Author Archives: xraymike79

America’s Two-Headed Corporate Hydra Monster of Politics & the Abandonment of the People

16 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jeffrey Sachs’ op ed piece entitled “America Has Lost the battle Over Government” in the Financial Times explains how the budget plans of our two corporate candidate stooges are strikingly similar and offer no real choice for the American citizen. With the modern-day instruments of mass media manipulation being the most sophisticated tool for mind control in the history of man, you are made to think that the current election is an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil, but the American’s fate of joblessness, dwindling social assistance programs, a permanently growing underclass, and the slide into an oligarchic Third World country has already been written in stone by the transnational capitalist forces and its corporate state. Crime will surely go up, lifespan expectancy will go down for the underclass, and the infrastructure of the nation will continue its trajectory into dilapidation and decay. Sacrificing your body in the Empire’s foreign resource wars and geopolitical games will be one of the only jobs available for our debt-ridden youth:

…Mr Ryan’s plan calls for federal revenues of 18.4 per cent of gross domestic product in 2016 and 18.5 per cent in 2020 (though his lower tax rates would probably put those targets out of reach). His budget outlays come in at 19.7 per cent and 19.5 per cent in 2016 and 2020, respectively. Of the total outlays in 2016, Mr Ryan targets “discretionary” programmes at 5.9 per cent of GDP; social security, 5 per cent; Medicare, 3.2 per cent; other mandatory spending, 3.7 per cent; and interest payments, 1.9 per cent.

Now consider Mr Obama’s budget unveiled in February. Federal revenues are targeted at 19.1 per cent of GDP in 2016 and 19.7 per cent of GDP in 2020, only about 1 percentage point above Mr Ryan’s revenue targets. In Mr Obama’s 2016 budget targets, discretionary spending is set at 5.9 per cent of GDP; social security, 5 per cent; Medicare, 3.2 per cent; other mandatory spending, 5.8 per cent; and interest payments, 2.5 per cent.

In fact, Mr Obama’s overall discretionary spending targets are essentially the same as Mr Ryan’s. Whether Mr Obama or Mr Romney wins, the “non-security” discretionary budget – for education, job skills, infrastructure, science and technology, space, environmental protection, alternative energy and climate change adaptation – is on the chopping block. Mr Obama’s budget would shrink non-security discretionary programmes from an already insufficient 3.1 per cent of GDP in 2011 to 1.8 per cent in 2020. That is the “liberal” alternative.

In bemoaning Mr Obama’s budget, I do not mean to equate it with Mr Ryan’s. Mr Ryan’s budget is nothing short of heartless in the face of the dire crisis facing America’s poor. It is also reckless, guaranteed to leave millions of children without the quality of education and skills they will need as adults. Yet the sad truth is that the Democrats offer no progressive alternative. Both parties are accomplices to the premeditated asphyxiation of the state. Viewed from an international perspective, the constricted range of the US fiscal debate is striking. Total US government revenues (combining federal, state and local governments) in 2011 came in at about 32 per cent of GDP. This compares with an average of 44 per cent in the EU and 50 per cent in northern Europe.

Many Americans will say that they are dodging the European curse by keeping taxation so low but they should look again. Northern Europe (Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) gets great value for its tax revenues: lower budget deficits, lower unemployment rates, lower public debt-to-GDP ratios, lower poverty rates, greater social mobility, better job training, longer life expectancy, lower greenhouse gas emissions, higher reported life satisfaction and greater macroeconomic stability.

