many of Washington’s admirers expected him to take the role of king or emperor. He refused for the higher purpose of establishing a constitutional democracy, and when asked to serve a third term as president, he set the custom that a president serves only two terms (later ratified as the 22nd Amendment).<br /><br />An enthusiast for Thomas Paine’s deistic treatise, The Age of Reason, Washington had little interest in any one religion, although baptized at birth in the Church of England, the official church of Virginia before the revolution. He strongly supported the separation of church and state.<br /><br /><blockquote>“Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.” (George Washington, letter to Edward Newenham, October 20, 1792; The Great Quotations, G. Seldes, ed.).</blockquote><br /><br />Like many European and American philosophers of the time, Washington, a deist, had learned how religious dogma could be exploited to serve nonsense (consider today’s creationism) such as the divine right of kings, against which the United States had waged a bloody revolution. The revolutions in France and the United States, however, arose as much from disgust for the whimsical laws of religious faith as from a growing bourgeoisie, educated in empirical philosophy and science. They wanted the entrepreneurial and financial freedoms that were otherwise greatly limited under the British monarchy, whose very authority rested with its assumed privileged communion with God. Frenchmen invented the guillotine as an efficient way to behead the royalists, tyrannical gluttons of financial and political power.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Freedom and Democracy? Or Financial Interests? </strong><br />Most of the leaders of the American Revolution lived as members of a liberal bourgeois class. For many years only the white male landowners enjoyed privileges such as the right to vote. After the revolution the “Founding Fathers” and their class of mostly nouveaux riches enjoyed the benefits of social, financial, and religious freedoms, including ownership of slaves. For as much as possible, the fifty white men who were signers of the Constitution, mostly deists, took their destiny into their own hands and relied less on God for whatever providence they might eke out by praying.<br /><br />“In short, said Beard [an historian] the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates. Beard applied this general idea to the Constitution, by studying the economic backgrounds and political ideas of the fifty men…to draw up the Constitution. He found that a majority of them were lawyers by profession, that most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out at interest” (A People’s History of the U.S. by Howard Zinn). These fifty “Founding Fathers,” were mostly men who took charge, made things happen, and if obstacles arose, they nevertheless found ways to create the country they wanted.<br /><br />Washington and his American colleagues were disciples of the Enlightenment. In contrast, the people of Mexico, as Morelos explained, placed less faith in their own actions than in the power of God and the intercession of the Blessed Mother. The popular revolutions in Mexico lasted at least a century (from the 1820s to the 1940s) and, in many ways continue to this day. Current struggles take the form of sporadic guerilla warfare, in the guise of underground movements against the mechanized modern state: guerilla insurgency—Zapatista Army of National Liberation; religious resistance through anti-Catholic cults—Santa Muerte; and the power struggles among the so-called drug cartels.<br /><br />This devotion to religious faith in providence as the cause of events, as Morelos revealed long ago, undermines free will and tends to knock the wind out of a person’s lungs. To fill that void, the Catholic Church plays an authoritarian role in Mexican culture to this day, determining almost every aspect of the individual’s life, as does the government. A ruling class has always subjugated the working class to such an extent that hardly any middle class has ever existed, while the poor struggle against the elite’s status quo.<br /><br />The colonizing Spaniards took possession of valuable land and later the Haciendas made land grabbing from the peasants a Mexican tradition. The Catholic Church became one of the largest landowners and had no charitable scruple to loosen its grip on its assets for the poor. “The Conservatives were supported by the onerous bureaucracy of the capital city, by the ‘respectable people,’ and of course, by the clergy” (Krauze).<br /><br />Like the new American aristocrats, the Catholic Church and the landowners in Mexico owned the poor as indentured slaves. The situation created a complicity between the landowner and the priest, at the cost of the peon. As Ocampo wrote, “As in the times of Abraham, the peon and the workers born in the haciendas belong to them and are bartered or claimed and exchanged and sold and inherited as are herds, tools and lands” (Krauze). The forces of the Catholic Church continue to make a large part of the Mexican people docile. Today’s peons tolerate their economic plight by the soothing belief that things will be easier in heaven.<br /><br />Most of human history is a saga about how those in power constrain personal and economic freedom so they can gain more control of wealth, enabling only a few to benefit. The revolutions in Mexico, as anywhere else in history, were motivated not so much by the ideals of democracy and freedom, as by the lack of economic opportunity. The rebellions in both the United States (1770s) and in Mexico (1820s) for independence were motivated by an uproar against economic tyranny. The popular phrase “no taxation without representation” expresses this sentiment.<br /><br />When Mexico finally did attain independence, it anointed and elected Iturbide as the “Constitutional Emperor of Mexico,” meaning that with his coronation on July 21, 1822, he ruled the country by authority of the Catholic Church as well as of the Congress. During his military campaigns, Iturbide gained a reputation of extreme cruelty. He ordered the beheading of women of disloyal fathers, husbands or brothers in order to gain control of the many groups of insurgents by sending a terrorizing message to the entire population. The new and independent Mexican government merely continued Spain’s conservative and theocratic position.<br /><br /><strong>Beheading as a Tradition</strong><br />Throughout Mexico’s history, the conservative government and its continuously rebelling groups have often beheaded their enemies as a means to send graphic messages about who is in charge or wants to be. Today’s news is filled with reports of police increasingly finding severed heads more frequently in the wake of battles between Mexico’s powerful drug cartels and the government. Bloody battles for wealth and power had long ago become a Mexican, and Latin American, tradition. If the United States has become known for its high rate of incarceration, violence, and free trade of assault weapons, Mexico is known as being even more violent, with the help of purchases from unfettered American arms dealers.<br /><br />Even after Mexico had gained independence from Spain in the early 1820s, it did not form any national order. It remained an assemblage of villages and provinces isolated from one another and controlled by the strong men of each region. These warlords gained power throughout Mexico and were validated by their personal strength and by the terror they inspired in their communities as much as by the benefits they provided, much like the so-called drug cartels today.<br /><br />“The name for them in Mexico—cacique—was an Indian word for chieftain. Since the earliest period of the colony, it conveyed the idea and was clearly rooted in indigenous tradition. Though the caciques were local, while the typical Mexican caudillos, those military chieftains had ‘risen with and seized the kingdom’…extended their activity to the entire country and sought power over the entire nation” (Krauze).<br /><br />Today’s so-called drug cartels are the continuation of a centuries-old Mexican tradition. They are motivated by the same lack of any economic structure that might otherwise enable a middle class to grow and prosper. Popular hatred of the economic inequalities has driven the rebel groups that have always existed in Mexico at least since the Spanish arrived. For this same reason, Mexico’s cartels or caudillos have always operated in opposition to the official government. Unlike popular ideals and fairytales, freedom and democracy have almost never been the engine of rebellions. Revolutions arise when a small percentage of the population—such as the Mexican Haciendas of Cuahuixtla, Hospital, and Mapaztlan—own an overwhelming part of a nation’s wealth—property or other means of production—and use it to control the population.<br /><blockquote>“In 1878, Manuel Mendoza Cortina, the owner of the Hacienda of Cuahuixtal, affirming that ‘justice for the poor has already gone off to heaven,’ made another move to dispossess Anenecuilco, this time of their water. One of the village leaders, Manuel Mancilla, began talks with him, in secret, trying to reach a mutual agreement. When they discovered what was going on, his neighbors cut off his head. They threw the corpse on the road, near the Hill of Flints” (Krauze).</blockquote><strong>Rebellion against Constraints</strong><br />Revolutions can take on various forms of subversive activity. In even more extreme states like Saudi Arabia, partly thanks to U.S. support, the royal family of Saud (like the Mexican Hacienda) owns the biggest piece of the country’s wealth (oil reserves) and its governing religion is used to control the behavior of its citizens. As in Mexico’s theocratic rule, the Saudi justice system calls on God’s authority to apply justice. To this day, Saudi Arabia’s religious Morality Police, the mutawa, swing a sword to behead people in a public plaza when they misbehave. Though, when a large part of the country’s population falls into desperate poverty, even the religion takes on extremist twists. Such is the case with the jihadists groups in Saudi Arabia. No secret: fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis from the Hijaz and Astha regions where resentment rages against the regime in Riyadh. They were alienated and grossly underemployed, although well-educated. The radical rebels in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and now in U.S.-occupied Iraq share similar groups of violent subculture “cartels” led by warlords and mostly financed by drug trafficking.<br /><br />In the case of Mexico, the aristocratic class (Haciendas) owns the highest concentration of wealth, measured by the Gini coefficient of 0.49 (What’s a Fair Distribution of Wealth? by Joel S. Hirschhorn). The Gini coefficient is an economic measurement where 1 represents one household owning all the country’s wealth. With a Gini coefficient of 0.37, the United States has the second highest in the world, just below Mexico. This high level of wealth concentration among the ruling class in Mexico explains one of the strongest forces behind the failure of the country, in terms of indicators like its inflation, slow growth rate, and high percentage of poverty—over 40% of the population makes less than $1 a day (World Bank). “There are over 85,000 millionaires (in U.S. dollars) in Mexico, while fifty million people live in economic destitution on less than a few dollars a day. According to the Mexican national daily, El Universal, the thirty-nine richest families in Mexico own 13.5% of the nation’s wealth, about $135 billion” (Mexico Unconquered by John Gibler).<br /><br />As in Columbia, so too in Mexico—more and more people have entered the illegal drug industry because it is the surest way to improve their financial situation. Many other Mexicans flee their own country and risk everything to work in the U.S., whose economy offers just a little less concentration of the wealth among a small group of superrich.<br /><br /><strong>American Conservatives Adopt Mexico’s Theocratic Model</strong><br />Since its foundation, the U.S. has also maintained a high level of concentrated wealth among a blue-blood class while it operates on a somewhat unique capitalistic principle. Unlike extremely theocratic societies—like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Mexico—the U.S. allows its citizens to enjoy a broad social freedom and civil rights, and this soothes the tension of the otherwise staggering economic inequality. Since the 1960s contraception was legalized and African-Americans were permitted equal rights, although the latter required bloody riots. In Mexico, the Catholic Church still refuses the use of contraception, despite the country’s overpopulation in proportion to its economic production.