America’s two political parties depend on wealthy contributors to finance their presidential campaigns. These donors want and expect their taxes to stay low. As a result, social divisions, broken infrastructure, laggard educational attainments, high carbon emissions and chronic budget deficits are likely to continue no matter who is elected, even though the public supports higher taxes on corporations and the rich…

Chris Hedges was back in court over the government’s appeal of Judge Forrest’s earlier injunction of the NDAA. As a matter of fact, the government has refused to comply with the injunction. Hedges states he and the other plaintiffs “will most likely have to continue this fight in an appellate court and perhaps the Supreme Court.” He also notes that no matter the results of the rigged U.S. elections, no meaningful change will come to the deteriorating lives of ordinary Americans:

…The corporate state has convinced the masses, in essence, to clamor for their own enslavement. There is, in reality, no daylight between Mitt Romney and Obama about the inner workings of the corporate state. They each support this section within the NDAA and the widespread extinguishing of civil liberties. They each will continue to funnel hundreds of billions of wasted dollars to defense contractors, intelligence agencies and the military. They each intend to let Wall Street loot the U.S. Treasury with impunity. Neither will lift a finger to help the long-term unemployed and underemployed, those losing their homes to foreclosures or bank repossessions, those filing for bankruptcy because of medical bills or college students burdened by crippling debt. Listen to the anguished cries of partisans on either side of the election divide and you would think this was a battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. You would think voting in the rigged political theater of the corporate state actually makes a difference. The charade of junk politics is there not to offer a choice but to divert the crowd while our corporate masters move relentlessly forward, unimpeded by either party, to turn all dissent into a crime…

A lot of Americans buy into this “cult of individualism” and anti-government sentiment which the elites of the corporate state artfully peddle in order to dismantle any remnants of a functioning government that might serve the common good of its citizenry. In this way, the corporate state has convinced the masses to cheer the destruction of government and its beneficial roles. But of course we cannot call our lobbyist-infested, corporate-controlled government an actual representation of the people’s interests. Just as our two-partied presidential election is an orchestrated illusion of democracy, so is the false dichotomy of government and corporations which are merely separated by a revolving door. The government has become, for the most part, a tool for wealth extraction by multinational corporations. During a period of multiple civilization-ending crises when leadership is in dire need, the degeneration of government from a socially beneficial entity into a puppet of Wall Street’s rapacious greed is the greatest tragedy of our time.

Last Man Scrambling

14 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If Ayn Rand was alive today, she would believe that climate change was a conspiracy theory.

I want to preface this post by saying I don’t endorse either Wall Street stooge of our political system’s two-headed corporate hydra monster. The Democratic party fell sway to Big Money a long time ago. See ‘Death of the Liberal Class‘ by Chris Hedges. But I do want to focus on the party that doesn’t mince words or even pretend (at least not very well for those who read) to represent the greater good of society. The primary ideology of the Republicans (and faux Democrats) is neoliberal capitalism whose tenets are laid out here. If there ever was a time when ‘the greater good’ should be our primary objective, the time is now. We are facing an environmental crisis, financial crisis, economic system crisis, food crisis, energy crisis, wealth disparity crisis, etc. Oh, I should have mentioned we’re also facing the possible probable extinction of our own species. But the modus operandi that the our leaders rulers are following is not to solve any of the civilization-ending crises, but to do what Richard Heinberg described as the “Last Man Standing” strategy:

I thought that world leaders would want to keep their nations from collapsing. They must be working hard to prevent currency collapse, financial system collapse, food system collapse, social collapse, environmental collapse, and the onset of general, overwhelming misery—right? But no, that’s not what the evidence suggests. Increasingly I am forced to conclude that the object of the game that world leaders are actually playing is not to avoid collapse; it’s simply to postpone it a while so as to be the last nation to go down, so yours can have the chance to pick the others’ carcasses before it meets the same fate.

The elite 1% are playing a similar game against the 99% which I call “The Last Man Scrambling”. Paul Rosenberg’s latest essay discusses a 2006 book by Yale University political scientist Jacob S. Hacker who explains how the 99% are being financially eaten alive by what is termed the “risk-shift” – the systematic shifting of risk from large institutions onto the backs of citizens, including the most vulnerable among us, under the neoliberal rhetoric of “individuals taking personal responsibility”:

…The figures Hacker cited were staggering. First, regarding basic economic security: Personal bankruptcies increased from 300,000 in 1980 to 2 million in 2005 – a 567 per cent increase. The chance that an average American’s income will drop 50 per cent or more over a two-year period increased from 7 per cent in the 1970s to 17 per cent in 2002 – a 143 per cent increase. Long-term unemployment (more than 6 months) at the peak of the business cycle is triple what it was in the 1960s.

Second, regarding health security: The number of Americans without health insurance was 46.6 million, up from about 24 million in 1980. The decline was entirely due to cuts in employer-provided health coverage. Worse still, over 80 million Americans lack health insurance over some time during a two-year period.

Third, regarding retirement security: The percentage of large and medium-sized corporations offering traditional “defined-benefit” pensions, with a guaranteed monthly benefit for life, fell from more than 80 per cent in 1980 to less than a third in 2006. And 401(k)s that replaced them? There’s a reason folks call them 201(k)s now.

Fourth, the burden was particularly hard on families with children, whom conservatives claim to care about most. Their bankruptcy rates are twice that of childless couples.

These are just a few of the frightening figures Hacker cited, and in every case, he argued, the basic cause was the same: risk had been systematically shifted from large institutions most capable of handling it onto the shoulders of the most vulnerable. This was largely a result of a rhetoric of “personal responsibility”, but what was actually being shifted was not responsibility, but risk.

Rosenberg then ties this in with what Romney/Ryan have planned for the American plebs:

So what does all that have to do with Paul Ryan? Simple: Ryan’s infamous budget plan has many well-known problems with it, but it would also vastly intensify the Great Risk Shift, as Democratic strategist Mark Schmitt cogently pointed out in April 2011 (“The Ryan Plan: The Biggest Risk Shift Ever“).

“It’s not just that Ryan slashes spending,” Schmitt wrote, “he places the burden of risk on American families’ shoulders.” That’s precisely what the Great Risk Shift has done step-by-step over the past 30 years.  With the Ryan plan, the process would be dramatically accelerated.

In one concise paragraph, Schmitt summarised Hacker’s point about the true value and function of the welfare state that America’s elites have been gradually dismantling since the 1970s:

The achievement of the New Deal and the Great Society was not primarily in providing benefits to the poor and the old, although that’s often how both liberals and conservatives talk about it now. What those programmes did best was to reduce risks for individuals by sharing them across society. Whether it was health insurance through Medicare and Medicaid, insurance against poverty in old age through Social Security, federal mortgage insurance that made homeownership possible, or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that enabled people to save for the future with confidence, when government absorbed and shared some of the risks of life, individuals were able to take chances and make the most of their potential.

And, in contrast, he noted: 

Today, though, the only risks we’re sharing are the wrong ones: Wealthy investors are protected by real or implicit guarantees such as “too big to fail,” while the risks that should be shared, through social insurance, are instead privatised – that is, pushed down the line onto us as individuals.

So that’s what you call “The Last Man Scrambling” –for a livable-wage job, for affordable health care, for food on the table… Forget retirement; most will now die with their working boots on. And all this occurs while corporate profits soar to their highest level since WWII and the corporate tax burden sinks to its lowest level...

The Political Circus and the Approaching Post-Human Era

13 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Here is a nice little skewering of King Romney by Cliff Schecter entitled Mitt Romney: The aristocrat. Some excerpts:

…if you knew you were running for president, wouldn’t you perhaps spend at least five years before running making your taxes look as clean as a whistle? I’m saying no Grand Caymans, no Switzerland, no stashing bullion in the cargo bay of Curiosity to reach the low-tax surface of Mars (ok, one of these might be an exaggeration).

Not Romney, though. He apparently had to use every manoeuvre known to man and man’s most deceitful accountant to ensure he paid low-to-no taxes. So how has he handled the fallout? Stonewalling, uncomfortable denials, and lashing out at those who attack him for his hidden returns, such as Senator Harry Reid – thereby keeping the whole story in the news that much longer (genius!).