<br /><br />The American middle class is free to pursue its life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness—at a steep price. If they behave reasonably enough, they will qualify for loans, mortgages, and credit cards whose interest rates benefit the wealthy. By greasing the “regular Americans’”—the 90% of the population earning 20% of the income (source: World Banks reports)—with the power to consume, the wealthy business owners or shareholders enable regular citizens to find just enough consumer gratification to tolerate their economic inequality, and so goes the unwritten economic law in America.<br /><br />Exaggerated to an extreme under the eight long years of the radically right-wing administration of President G. W. Bush, Regeanomics has allowed the super-rich—the 10% of the population owning 80% of the wealth—to undermine the pillars of our democracy under both—Democratic (e.g. Clinton) and Republican presidents. As radical capitalists have operated over the last 30 years without much regulation, they have pushed the economy, already favoring the wealthy, beyond its own capacity and thus destroyed a large part of the middle class (more than a million unemployed today). More so than even President Reagan, the Bush administration unleashed big business to dig their claws into the pocket books of middle-class Americans, stirring up a feeding frenzy of mortgages, credit cards and stock market bubbles, distracting regular Americans by their delusional consumer borrowing and spending and with hardly any consumer protection from the wolves of corporate marketing pushing for greater profit margins.<br /><br />Just as the Haciendas have been gorging on the wealth in Mexico by taking land from peons for centuries, corporations like Exxon, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and AIG have been sacking the coffers of the short-lived American empire for decades. These unbridled companies, ingratiated with government, have become America’s version of Mexico’s Haciendas. The greatest advantage American businesses hold over their Mexican counterparts, the old Haciendas, is their marketing and PR departments, which paint their image as America’s pillars of prosperity for all. They have rebuilt a modern day Gilded Age. After all, insurance companies like AIG collect billions of dollars in payments from hard-working Americans and, while denying boatloads of legitimate healthcare claims, they invest the cash in other financial sectors, such as the Internet IPOs of the ‘90s or, more recently, mortgage derivatives, creating unstable economic bubbles destined to burst. And when the bubbles explode at the expense of homeowners, the likes of Goldman Sachs always find innovative financial instruments such as high interest rate loans to profit from the losses of the taxpayers. At the same time, taxpayers pay for the bailouts of these modern-day carpetbaggers who continue to profit from the misfortunes of taxpayers after they had created and profited from those misfortunes in the first place, and while rewarding the managers with billions of dollars in bonuses.<br /><br />With hardly any regulations on lobbying, the likes of these corporations pay “campaign contributions,” otherwise known as bribes, to both Democrats and Republicans in order to assure their free-wheeling deals and status quo in industries like healthcare, banking, and petroleum. The petroleum industry lobbied the U.S. government and influenced G. W. Bush to invade Iraq—by using a series of pretexts such as WMDs, terrorism, imposing democracy and freedom—in order to retake control of the oil fields after Saddam Hussein had nationalized them. The Republican plan to repossess the Iraqi oil fields was not a stellar success because the Iraqis were not as docile as hoped, though the companies landed contracts from the new Iraqi government which, with support of the U.S. government, hung Saddam Hussein, a slightly less cannibalistic punishment than beheading.<br /><br />Like most other countries whose upper class benefits from a high concentration of wealth, Mexico has never allowed so much delusional social freedom as America’s free-reigning capitalism. Like many other societies that exploit religion to control their populations, Mexico’s ruling class has often succeeded for the most part in controlling its pious citizens by the authority of God rather than by consumer credit.<br /><br />Despite the paternalistic attitude of the Catholic Church and the thuggish, corrupt Mexican Army, Mexicans have revolted numerous times since their independence from Spanish oppression. At the end of the 19th century, the War of the Reform became one of the fiercest attempts to reform the Catholic Church and the government. A large and popular group of young liberals led partly by Ocampo revolted against the conservatives, mainly the wealthy landowners, and the Catholic church, which owns large properties, and the older members of the Army who protected the status quo by massacring “all their prisoners—commanders, officers, soldiers, even the doctors and medical students who were caring for the wounded” (Krauze).<br /><br />Two important legal decrees, though entirely unenforced, resulted from this civil war: the Law of Disentailment—which attempted to redistribute some of the Haciendas’ and the church’s lands to the peasants, and the “sanction of freedom of conscience”—which tacitly implied and tolerated freedom of worship. Yet in the same breath, the conservative government “voted to particularly ‘care for and protect’ the Catholic Church with ‘just and prudent laws’” (Krauze).<br /><br /><strong>Centuries of Religion and Patria</strong><br />Against this historical backdrop religion y patria, the Army and the Catholic Church represent the power structure that carries on the traditions today. When G.W. Bush approved the Mérida Initiative, during the end of his administration, giving $1.4 billion of U.S. tax money to the Mexican Army, he most likely had no clue that there are two Mexicos. Alternatively, if he did understand Mexican history and culture, he intended to enforce neocon policies by supporting conservative Christian theocracy and its status quo. After all, Mexico’s conservative theocracy seems to be the ideal for the right-wing, Bible-thumping Republican agenda in the U.S.<br /><br />The Mexico most American tourists and viewers of mainstream media see is the Disney World view—one where “the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war on drugs, aided by the Mexican Army…,” as Charles Bowden reports in his article in Mother Jones magazine (August 2009), We Bring Fear. This Mexico has a free press, a fair justice system, rule of law, and an effective government.<br /><br />Though we can see in its long history Mexico, in its current state, is teetering on collapse, the tourist version of Mexico continues to exist in the zombie minds of TV viewers and spring-break Cancun hotel dwellers. The real Mexico operates on bribes in an economy that has been flat lining for decades, if not centuries. Aside from its natural energy reserves and tourism, its most lucrative source of national income now arises from the illegal drug industry—the only thing propping up the country from its decades-old recession that NAFTA and the maquiladoras never resolved, despite one of Mexico’s greatest resources being its cheap labor force.<br /><br />In the real Mexico, the war is for drugs “where the police and the military fight for their share of the drug profits, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between the government and the drug world has never existed (Danish Brethern, dailykos.com).<br /><br />Like the twisted fundamentalist versions of Islam among certain groups in places like Saudi Arabia, Mexico too has a long history of carrying on seemingly distorted versions of religious traditions, many of which have become subcultures of modern versions of ancient Aztec faiths.<br /><br />Especially popular among a huge and growing part of the Mexican people, the poor and alienated—those excluded from the wealth modern globalization—Santa Muerte is a faith not likely to go away any time soon. It may have arisen as a reaction to Vatican II or simply as a longstanding tradition based on the popular “Thin Lady,” Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec queen of the underworld, a part of Mexico’s native religion.<br /><br />On the American taxpayers’ dime, the Mexican Army is using funds from Bush’s Mérida Initiative to carry out the wishes of the Catholic Church condemning Santa Muerte as devil worship because some drug traffickers wear tattoos of the Thin Lady. But drug traffickers more often wear images of Christ and the crucifix as well. So, why isn’t the government seeking to destroy Catholic churches by this same logic? The government claims that the Santa Muerte sect is part of the narco subculture, a justification for the Army to demolish “dozens of shrines to Santa Muerte, claiming that the worship of this skeletal woman in a white cloak is a ‘narco-cult.’ As resistance grows, so does this new religious movement” (US/Mexican Narco War Targets Religious Sect, by Danish Brethern, DailyKos.com). This represents another variation of how the Mexican people can rebel against their authoritarian, conservative government and its official church by worshipping the Holy Death, a spirit who cares for the poor and the marginalized.<br /><br />In another form of rebellion against Mexico’s economic inequality, today’s drug cartels continue the traditions of the caudillos and have seized control of large regions of the country. They are overpowering or buying out the Mexican Army, which is weakened by a bad economy, one that does not engage and motivate a middle class. Like the police, the Army is so poorly paid that its soldiers desert the government and use their skills, including those gained from Special Forces training in the U.S., to join the higher paid caudillos, or what the mainstream media calls the drug cartels.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-50181714014960444232009-06-07T15:41:00.000-07:002009-06-07T15:43:00.969-07:00Mexico: U.S. Is Borderline to Third World?<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #333333">"There is an arms race between the cartels," said Alberto Islas, a security consultant who advises the Mexican government on the current drug wars, </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif"><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-arms-race15-2009mar15,0,229992.story">as reported in the Los Angeles Times.</a><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: #333333"> "One group gets rocket-propelled grenades, the other has to have them."</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Since January 2007, when the Mexican war on drugs was officially declared, <a href="http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/its-a-war">more than 9,700 people have died in the conflicts</a>, more than the official count of U.S. soldier causalities in Iraq. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">When looking at Mexico's history and its current economic and civil predicament, we gain insight into how our own American government is so vulnerable. Only our values and distinguishing principles designed into our system by its founders will save us. If we lose these, we fall into the abyss. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">To some, comparing the U.S. to Mexico, or the Third World in general, sounds shocking. Yet, is this comparison really so far-fetched? With our constitutional form of government in jeopardy, the U.S. teeters on the edge of emulating Mexico's dismal style of democracy. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">In my previous two articles in a series of essays examining the similarities between Mexico and the U.S.A., <em>Mexico: a Theocratic Model for Republicans</em> and <em>Religious Morality Is Problematic</em>, I consider how certain leaders in Mexico, as in so many countries south of the border, have seized political power through the use of the authoritarian religious traditions that are pervasive in the culture. More than ever in U.S. history, the Republican Party has pursued this model during the G.W. Bush administration's eight long years.