He’s even got porn star Jenna Jameson saying she is going to vote for him because “when you’re rich, you want a Republican in office.” (Of course, other porn actors interviewed by The Daily Beast are pro-Obama, showing that even in the world of X-rated entertainment, Mitt can find a way to divide the top 1 per cent from everyone else)…

Amazingly, if you look at the polls, a large percentage of American’s(aka the clueless, MSM spoon-fed plebs) would still vote for someone who is part of the cosseted 0.001% responsible for hiding 20 to 30 trillion in off-shore tax havens and who boldly regurgitate the lie that corporations in America have the highest tax rate in the world (the nominal rate is meaningless; it’s the effective rate produced from all the tax loopholes that counts). But as they say, the propaganda-ridden minds of the American public are mere putty in the hands of the corporate-owned media machine. Mind you, I know there is no real measurable difference between Obama and Romney when it comes to our self-inflicted trajectory toward a post-human era, but voting for Romney, a financier of the criminal class on Wall Street, takes ‘voting against your own interests’ to a whole new level. I mean this guy financed Bain Capital with blood money from death squad oligarchs in South America. I understand the utter failure Obama has been for the masses who bought into the “Hope” slogan, but voting for King Romney is like saying, “I give up; please rape me and then throw me to the lions.”

In a comment section of Schecter’s piece, a reader sumarizes perfectly what King Romney is about:

Let us focus that the issue is not Rommey or the VP RP, the issue is what is behind Rommey. Rommey is the representative of global capitalism; he is not interested in the American people as a nation, but as consumers; for him the solvency of the middle class is of no importance. It is the maintenance of corporate America and global capital that matters for him. He advocates trickle down economics and the emancipation of corporations over people. [In] the end Rommey, like any other warmonger, will use war [as] an economic incentive.

– ’nuff said. So how are the American plebs doing? For starters, a recent study found that nearly half the population in the U.S. dies penniless and dependent on Social Security. Basically we are now a nation of the grotesquely wealthy, the ‘just-getting-by’, and the crumb scrapers. The ‘just-getting-by’ segment is always in danger of falling into the ranks of the crumb scrapers. And the elite 1%, as we have discussed in prior posts, have built up a security and surveillance state as well as the prison industrial complex in order to deal with those who have any funny ideas of changing that status quo.

…now back to our two corporate stooges who are vying for the coveted PR position of the corporatocracy. Matt Taibbi has a new article out which shows how our tax system favors the wealthy and how Big Money from Wall Street perverts our political system:

…We’ve known for seven months now, for instance, that Romney paid $3 million in federal taxes in 2010 on $21.7 million in taxable revenue, an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent. Which, as most people know, is less than half the rate most people pay on their income tax.

When Romney released these numbers, he said they were “entirely legal and fair,” and added, “I’m proud of the fact that I pay a lot of taxes.”

The Romney tax returns are a prime example of our increasingly two-tiered bureaucratic system, in which there is one set of rules for poor and middle-class people, and another set of rules for people like Mitt Romney. …

<snip>

In Mitt’s case, the money you and I make to support ourselves is called income and is taxed up to 35 percent, but the money Mitt makes raiding companies with borrowed money and extracting draconian management fees from captive companies that have no choice but to pay them is called “Carried Interest,” and taxed at a top rate of 15%.

The ostensible excuse for this outrageous difference is based upon a built-in cultural value judgment, which says that the work Mitt Romney does raiding companies with borrowed money is more valuable than the work ordinary people do laying asphalt or teaching autistic children. Here’s what one private equity spokesperson said by way of explanation for this difference:

Steve Judge, the president of the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, a trade group for private equity funds, said carried interest is a way to reward risk takers in a way that tax havens do not. “They don’t have the purpose of incentivizing risk taking,” Judge said. “That makes it inappropriate to blend carried interest with them.”