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">In the U.S. under the G.W. Bush administration, the Republican Party took a page from Mexican history and followed this same process as Mexico's leaders to: </span></p> <ul style="margin-top: 0in"> <li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Bridle the Horses-Concentrate power in the executive branch. </span></li> <li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Use Loopholes-Alter the U.S. Constitution for more control. </span></li> <li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Leverage the Ol'Boy System-Diminish federalism in favor of executive power. </span></li> <li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Burn the Bodies-Oppress the press and thus avoid transparency.</span></li> </ul> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Bridle the Horses: President as King</span></strong></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">During Porfirio Diaz's presidency, the time was ripe in Mexico's history to "bridle the horses." Diaz's phrase reveals his "all-encompassing program of political control and centralization," as historian Krauze explains in his book, <em>Mexico, Biography of Power</em>. In Mexico the liberal Constitution called for a "representative, democratic and federal Republic," reflecting the ideals of the U.S. Constitution. But Diaz flouted the Mexican Constitution and took control by diminishing the three branches of government and concentrating power in the executive. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">As Krauze writes,<br /></span></p><blockquote style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 40px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial">"To contain the overwhelming pressure, he would assert the sanctity of the presidential position more than any other twentieth-century President. He [Diaz] would speak...of the 'majesty of the office.' His concept of the position was almost explicitly theocratic....The new style of power took effect immediately...only pure and naked application of power."</span><br /></blockquote> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">As advisor to President G.W. Bush, Karl Rove could have written his playbook straight from the history of Mexican Presidents from Diaz to Calderon, from the 1960s to the present. What this sequence of Mexican presidents accomplished in more than fifty years, the Republicans did in eight. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">The parallels are astonishing as explained <a href="http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6330">in the Cato Institute reports</a> <span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black">by Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch</span></span>: </span></p> <blockquote style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 40px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial">"Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes</span><br /></blockquote> <ul><li> <ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial">a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech-and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;</span><br /></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial">a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;</span><br /></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial">a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as "enemy combatants," strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror- in other words, perhaps forever; and</span><br /></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial">a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.</span><br /></li></ul></li> </ul> <blockquote style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 40px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial">President Bush's constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers."</span><br /></blockquote> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Like Diaz, Bush used religion to establish his sense of moral and political authority and was supported by American right-wing Christian groups, the progeny of extremists forged by the fundamentalism of Pat Robertson, Bill O'Reilly and his ilk. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Loopholes & Dirty Tricks-Alter the Constitution to Undo the Legislature and the Judiciary</span></strong></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">In doing so, the Republicans weakened the values by which the U.S. distinguishes itself from the Third World. They used religious fundamentalism-superstitions-to replace rational thinking. They disregarded constitutional law which the president's sworn to protect. They ignored laws enacted by Congress with "signing statements" issued by President Bush. With these signing statements, Bush was able to interpret laws as he saw fit, thus further deteriorating the U.S. constitution. Over the last eight years, the Republican Party transgressed the Constitutional form of government for the sake of an ideological vision that included unbridled, free-wheeling capitalism. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: black">As </span></span><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Elizabeth Drew</span></strong><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif"> says in her article in <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19092">The New York Review of Books</a>, </span></p> <blockquote style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 40px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial">"<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black">This power grab has received little attention because it has been carried out largely in obscurity. The press took little notice until Bush, on January 5 of this year [2006], after signing a bill containing the McCain amendment, which placed prohibitions on torture, quietly filed a separate pronouncement, a "signing statement," that he would interpret the bill as he wished....The public scenes of the President surrounded by smiling legislators whom he praises for their wonderful work as he hands out the pens he has used to sign the bill are often utterly misleading. The elected officials aren't informed at that time of the President's real intentions concerning the law. After they leave, the President's signing statements-which he does not issue verbally at the time of signing-are placed in the</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black"> </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><em><span style="color: black">Federal Register</span></em><span style="color: black">, a compendium of US laws, which members of Congress rarely read. And they are often so technical, referring as they do to this subsection and that statute, that they are difficult to understand."</span></span></span><br /></blockquote> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: black"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: black">Again, one of the distinguishing values built into the U.S. Constitution is the division of power that creates a system of checks and balances. However, by using the signing statements and other loopholes asserted in devious arguments, such as the unitary executive power, Rove, Cheney, and Bush found ways to annul the legislative branches in more ways than one. Unlike the Democrat Party, the Republicans enforce a strict code of loyalty and, at least during the reign of Karl Rove, they spoke only according to the party line of well-rehearsed "talking points." </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: black">This mirrors another aspect of Mexican history that brought that country into its current plague of corruption, violence, and chaos. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: black">Krauze tells us how:<br /></span></span></p><blockquote style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 40px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial">"Diaz had weakened and corrupted the Legislature by making it a mere adjunct of the Presidential Chair. The bothersome business of electing candidates was conveniently overcome by appointing them. No presidential initiative was ever questioned, and nothing moved in the Legislature without the consent of 'the Great Elector.' A similar process of servitude neutralized the judiciary as Don Profirio [Diaz] freely appointed and removed judges."</span><br /></blockquote> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: black">And this became a tradition for most all subsequent Mexican presidents. Similarly, the Bush administration transformed the role of the president into 'the Decider' partly by neutralizing the judiciary-appointing only right-wing extremist judges who would serve the president's agenda. As Drew points out: </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: black">"As for the judicial branch, the Bush administration, like previous administrations, has tried to appoint judges compatible with the President's views. But Bush has been strikingly successful at putting extreme conservatives on the bench, and probably now has four votes on the Supreme Court for his 'unitary executive' rationale for executive authority over what the other branches do."</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif"><span> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">The Ol'Boy System: Federalism as Myth</span></strong></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Under Don Porfirio Diaz, like most subsequent Mexican presidents, state governors tend to be extremely loyal to the president who kept an eye on them. As Krauze tells us, "Bernardo Reyes, the governor of the state of Nuevo Leon and a true proconsul for Don Protfirio in the northeast, received daily instructions, reports, and suggestions from the President concerning issues as varied as elections for the Legislature and the judiciary; pardons...." </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Knowingly or not, the Bush administration followed this model closely and raised it up a notch in many ways. G.W.Bush's initial election to the presidency was tainted by the chaotic voting methods in Florida, where his brother Jeb pulled strings with the Republican Party to assure obstacles were placed in the path of Democrat voters. Ultimately, it was not the voting public of the nation that elected the president. It was the right-wing judges in <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010205/bugliosi">the Supreme Court who appointed G.W. by using obscure technicalities</a>. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Likewise, many Mexican presidents appoint their successor president-for example, as Krauze points out several times, in the case of President Mateos: "He would later confess that it was at that moment he decided that Gustavo Diaz Ordaz would be his successor." <span> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">By extending this ol'boy system to the state governments, the president maintained greater control of the states. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">In an <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405EFDF143DF935A35750C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=4">essay in The New York Times, Franklin Foer</a> reveals how the W administration imposed federal policies over the States.<span> </span></span></p> <blockquote style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 40px; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; border-style: none; padding: 0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial">"Prodded by a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, Clinton actually presided over the revitalized federalism.... Federalism suited his declared ambition to move beyond the era of 'big government....'<span> </span>George W. Bush didn't give Clinton much credit for these achievements. Like many of his predecessors, he entered office promising to rescue the states from federal pummeling. Yet his administration has greatly expanded federal power, and some conservatives have been complaining. Writing in National Review two years ago, Romesh Ponnuru observed that ''more people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the cold war.'' State governments have their own version of this complaint. They say the Bush administration has imposed new demands...without also providing sufficient cash to get these jobs done."