So the carried interest tax break is a way to “incentivize” the kind of work Mitt Romney does. One wonders then if the relatively higher tax rates paid by teachers and librarians and cops is … what? A disincentive? Anyway, it’s this skewed set of obligations that Mitt Romney thinks is “fair.”

The Obama administration, if it wanted to, could make a lot of hay over this. It could say, “Mitt Romney doesn’t want to release his tax returns for years and years during the last decade. But the years for which he did release returns, he paid a rate that’s less than half of what most ordinary American professionals make – and he thinks that’s ‘fair.’”

Now, Obama has gone after Mitt’s tax returns – a little. He’s released a few ads here and there, including one called “Makes You Wonder” that called Mitt’s use of carried interest in his tax return a “trick,” a semantic move for which Obama was criticized, since it was actually nothing of the sort. Mitt Romney’s ability to pay a top rate of 15% for his work was no trick at all but a fully-legal expression of the values of our current political system, a system, again, that Mitt Romney is “proud of” and thinks is “fair.”

The reason the Obama administration hasn’t gone after this aggressively is probably the same reason it hasn’t fought harder to repeal that carried interest tax break (which Obama incidentally promised to do four years ago), and the same reason that everyone from Corey Booker to Bill Clinton has urged Obama to lay off the theme of private equity thuggery in his campaign against Romney. Big-time politicians are still afraid to explain to the American people how exactly it is that many Wall Street firms make their money, because they’re afraid to lose access to the crumbs those firms sometimes toss their way.

In the case of Romney, what we’ve mostly heard is that he’s a turnover specialist who sometimes creates jobs and sometimes eliminates them – a kind of ideologically-neutral efficiency consultant who takes a cut when poorly-run companies cut out the fat. The Obama ads about Bain have been emotionally effective, but they’re still frustratingly vague about the actual mechanics of these takeovers. We learn from these ads that a bunch of rich guys took over plants and fired workers, but what we don’t learn is how companies like Bain raise the money for those takeovers, why the plants subsequently become cash-poor, how this industry works generally, and not just at Bain.

In fact the takeover method espoused by Bain and many other private equity firms is a lot closer to the Tony Soprano-takes-over-Davey-Scatino’s-sporting-goods-store “Bust Out” model (and we’ll be getting into this more in the magazine in upcoming weeks) than it is to anything like legitimate consulting.

Barack Obama is one of the few politicians with the communication skills to explain this to middle America, but he’s refusing to go there, probably because he’s still hoping for a post-election rapprochement with Wall Street. He wants to go after Bain Capital, but not private equity in general; he wants to go after Mitt Romney’s missing tax returns, but not the tax returns of all people like Mitt Romney.

So there you have it. Both sock-puppet politicians continue to protect the monied interests, skirt the real issues, and bamboozle the sheeple. But as I said, in a post-human era of the not-too-distant future, you can’t get too riled up about such trivialities.

Catastrophic Planetary Tipping Points

13 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

“Did you feel you were tricked by the future you picked?” ~ Peter Gabriel

Another Version of the Truth

I was set to write a post about gross inequality, but I had a dream nightmare last night about the end of the world as we humans know it. Remember the monkey wrench I wrote about recently? If the pervasive mindset amongst our leaders and society at large is that we can continue growing the economy, using the environment as a sink for our waste, and that our burning of the planet’s fossil fuels has no effect on the thin atmospheric skin covering the earth, all other issues of social injustice become meaningless. All the magnificent art, music, scientific breakthroughs, and intellectual writings of our species will be swept away like dust mites before a broom. With the pick of Paul Ryan as VP, you can disregard what King Romney, aka Mr. etch-a-sketch, said about climate change. The interdependence of industrial civilization with fossil fuels is an unbreakable bond that overrides all other human concerns including the very hospitableness of the planet for our species. 