</span><br /></blockquote> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif"><span> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Burn the Bodies-Freedom of the Press and Public Transparency</span></strong></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">From Krauze's history, we learn of events like the Corpus Christi Thursday (1971) in the neighborhood of Tlateloco where President Echeverria planned (while he was Minister of the Interior under President Ordaz) to deploy Los Halcones to kill the liberal students demonstrating for political reform. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Just as we find among our own recent politicians in the U.S., Mexico's President Echevirria "would be able to throw the blame on others, as far away as he could from himself, for Tlateloco and the rest of the actions he supervised...." Krauze tells us that "Echeverria had snapped out an order by telephone to burn the bodies." </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">During the three years after the 9/11 attacks, a period when the American public gave all their trust to Bush-Cheney, the administration moved to intimidate the press by calling journalists unpatriotic if they voiced the slightest word of dissent. The most obvious example of this arose when Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote an article in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson">The New York Times</a> revealing how Bush and Cheney were using trumped-up stories about WMDs in Iraq to justify their long-time neocon plan to invade. Bush-Cheney retaliated by destroying the career of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, in the CIA. And they were able to throw the blame on others, such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby">Scooter Libby</a>, who was convicted of felony federal charges of obstruction and perjury but never served a day in jail, because Bush pardoned him. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Yet this example pales in comparison to how Bush-Cheney secretly enabled torture to be used as a covert means to <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/05/14/cheney/index.html?source=newsletter">create a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda</a>, not to mention how they manipulated intelligence documents to justify bombing a country into rubble and killing a large part of its citizens, women and children included. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Unlike Mexico's President Echeverria, Cheney did not need to burn the bodies. The dead Iraqis, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, were killed in places where journalists were not allowed to go. Fortunately, <span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black"><a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/14/iraq.torture/">Lawrence Wilkerson</a>, the retired Army colonel and former senior State Department aide to Colin Powell, spoke the truth behind Cheney's lies, exposing how the former VP used torture to force prisoners to link al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: black">During the Bush administration, the government intimidated journalists' freedom of the press, which was, and still is, already weakened by the pressures of corporate sponsors. Almost every policy Bush-Cheney carried out, they did so as covert operations, from forbidding photographs of the soldiers returning from war in caskets to concealing how torture was authorized, how intelligence was manipulated, and how dissent was squelched, as in the case of Valerie Plame.<span> </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: black"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: black">We think we are free. That's what we want to believe, and it seems we are because we can choose among 8 types of blue jeans and 21 flavors of ice cream. Now, though, our political leaders have shackled us in the chains of extremist ideology and religious superstitions. These same dismal shenanigans and outright crimes characterize the history of Third World countries as we see in places like Mexico.<span> </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif">Tragically for America, we have become extremely tolerant of political leaders who have taken ownership of our own government and our guiding principles, our only saving virtues. If the new administration under Obama, including Congress, do not willfully and aggressively undo the aberrations created by the Bush administration, then we will continue to roll down the rails, heading closer to a corrupt and failing government-one that no longer finds the courage to correct itself. <span> </span></span></p>Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-10569658638867310652009-05-22T10:18:00.000-07:002009-09-07T10:26:34.513-07:00Mexico: Religious Morality Is Problematic—A Failure in Mexico & in the U.S."To say that Mexico is a failed state is absolutely false," <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29413556" target="blank">said Mexico’s current president, Felipe Calderon</a>. "I have not lost any part—any single part—of Mexican territory."<br /><br />Maybe Calderon should reconsider his claim. What about Ciudad Juarez? Calling in 5,000 troops sounds like an offensive mobilization of the Army to regain the territory lost by the local police.<br /><br />“President Felipe Calderon said Thursday he wants to defeat the world's most powerful drug gangs before his term ends in 2012, disputing U.S. fears that Mexico is losing control of its territory, though his government plans to send thousands of soldiers and police officers to one city to try to control drug violence there.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29413556<br /><br />How did Mexico come to the edge of being a failed State? The history of the country shows us how its political officials, from the lowest to the highest ranks have used any means possible—mostly illegal—to gain personal power and wealth. We learn from historians such as Enrique Krauze, in his book, Mexico: Biography of Power, how Mexico attempted to establish several constitutions over the last century while groping for its core guiding values. At the same time, the Catholic Church, in its struggle to retain control, varied its policies and values to assert its own slithering agenda.<br /><br /><strong>Loss of Rational Core Values</strong><br /><br />As in other theocratic countries, in Mexico leaders constantly govern in arbitrary ways—void of core, rational values—in order to benefit themselves and the powerful wealthy who are most likely to support these leaders in return. <em>Rolling Stone</em> magazine recently <a com="" politics="" story="" 24012731="" target="blank">revealed how Mexican officials</a>, from the highest to the lowest ranks, benefit from revenue sharing in the Columbian cocaine industry.<br /><br />As in Columbia, now too in Mexico, government officials at all levels collaborate with drug lords like El Chapo, a man made extremely wealthy from cocaine and marijuana, who is most likely to support these leaders in return for their favors, such as letting him out of a high security federal prison before his extradition to the U.S. Officials in the Bush-Cheney administration are not unfamiliar with these practices. <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/27081427/obamas_sheriff/1" target="blank">Bush oil industry regulators spent American tax money on Columbian blow</a>, and we have learned how their stimulating high aided in their sex parties with oil industry lobbyists.<br /><br />Despite Bush’s claims of high moral standards as a born-again Christian, he and Cheney whittled away at what was once America’s moral high ground, once one of the touchstones of American world leadership. The Bush administration has inculcated the type of hypocritical immorality typical of popular religions that enforce ethical rules arbitrarily, depending on the situation and political needs.<br /><br />Clothed in the image of Christian righteousness, the Bush-Cheney administration authorized torture as a means to obtain testimony—ultimately revealed to be false—to support the lies used to justify bombing Iraq and killing thousands of innocent civilians. Many reports have shown that the previous administration intentionally invaded Iraq, not for any alleged links to al Qaeda but for access to its oil reserves. Succeeding in this well-documented, premeditated plan would have benefited large oil companies, the wealthy who are most likely to support these leaders in return for the favor.<br /><br /><strong>Political Use of Religion</strong><br /><br />Politicians often use popular religion to justify the abuse of power and force, degrading a nation into third-world status like Mexico. Unlike any other presidential administration in the U.S., the eight years of Bush-Cheney solidified a culture of corrupt favoritism for the wealthy, leaving the middle class to pay for our current financial and moral disaster. The financial catastrophe may be the result of decades of disastrous deregulation policies but, like the 9/11 attack, Bush-Cheney ignored all the warnings. So many disasters befell W’s administration as if he were the victim, a bystander struck by a MAC truck, not a leader in charge of the traffic, not really the decider.<br /><br />Like the Bush-Cheney administration over the past eight years with its favoritism to big oil and its no-bid contracts with Halliburton, Mexican presidents have used similar means for centuries to use the resources of the many, the middle class, to benefit the few, the extremely wealthy and powerful.<br /><br />This dismantling of the middle class in the U.S. has already begun to eat away at American core values. The more middle class Americans have to struggle to keep a roof over our children’s heads, the more we have to compromise our ethical standards. We are more willing to tolerate a preemptive, unjustified war if our leaders tell us it might make us safer and lower the prices at the pump. We are willing to tolerate the torture of prisoners if it means maintaining our standard of living.<br /><br />The American voting public became aware of this by the end of the last Republican administration. They voted for change. As President Obama says <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/16/AR2009041602873.html?sid=ST2009041602877" target="blank">in his statement</a> about the release of Bush administration torture memos, “A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals, and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.”<br /><br />America’s ideals were founded by the rational, clear thinking of the Enlightenment, when obscure religious thought was ignored for the sake of moral values based on logical reasoning, as in classical Greece.<br /><br />Mexico’s leaders, in contrast, have been inspired by the inquisitions and superstitions of the Baroque era. The leading architects of American government were not religious men at all. They were deists, inspired by the European Enlightenment. America’s ideals were founded not in arbitrary, popular religious dictates that deceptive politicians use to abuse power.<br /><br />Yet this is exactly how the Mexican government has favored the wealthy in Mexico (and in the U.S.), at the expense of Mexico’s middle class. The drug industry in Mexico has become the most attractive means to stay in the middle class because the corrupt economic and political system has not enabled the middle-class families in Mexico to build a life by more legitimate and respectable means. They have compromised their ethics in order to keep a roof over the heads of their children.<br /><br />Many Mexican citizens have lost all trust in their government. The Zetas, the Special Forces soldiers of the drug lords, routinely recruit Mexican soldiers into their ranks. <em>Rolling Stone</em> <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/24012731/the_war_next_door/6" target="blank">reporter Guy Lawson quotes</a> the rationale of one such recruit. <br /><br /><blockquote>"Chapo came to my village in a helicopter and gave out money to plant marijuana," Julio says. "He did this for the whole town. If I wanted to start a business of some kind in the city, he would provide me the money to start. He uses his money for his people, to help us progress." </blockquote><br /><br />As the Mexican political system fails, the more the middle-class Mexican has to tolerate immoral means of survival. In most of central and south America, the illegal drug industry has become the most effective means to increase a regular person’s income. For this reason it has gained overwhelming popularity, despite its dangers.<br /><br />Likewise, the eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration has led middle-class Americans to sacrifice our core values, with the hope that the unjustified destruction of a country, the torture of prisoners, and the free-wheeling, deregulated capitalism would somehow save the standard of living for us and our children.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.markdanner.com/articles/show/154" target="blank">As Mark Danner comments</a> on this line of reasoning <blockquote>“from Dick Cheney on down have been unflagging in their arguments that these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques . . . were absolutely crucial’ to preventing ‘a major-casualty attack.’ This argument, still strongly supported by a great many Americans, is deeply pernicious, for it holds that it is impossible to protect the country without breaking the law. It says that the professed principles of the United States, if genuinely adhered to, doom the country to defeat. It reduces our ideals and laws to a national decoration, to be discarded at the first sign of danger.”</blockquote><br /><br />The lessons we learn from Mexico’s failures illuminate our own down fall in the U.S. during the last eight years. The damage done was so severe that we must remain vigilant, despite Obama’s Herculean leadership. We must pull ourselves out of a dire situation where our own political system failed and now teeters on the precipice of collapse.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-80935888932192316832009-05-08T20:04:00.000-07:002013-03-08T20:21:41.815-08:00Mexico: A Theocratic Model for Republicans<div style="margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
Here in Los Angeles, Sepulveda Boulevard serves as a main traffic artery for over 42 miles, from the San Fernando Valley in the north to Hermosa Beach in the south—the longest road in Los Angeles County. Few Angelinos probably know what history lurks in the name, even if the name of the road was intended for some other historical person. </div>
Sepulveda, a militant racist, a fascist? A study of Mexico’s history reveals that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gin%C3%A9s_de_Sep%C3%BAlveda">Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda</a> (1494 - 1573) wrote that the natives are "as children to parents, as women are to men, as cruel people are from mild people.” <em>A Second Democritus: on the just causes of the war with the Indians </em>was his most important book, shaping the course of Mexican history.<br />
In his book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=mexico+biography+of+power">Mexico, Biography of Power<span style="font-style: normal;">,</span></a></em> Enrique Krauze tells us: “The imperialist interpretation of the Conquest (stridently represented by Juan Gines de Sepulveda) justified the war against the Indians on the grounds of their allegedly natural vices and defects: they were subhuman, sodomites, barbarians, cannibals, cowards, idolaters, liars and depraved idlers. Their backwardness prevented them from freely submitting to the law; they were ‘slaves by nature.’”<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Religious Doctrine--Political Policy</span><br />
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<strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">This fervent, Catholic, political ideology represented in Sepulveda’s writings resembles much of the North American Protestant justifications to decimate most of the American Indians. Sepulveda’s view sounds like a line straight from one of today’s Republican propaganda writers (Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, etc.) who brutally attack anyone of a dissenting opinion about torture, preemptive invasions, or any of their other policies.</span></strong></div>
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We might excuse Sepulveda at least a little if we consider his own historical context during the end of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages">Dark Ages</a>, a period of cultural decline and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse">societal collapse</a>, even though several of Sepulveda’s contemporaries advocated respect and tolerance for human rights. The Jesuit humanist Francisco Javier Clavijero “ascribed to the civilization of the Mexicas a classical rank equal to that of Greece and Rome.” </div>
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Despite Sepulveda’s disadvantage of being born into the Dark Ages, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocon">neocons</a> and other Republicans cannot use any such excuse for their medieval views. When reading Sepulveda’s theocratic ideology, we find the same twisted logic and bellicose policies, supported by claiming it’s God’s will. Referring to God as support for a political policy was a hallmark of the Dark Ages, when reason was left twisting in the wind. The use of trumped-up religious authority as a justification for a political doctrine reveals the weakness of that doctrine. Instead of using rational thought and logic, theocrats lean on so-called sacred text, dictated by God, as the basis of policy. </div>
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<strong>Religion as a Political Platform</strong> <br />It’s as though the Republicans ripped their policies out of Sepulveda’s pages and used them as their playbook. Sepulveda’s words contain the sounds of the same strand of blind theology that the W Administration used to manipulate the general public into a frenzy after the 9/11 attack, calling for a “crusade” and using it to justify the implementation of their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century">long-planned, extreme, right-wing policies</a>.</div>
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Bush often used religious terms in grandiose <a href="http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/gen.bush.terrorism/">statements</a>. "<a href="http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/gen.bush.terrorism/">This crusade</a>, this war on terrorism is gonna take awhile.” “We will rid the world of the evil-doers." His use of <a href="http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/cohen_24_4.htm">religious expressions</a> gained him popularity among gullible groups of born-again Christians throughout his career. W’s born-again Christian fundamentalism helped him to become governor of Texas. “But I feel God wants me to do this, and I must do it.” It was the right-wing members of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore">U.S. Supreme Court who made him president</a>. </div>
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Once in the White House, W’s unreasoned policies fell straight into the greatest wishes of the likes of Osama bin Laden whose goal was to cause confusion and terror. What fundamentalist plans Osama bin Laden instigated, W unwittingly fulfilled. Leaders like these rely on traditionalism, meaning that they claim their authority derived from a religious text. In his essay, <a href="http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html">Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt</a>, Umberto Eco explains how this style of leadership is an early form of fascism. </div>
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<strong>Religious Doctrine--Traditionalism--Dangerous Policies</strong>In its recent eight-year reign, the Republican Party took the U.S. from peace and prosperity to a historic deficit, unbridled financial disaster, preemptive war justified by lies to the public, and <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/27081427/obamas_sheriff/1">corporate corruption, especially among the oil titans</a> which only expedites the looming environmental breakdown. Most born-again Christians believe that environmentalism is futile since the End Days are soon approaching for the Rapture and Christ’s second coming. Why bother trying to save the planet if God is going to snatch up the righteous to heaven and leave the rest of us sinners here to face the apocalypse? </div>
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Such painful incompetence, irrational policies, and corruption once were the mark of third world countries like Mexico—until now. Given another Republican administration, the U.S. would have become a failed state, like Mexico today. Driven by a religious ideology that influenced every aspect of policy from economics to the judicial system, W’s presidency is an example of how religious fervor can bring a peaceful and prosperous nation into war and financial collapse. </div>
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If Republicans had remained in power, they would have gleefully transformed the U.S. into a born-again Christian theocratic government, run by and for the wealthy and justified by God’s will. Certain traits create the third-world conditions of Mexico, and they reflect closely the fundamentalist policies of the Republican Party in the U.S. today. </div>
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Like most Central and South American countries, Mexico has been under the yoke of the Catholic Church since before Cortés. For most Mexicans the Church still is the main source of culture and education. Krauze writes, “It was in other areas, like education, where the influence of the Church was clearly harmful.” He notes that the Church was responsible “above all, [for] the intolerant strain in Mexican thought, evident in 1910….” </div>
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<strong>Church + State = Third World</strong>One church, one god, one dogma, one catechism, one way of thinking—this narrow mindedness is what fuels theocratic regimes. This holds true for Mexico today as it does for many other third-world countries like Israel, Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, where reason flutters in the wind like a battle-torn flag, and where people view the world in terms of what God wills. They do this without realizing that God can be quite different from one tribe, gang, or congregation to the next. They result is endless wars in the Golan Heights, the West Bank, or on the streets of Juarez.</div>
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Theocracies most often resemble fascist regimes, with their dogmatic control over every life. At different times and places, the degree of tyranny varies but the underlying characteristic of centralized command remains, just as it does in right-wing regimes, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or Panama under Noriega, or Saudi Arabia under the Saud Monarchy, or Israel under <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Netanyahu">Benjamin Netanyahu</a>. </div>
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Or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porfirio_D%C3%ADaz">Profirio Diaz</a>, like many other Mexican presidents all the way to recent ex-President <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicente_Fox">Vincente Fox</a>, who “ran an ‘integral’ or ‘total’ government…by integrating into the person of the President the real powers—national and local politico-military leaders and army generals…and by neutralizing dissident voices.” </div>
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In the aftermath of 9/11, W’s administration muzzled dissident voices for several years by calling them unpatriotic, a claim that could ruin the career of a journalist like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rather">Dan Rather</a> and former <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson">Ambassador Joe Wilson</a> who published an opinion piece in the <em>The New York Times</em>, revealing how W twisted intelligence reports to justify the invasion of Iraq. </div>
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Like most third-world countries, Mexico escaped the influence of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment">century of the Enlightenment</a>. For Europe and the United States, the Enlightenment meant that facts, scientific method, and reason reemerge from antiquity as the measure of truth and sound ideas. It was a time when revolution tore down the arbitrary and whimsical “divine rights” of kings and other nutcase right-wing manipulators. As in France, the “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United_States">Founding Fathers</a>” of the U.S. fortunately had embraced the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Reason">Age of Reason</a> with its ideals of human rights, rational justice, and democracy. </div>
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<strong>Age of Enlightenment Revisited</strong><br />
Contrary to claims by members of the Republican Party, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United_States">most of the Founders were Deists</a>, hardly interested in any religion. They thought the universe had a creator, but one not concerned with the daily lives of humans and not in direct contact with them, either by revelation or by sacred texts. No, the Republicans are horribly wrong in their claims that America was founded as a Christian nation. As usual, when they make statements in the mainstream media, they revise history according to their own mythologies. Jefferson, on the contrary, believed that America’s strength arises from free thinking, critical citizens, unfettered from the chains of religious nonsense. <br />
<br />Eco writes that right-wing traditionalists see “t<span style="color: black;">he Enlightenment, the Age of Reason…as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as <em>irrationalism</em>.”</span>Krauze points out that the values of the Enlightenment “affected only the topmost level of society, and despite the historic breakthroughs of that period, Mexico held tight to the culture of the Baroque with centralized power in a monarchal-type president or a despot and religious superstitions in the place of science. Mexico remained resistant to the political and intellectual currents of the European Enlightenment.” The Republican Party ignores any type of rational system of justice and instead attempts to transform the U.S. justice system into an extension of its own arbitrary policies. Like Islam and Judaism, Christianity has been used as a propaganda channel for unified political power ever since it was accepted by political authorities, such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_I">Constantine</a>. <br />
<br />Today, the Republicans use religion to legitimize their own goals, such as to ignoring the <em>habeas corpus</em> and due process of the law in order to imprison and torture people without trial. Motivated by personal gain and fueled by favoritism for members of their own religious tribe, they appoint religious extremists to the Supreme Court and make deals with lobbyists of large corporations against the best interests of the people and the greater welfare of the country. As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavio_Paz">Octavio Paz</a> describes Mexico in his book, <em>The Labyrinth of Solitude</em>, “ours is the Counter-reformation, Monopoly and Feudalism….” <br /><br />
By shifting power to a centralized executive branch, by <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/27081427/obamas_sheriff">favoring corporations</a> that become monopolistic, by legislating religious superstitions like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_creationism">creationism</a> as part of the educational curriculum in public schools, and so encouraging citizens to lose their grasp on clear thinking, not to mention science and reason, the Republican Party sought the dumbing-down of the general public. The dumber citizens are, the easier it is to beguile them. The right wing is continuing its quest to bring the U.S. closer to the Dark Ages of feudalism, monopoly, and ignorance—and shared status, with Mexico, as a failed state.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-47987181086087144472009-04-24T08:56:00.000-07:002009-04-24T09:10:58.380-07:00In the Case of Iraq, a War Story Might Best Take Place on U.S. SoilIn the last few days, reports appeared about how the Pulitzer committee awarded their prestigious prize to topics like the luxury bordello scandals involving elected officials, Thomas Jefferson’s various mistresses, and international sex trafficking, among others.<br /><br />No doubt these subjects are important and sizzle in the public mind, yet something feels missing—a shoe lace untied, a hole worn through a pocket by a house key, or that war lasting more than 7 years now.<br /><br />The Pulitzer committee grants awards for socially redeeming art, beautiful music, or fine writing that pierces the veil of deception in high places. Plenty of journalists and writers have accomplished this on the subject of Operation Iraqi Freedom, focusing not on the sizzling sex scandals but on the more primitive forms of brutality and rape in the chaos of a destroyed country.<br /><br />Does this explain why the war topic was passed over this year, the seventh of a long war?<br /><br />The Pulitzer was founded on values of professional journalism and artistic merit. Has it turned its eyes to new, more important subjects than the U.S. invasion of another country?<br /><br />If you consider how mainstream media and journalism have botched so many opportunities to pierce the veil of high-power deception, you’ll not be surprised that a prestigious prize for journalism shows a lack of interest in Iraq, war, soldiers and civilians dying. After all, how many newspapers, or congressmen for that matter, risked dissent from the W administration during the wake of the hyped-up, politically exploited, hysterical 9/11 reaction?<br /><br />Plenty of novels and nonfiction books criticized the war and risked public outrage and the lethal label of “un-American” during the period when the native authority of W and Cheney commanded support for their own cleverly crafted, massive destruction and public deception. In this sense, the Iraq war took place more right here in the U.S. than in the bombing missions and in the Humvees where blood spills out to this day.<br /><br />Perhaps Americans at home just don’t have the stomach to think of the war anymore—though the war was, and still is, fundamentally right here at home. The battleground is in the American political arena. Now more than ever, this becomes clear as the reports pile up to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the war was planned long before the causus belli –the justification and the opportunity that presented itself in the form of the 9/11 attack.<br /><br />America’s political system failed—and so did its journalism. Collectively, reflecting our country’s culture, we Americans wanted to find a fast solution to an otherwise complicated situation. Suddenly faced with difficult decisions and questions, we clung tightly to our Bibles, searching for quick answers and whispering curses to the Muslims in a “crusade,” as W often called it. We did not want to analyze the facts before we reacted. We wanted to follow a leader, regardless of how nefarious and duplicitous the power brokers played their hand in a twisted plan.<br /><br />Ironically, these officials, W and Cheney, were not even elected officials, rather just appointed hastily by a small group of extremists at the Supreme Court. This is why the real battleground has always been right here at home. It began as a struggle for the power to impose an ideological belief on a democracy. By grasping the power to command, the extreme American ideologues overreacted, waged a war of political passion, and thus fulfilled the greatest wishes, plans, and prayers of the likes of Osama bin Laden.<br /><br />So, a nonfiction book, and especially a novel about the war, might best be situated at home, not in the smoking battlegrounds where the bombs explode. This war is all about political ideology that affects every aspect of American culture and economics. This war is not about WMDs, not about a brutal tryant, not about evil terrorists, and not about the security of our nation.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-72657843069743684372009-04-22T21:26:00.000-07:002009-04-23T20:27:25.986-07:00Soldiers Readapt to Civilian Life, Some Don'tUnlike any war the U.S. has waged, the urban, guerilla combat in Iraq is personal and challenges the soul’s endurance. Except for the Vietnam War, especially the later part, U.S. soldiers are faced with a more personal type of combat. An unidentifiable enemy walks around in public, indistinguishable from the civilians. Except for the Special Forces, U.S. soldiers are trained only for traditional warfare, not terrorism and insurgency.<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Moving freely anywhere, civilian insurgents can detonate a suicide bomb, shredding humans indiscriminately. In March this year, the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html/" target="blank">New York Times reported </a>how, even as U.S. soldiers begin to leave Iraq, suicide bombings increase, killing more than 33 in a single day. The bloody scenes sear the spirit of anyone witnessing the carnage. </div><div><br /></div><div><br />Insurgent civilians seem like regular people one day, exchanging cigarettes with a soldier like <a href="http://www.militarycity.com/valor/honor.html" target="”blank”">Army Cpl. Jason Pautsch</a>. The next day, the same friendly face can pull an AK47 and spray bullets into a Marine Unit where buddies <a href="http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/" target="”blank”">fall with nightmarish wounds</a>. Like a lightning bolt from nowhere, a roadside bomb can explode, taking life and limb.<br /><br /></div><div><br />Scenes of horror create the post traumatic stress syndrome that U.S. soldiers like <a href="http://www.sgtstryker.com/soldiers-and-post-traumatic-stress-disorder/" target="”blank”"> Sgt. Stryker</a> have to cope with when they return home after years of patrolling Iraqi neighborhoods filled with paranoia and constant fear for life.<br /><br />A soldier develops personal relationships with his battle buddies or with friendly civilians--alive one day and torn apart the next.<br /><br />One day an otherwise friendly civilian might appear out of nowhere working as a suicide bomber, forcing a well-intended Marine to make a split-second decision to shoot in self-defense. Mistakes happen in the strained, continuous, life-threatening situations. The extended missions exacerbate the stress. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/stop-loss_policy" target="blank">Stop-Loss</a> clause in a military service contract can hold a soldier in combat indefinitely.<br /><br />When the soldier returns home to America after surviving by any and all means, including shielding himself with intensified paranoia and tight nerves, he can’t resolve the gap between his newly regained civilian lifestyle and the adrenaline still racing through his veins. Sometimes he cannot slow down the synaptic overload in his mind and soul. Readjusting to a whole new and alien world seems impossible, a world that used to be familiar, now turned into another planet. He loses his grip and slips into the darkness.<br /><br />In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/us/30suicide.html?scp=6&sq=soldier%20suicide%20iraq%202009&st=cse" target="blank">2008 suicide rates of U.S. soldiers</a> from Iraq rose beyond the levels during the Vietnam War three decades ago.<br /><br />In the novel, <i>Mojave Winds</i>, Kris Klug is caught in this tough transition between dangerous and extended missions and finding his way in regular American daily life. As a portrait of the human condition, the novel is best positioned to capture the internal struggle of soldiers, many bearing the burden of deep invisible wounds.</div>Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-24564737297986097152009-04-14T20:12:00.000-07:002009-04-29T18:29:11.429-07:00Mojave Winds and A Sufi's Ghost Mentioned in The New York TimesEven if it is just a mention on The New York Times's Web site, it's still great to see that my novels are being referenced and noticed in some of the mainstream newspapers. <br /><br />You can find the discussion thread that brought up my novels <a href="http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/shock-and-awe-a-novel/">in The New York Times's blog.</a>: <br />http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/shock-and-awe-a-novel/<br /><br />Part of my own comments in this thread include the following. <br /><br />I began writing Mojave Winds in 2002 when the G W Bush administration began preparing the preemptive invasion of Iraq.<br /><br />Since then, I’ve been tracking the public’s interest in reading about the war and its politics in nonfiction and in fiction as well as in the movies.<br /><br />By doing this tracking, I’ve discovered that it’s own way to observe how public opinion has changed drastically over the last 7 years, from an almost hysterical reaction to the 9/11 attack to a much broader and deeper understanding of how the W administration had used the invasion for its own previously planned agenda. In a situation like this it has taken a good five years for the facts to move from nonfiction books into the area of public opinion.<br /><br />As of 2005, many movies had appeared: Rendition, Stop Lose, Valley of Ellah, Jarhead, The Kingdom, among others. Some of these enjoyed box office success. It seems that these movies helped in making the “general public” more aware of the war. Otherwise, it seems that, like Vietnam, the war was not in the forefront of the minds of the “average citizen” who is often concerned about how to pay the mortgage, rent, medical bills, and education.<br /><br />Fortunately, the American citizen did come around to understand that the right-wing extremists in the White House were taking the country down a bumpy road to the Dark Ages.<br /><br /><br />One of the points in the previous comments, in the New York Times blog postings, suggests that this war in Iraq is very different from anything the U.S. has engaged before.<br /><br />I believe that this is true for at least a couple of reasons. As mentioned, the demographics of the soldiers are now different and new in some ways and the politics behind the U.S. wars in the Middle East are motivated by relatively new incentives, although some historians see World Wars I and II as prompted at least partly by the much coveted petroleum (see The Epic Of Oil, Catalyst Of Conflict - New York Times January 1993).<br /><br />The U.S. has seldom ventured into preemptive war, and certainly not in any way like its preemptive bombing and invasion of Iraq where substantial evidence and controversy existed before the invasion. <br /><br />In the U.S. history, there have been false justifications for war, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, Vietnam—all justified by trumped up reasons of some alleged skirmish that riled the patriotic blood. Iraq is similar to these in many ways, but different in its politics of such a clearly defined and pre-documented political agenda as well as its overwhelming military advantage—not to mention an arrogant occupation of a country that so encouraged successful guerilla warfare.<br /><br />It’s the politics ( and religious ferver) that seem most intriguing in this war with Iraq. Its manipulation was blatant to many. Though the U.S. public opinion was clearly manipulated by a small cabal in the White House who used the 9/11 attack as the pretext for their agenda planned long before. This is what makes Iraq so unique, revealing how the American political system went awry.<br /><br />This affects how writers approach this war in novels.<br />As mentioned in previous comments, above, soldiers experiencing the war first hand would probably do best to write memoirs—a genre well suited for first-hand witness, such is the case for Jarhead by Swofford (the Desert Storm invasion) and later for Generation Kill by Wright (the current Operation Iraqi Freedom invasion).<br /><br />Although Swofford was a sniper (who later went to writing school) and Wright, an embedded journalist, they both depict just how jaded, cynical, and disillusioned the soldiers were for the most part. Unlike most any other war, the soldiers were aware of the crass Realpolitik behind these Iraqi wars, as security operations for the oil fields (especially since, during the same time, the U.S. could have taken leadership in initiating new, innovative industries for alternative energy). As portrayed in these war accounts, the modern U.S. volunteer soldier becomes aware of the crass politics behind their mission.<br /><br />On the other hand, the novel Catch 22 by Heller, focused more on the incompetency of the military bureaucracy which Heller had seen in the Korean operations after WWII, even though his story was placed in WWII.<br /><br />Given the political and corporate interests in the Iraq wars, the way novelists approach this subject will most likely be quite different from Hemmingway’s view of WWII, or Heller’s depiction of the Korean (vis à vis European) War. In any case, Jarhead and Generation Kill express very new sentiments about U.S. military adventures.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610299626054876320.post-12776699479497295482008-08-07T07:55:00.000-07:002008-08-12T20:56:04.348-07:00Church of Later Day Neocons<em>Fighting Guerrilla Warriors with Conventional Tactics All for the Sake of Godly Profits</em><br /><br />“War on terror” coins a <em>sacred phrase</em> in the Iraq crusade. Karl Rove, high priest of spin, led the neocons’ faithful choir through the doctrinal hymns, especially regarding Bush’s military mission. <br /><br />Now the Sanctified Church of Later Day Neocons has anointed John McCain to take the pulpit for the <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservative target=”_blank”> steadfast congregation</a>, a political party on a mission from God, bowing down to corporate avarice at the detriment of public interests. The neocon party promises to maintain stilted, stodgy status quo of old, slogging industries. Though, what we need these days is Yankee ingenuity, innovation, and invention--the heart of American entrepreneurism in government and in business. <br /> <br />Except for Secretary of State Rice, the ex-oil executive automaton, this special cabal of wealthy, white codgers has woven a web of myths so thick that everyone believes the country is divided between the red and the blue: the virtuous, righteous party versus the diabolical, liberal socialists. Behind the neocon marketing hype, the issues draw a real line between rich and the bleeding middle class and the economic policies that shove the poor deeper into debtor’s slavery while the wealthy reap the profits from the uneducated, gullible middle class. <br /><br />At least twenty percent of Americans still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. As many Americans also believe they pay fewer taxes than Europeans who enjoy high quality public healthcare and education through university level. <br /><br />I know firsthand by attending a German university. Otherwise, coming from a blue collar background in America, I never would have been able to afford an education. I lived and worked more than twenty years in Germany and France and paid fewer taxes than we do in America. I pursued the American dream where it was available. <br /><br />Considered an enlightened saint among the neocons, Milton Friedman claimed that unregulated industries operate most efficiently. Contrary to this twaddle, we have witnessed how unbridled Savings and Loan banks imploded under Bush Sr. in the early 90’s. Corporations can and will destroy themselves by greedy feeding frenzies as we watched in the scandals like Enron and Anderson Consulting. Lack of government intervention, a lack of political will and leadership in America generally allows this trend to continue. <br /><br />Once the Berlin Wall fell, hollow winds blew through the streets of Soviet Union’s communist ideals and gave the captains of American industry free reign to practice arrogant forms of unrestrained and turgid capitalism at the high costs of public interests. <br /><br />After disastrous Reaganomics were implemented, Bush Sr. became president, campaigning on a promise to reduce taxes which he later increased in a desperate attempt to reduce Reagan’s inflamed deficit, and pushed Friedman policies, <em>voodoo economics</em>, further, allowing certain industries to gorge on consumers’ savings accounts, wolves on meek lambs. Bush Sr. cooled the corporate feeding frenzy that turned into a blood bath by paying over $120 billion in public tax funds to bail out the Savings & Loan crisis in the early 1990’s. <br /><br />So, rather than maintain a Keynesian <em>mixed economy</em> in which government calms corporate passions for predatory profits, the neocon doctrine allows industries to devour gullible consumers until streets flow red with blood. Unimaginative industries, banking, healthcare insurance, and energy, resist innovation and change. The only way left for them to make profits is by praying on consumers' ignorance. Only then does government intervene by giving the status quo industries, which lack any innovation, a transfusion of tax payers’ money. <br /><br />America’s government has become a mere socialized emergency room for industries that overdose on the crack cocaine of greed. Tax payers now pay industries to cure them of their own addiction to larger and larger profits and executive salaries. <br /><br />As if ambitious to outdo dad, President Bush Jr. drove Milton Friedman’s free wheeling economic policies like a freight train on a downward spiraling track until it finally crashed into the limits of <a href=”http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/house_of_cards/7181/” target=”_blank”> melting consumer credit cards and fraudulent, bloated mortgages</a>. Bush Jr.’s administration will hand out hundreds of billions of tax dollars to subsidize the mismanagement of credit card and mortgage banks while their CEO’s carry their multimillion dollar paychecks to the bank, laughing all the way. Meanwhile middle class workers lose their homes at a neck breaking rate. <br /><br />In so far as incompetent politicians sell their souls to corporate contributions and voodoo economics and consequently mislead this country into destruction and mayhem, the guerrilla Islamist warriors, like Osama bin Laden, are accurate in assessing the US as corrupt and decadent. <br /> <br />McCain’s campaign promises continue the neoconservative holy crusade for the <a href=” http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/07/04/mcain_vietnam/index.html?source=newsletter” target=”_blank>Iraq War</a> which directly affects the economy. The differences between Obama and MacCain are blatantly clear. Whatever McCain says about the economic fiascos of the mortgage crisis, the credit card crisis, or the Iraq War, Obama has an opposite view and innovative solutions. <br /><br />The 2008 election is about diametrically opposing views between the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian” target=”_blank”>Keynesian</a> versus the Friedmaniac policies. In 2008 we also choose between the neocons’ imperial war to impose corporate turgid status quo over a sovereign nation for the sake of its oil reserves versus the innovative solutions in such industries as healthcare, banking, energy, and war.<br /> <br /><strong> Corporate Campaign Contributions – Industrial Domination</strong> <br /> <br />Tied to the <a href=”http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html” target=”_blank”>unparalleled power of the Israeli lobby</a> money and to the huge corporate <a href=”http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/thepoliticalsystem/a/industrybucks.htm” target=”_blank”>defense and energy contractors</a>, Bush and his chums have been operating only in terms of conventional warfare. Influenced by corporate campaign money, they only think in terms of corporate interests. This involves no bid contracts and the use of expensive, sophisticated weaponry that applies best to the warfare of one sovereign nation against another and not to guerilla warfare. <br /><br />In other words, the stodgy political church of Bush and McCain is less interested in armor to protect the individual soldiers on the ground, fighting house to house. That sort of activity represents social welfare to individual human beings, brave soldiers. Armor for body and Humvee hardly increases profit margins in comparison to a billion dollar B2 bomber. <br /> <br />Following Bush’s footsteps, McCain embraces this same agenda. If Bush says, “stay the course in Iraq,” McCain says, “stay there a hundred years.” If Bush says timetable to pull out, McCain dittos the Anointed Decider. McSame has developed his economic and war policies from his ties with <a href=”http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24844889/” target=”_blank”>big business lobbies</a> and not with the interest of the American people. Like Bush, McCain abides by unregulated big business as indoctrinated by <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman” target=”_blank”>Milton Friedman</a> since the Reagan years. <br /> <br />This is the reason why Bush invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation. “It’s just business,” as he would say, “nothin’ pers’nal.” He could have pointed his finger at any piece of fresh meat and the American people were eagerly drooling to revenge the 9/11 attack. <br /><br />The golden opportunity, <em>the casus belli,</em>a perfect justification for war arrived. The neocons knew exactly which war to wage, the low hanging fruit of the world’s second largest oil reserves. Despite many warnings of the 9/11 attack, W did nothing to restrain the well known Islamist guerrilla warriors, as indicated in his <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/august6.memo/" target="_blank">August 6, 2001 Presidential Brief</a>, which he chose to ignore. <br /><br />According to Ron Suskind's new book, <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93293353" target"_blank">Way of the World</a>, Bush chose to ignore and deny clear intelligence that Iraq had no connection with al-Qaida and no WMDs: <br /><blockquote>Then, in the fall of 2003, the White House decided that a letter should be fabricated, dated July 2001, from the Iraqi to Saddam Hussein establishing a link to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. "And the letter should as well say that Saddam Hussein has been actively buying yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help of al-Qaida," Suskind says.</blockquote><br /> <br />The neocons had long ago planned to knock off Saddam Hussein since the day he <a href=”http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/5873nation.htm” target=”_blank”>nationalized Iraqi oil</a>. They have well documented this fact. Take a look at <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century”>PNAC</a>. It’s always been about the oil and a drive for global dominance backed by a fanatical Judeo-Christian fundamentalism. We cannot act too surprised when former Fed Chairman Allen Greenspan explained as much in his biography after he left his cushy government job where he practiced the Milton Friedman rituals devoutly in his bathtub, enlightened by flickering candles. <br /> <br />Invading Iraq made great financial and political sense at least for Dubya and his Friedman disciples from Podhoretz to Falwell and Pat Robertson. Defense and petroleum contractors made boat loads of profits, thus fattening the coffers for Bush’s 2004 campaign. Beyond campaign money, the Bush family as well as members of his neocon church, including Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and so on—they own millions of dollars in stocks with defense contractors and petroleum companies such as the Carlyle Group and a long list of others. <br /><br /><a href=”http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/04/20060414-2.html” target=”_blank”>Cheney’s stock options</a> at Halliburton skyrocketed, once the company landed those no-bid billion dollar contracts. Unless you’ve read up on this subject, you wouldn’t recognize the names of these companies, except for maybe the ones that advertise regularly on TV like Exxon, Boeing, Lockhead… By paying for multi-million dollar ads, they were able to stifle freedom of media journalism for at least as long as it took to get Neil Cavuto, comedian Bill O’Reilly, and Wolf Blitzer a whoring chance to sway public opinion to wage an imperial, conventional war against a loosely organized network of guerrilla fundamentalists. <br /> <br /><strong> Waging Conventional War Is Good for Re-elections</strong> <br /> <br />Bush desperately needed to increase his plummeting popularity score after the Supreme Court appointed him to the presidency by overturning the 2001 election. He could only win a second term in office if he initiated a major war against a well defined country. Iraq was a ripe target with an army impoverished by decades of sanctions. US history shows that no president has lost a second term election after declaring a war in the first term. Now the same scenario plays out for opportunist, citizen McCain who playfully sings his own song, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” <br /> <br />This is how the American <a href=” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-industrial_complex” target=”_blank”>industrial military complex</a> works. It’s become a cookie cutter process for presidents since the Mexican American War when the <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Thornton+Skirmish&btnG=Search” target=”_blank”>Thornton Skirmish</a> arose between the U.S. and Mexican militaries, handing President Polk a justification of war against Mexico in 1846. The sinking of the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_American_War” target=”_blank”><em>USS Maine</em> </a> gave Teddy Roosevelt a trumped up reason for the Spanish American War just as the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident“ target=”_blank”>Tokin incident</a>helped justify the Vietnam War. <br /> <br />This is how the American industrial military complex has operated at least since the Mexican American War (1846). President Eisenhower knew this and warned us about it. However, at the slightest incident, the unschooled masses repeatedly jump on the bandwagon for nationalistic pride, all too willing to take a blind patriotic ride to hell while all the way handing the pillaged profits to the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)“ target=”_blank”>robber barons</a> of war. Is there a cure for the American middle class’s credulity? <br /><br />Well, everyone could turn off the boob tube and read some books other than the Bible. In France and Germany, they’ve developed a remedy to some extent. It’s called a damn good secular public education system, one that does not muddle science and reason with religious poppycock like creationism, End Days, and all the hooey about holy lands. <br /> <br /><strong> Guerrilla Warriors, Not Iraqi Armies</strong> <br /> <br />There’s a little problem, though. The groups--groups plural--that perpetrate terrorist activities in the name of Allah are non-conventional warriors. They harbor loyalty to no sovereign nation but to a fundamentalist creed similar to White Supremists or the 700 Club. The US military could never bomb the terrorist groups involved in attacking US and European cities. The US could never invade any one country and expect its leaders to surrender and end the “war on terrorism.” <br /> <br />If attacking any main source of the trouble makers would solve the problem, then they would have to bomb Saudi Arabia because 15 of the 19 terrorists were born, raised, and indoctrinated there. The Devine Decider didn’t invade Saudi Arabia for the simple reason that, unlike Saddam Hussein, the royal family of Saud are long term allies and reliable petroleum suppliers since Franklin Roosevelt made the deal with King Saud in 1945, essentially saying, “We’ll support and protect your tyrannical monarchy so long as you deliver the crude.” It seemed like a good deal at the time, but times change. <br /><br />The American industrial military complex makes less money in the labor intensive guerrilla wars than they do in wars that require sophisticated, manufactured weaponry. It’s basic business strategy to maintain high profits—to hell with the reasons or the outcomes of the war. Defense contractors earn much smaller profits in guerrilla warfare which requires labor intensive work in urban settings with ears to the ground. In his books, Robert Baer makes this a central argument. Using bombers, sophisticated equipment, missiles,...it's the only thing that makes business sense.<br /> <br />The guerrilla war we face has no one leader, no one country, no standing army. Our enemies in this so-called war on terrorism do not wear uniforms. They are guerrilla warriors who use any means possible to harm their enemies. They use bombs, booby traps, and hijacked airliners because they have neither conventional weapons nor armies. They made this point abundantly clear when they bombed the World Trade Center’s basement in 1993, not to mention earlier bombings of American assets in many places like Tanzania and the Congo. <br /><br />Any one with a pulse could understand this as early as 1983, when a terrorist cell blew up the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing” target=”_blank”>US Marine barracks in Lebanon</a>. Likewise most intelligence agents operating in the Middle East knew that a persistent, organized movement of Islamist guerrilla fighters bombed the <em>U.S.S. Cole</em> in 2000. In his many books on the subject Robert Baer describes how he tracked militant Islamists. They had been a well known enemy decades before 9/11/2001.<br /><br />Bush Jr. would have us believe that these guerrilla warriors hate America and its freedom. He never bothers to consider the simple economic situation in which only the small <em>royal</em> families control the opulent oil wealth in most Arab countries and they do not give a fig to diversify their own economies and develop their own people. <br /><br />Unemployment (over 35% in Saudi Arabia) and poverty enrage Muslims. Fanatical anti-American religious training helps to set an unemployed, hungry, angry, idle man down a path to murder and mayhem, as was the case for Mohammed Atta and others. Most any religious group provides this sort of narrow education. Just watch Pat Robertson on his evangelical TV show, the 700 Club, or visit one of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Universities to witness how the later day church of neocons indoctrinate our own credulous youth. <br /><br />Among Bush’s many mutating reasons for invading Iraq, he finally claimed that it was America’s moral duty to create a democracy throughout the Middle East. For a year or two around 2003, he had most American yahoos believing this. It is another part of the neocon catechism. <br /><br />Another one of Friedman’s mind boggling theories is that once a country’s economy begins to operate in a capitalistic fashion, it will inevitably become a democracy. Likewise, so the theory goes, if a country becomes democratic, it naturally seeks to implement a liberal capitalism. Neither has proven true in the real world. As a totalitarian regime, China thrives on capitalism. We buy products from totalitarian capitalist China because their regime encourages, nay, enforces, sweatshop labor. It's why US corporations outsource American jobs; labor is cheaper in authoritarian regimes. <br /><br />Contrary to Pope Friedman’s crack-pot ideas, once given the vote for a democratic government, several countries have recently voted against democracy in favor of theocracy, Islamist regimes like Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or President Gull in Turkey who has an Islamist background. Like the Catholic dominated politics in most of South America, many Islamic countries are theocracies. <br /><br />Given the theocratic proclivities of President Bush, he too would like to see America governed by some inerrant, one and only Biblical interpretation and not by its Constitution. "We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God," <em>--As quoted in <a href=” http://www.beliefnet.com” target=”_blank”>Understanding the President and his God</a></em><br /><br />Guerrilla warfare is messy and much more difficult to win than invading a crumbling nation. For this reason it never benefits individuals like Bush who intend to expand their personal, political, and financial success at the detriment of national security and economic stability. <br /><br />As we learned in our own War of Independence and, likewise in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare is extremely messy, costly, and bloody. Contrary to Rumsfeld’s infamous statement that “democracy is messy,” it is the insurgency and the guerrilla fighters that clog the wheels of industry. The Russians learned this when they invaded Afghanistan and it cost them the collapse of their already frail economy. And these schmoes would have us believe that Reagan caused the fall of the Soviet Union.Mark Biskeborn Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08377798595365599881noreply@blogger.com2