Humans are now burning more than 1 million tons of coal, oil, and natural gas every hour.

 at his blog Brane Space has just posted an essay which should give you pause for what havoc we are unleashing by our insatiable appetite for the carbon energy we dig up and suck out of the Earth. In addition to the references cited by Copernicus, I want to mention an article written a couple of years ago in the online German publication of Die Welt which reported on the discussions at a scientific conference in Aussois, France concerning the planet Venus. They determined that the hellish planet of Venus was much more similar to Earth than previously thought. Their conclusions were based on high-tech measurements and analysis from the European Venus Express, launched in 2005.

Venus in the past may have been very similar to Earth – with oceans – and even life. Then the climate changed, and the planet turned into red-hot desolation.

…it is a prime example of a runaway greenhouse effect that may have started in a way that is feared to be now taking place on Earth.

…

Due to its thick cloud cover, only 20% of the solar energy reaches the planet’s surface. This 20%, however, cannot be radiated back into space because of Venus’s dense atmosphere, and thus leads to enormous heating of the planet.

…The manmade pollution of the Earth’s  atmosphere – warns a majority of climatologists – could also lead to a runaway situation whose final result would be what we have on Venus today.

Scientists have been studying other planets like Venus, Mars and Jupiter for some time now and have come to the overall conclusion that huge consequences for a planet’s climate from feedbacks like the greenhouse effect is “not a mere speculative theory. It was an observation of real events.” Man’s hubris and power of self-deception know no bounds. The Earth cannot be shoehorned into man’s fabricated economy of endless growth and infinite money printing. The crutches of religion and technology will quickly wither when we are faced with catastrophic planetary tipping points.

As Copernicus observes in his latest post How Did a Once ‘Good’ Planet Go Bad?:

It is clear that learning the object lesson of what happened to our neighbor planet can have mighty consequences to what may befall our own (though admittedly not from the same causes)….Perhaps we need to pay much more attention to our own planet and especially its carbon load and carbon footprint made by each of us, lest we hasten our path to becoming another Venus. Why do good planets go bad? Maybe because natural conditions incite the bad effects in the first place, or…..maybe a resident species aids and abets the natural causes by consuming too much of the wrong form of energy!

King Romney: Stuck in Cognitive Dissonance

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Peak Oil

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

I did not waste my time reading King Romney’s 2010 book No Apology; The Case for American Greatness, but someone who did sacrifice some eyesight to it has some interesting observations which I’ll comment on. Romney may be the only Presidential candidate to explicitly acknowledge in writing the fact of peak oil:

Many analysts predict that the world’s production of oil will peak in the next ten to twenty years, but oil expert Matt Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, presents a compelling case that Middle Eastern oil production may have already reached its peak.  Simmons bases his contention on his investigation into the highly secretive matter of the level of reserves in the Saudi oil fields. But whether the peak is already past or will be reached within a few years, world oil supply will decline at some point, and no one predicts a corresponding decline in demand. If we want America to remain strong and wish to ensure that future generations have secure and prosperous lives, we must consider our current energy policies in the light of how these policies will affect our grandchildren. (pg 233)

Romney also acknowledges climate change, but then enunciates the contradiction the vast majority of the population cling to, which is the notion that we can limit GHG within our fossil-fuel based industrial civilization while maintaining economic growth and business as usual. This fantasy will never be, even if we were able to magically enlarge the planet and its resource base in order to accommodate more growth. So in the end, Romney is not a true Peak Oiler. His “energy policies” ultimately involve the ubiquitous growth imperative:

“It’s impossible not to take a look at our current energy policies without considering the question of climate change.  I believe that climate change is occurring – the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore.  I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor.” (pg 227)

Romney hedges this statement in the next paragraph by saying he is “uncertain how much of the warming is attributable to man and how much is attributable to factors out of our control.” Three pages later, Mitt concludes his discussion of climate change saying that “Internationally, we should work to limit the increase in emissions in global green house gases, but in doing so, we shouldn’t put ourselves in a disadvantageous economic position that penalizes American jobs and economic growth.”  (pg 330)

Isn’t it amazing that a person who may be the next President (even though it is just a PR position for the corporatocracy) can talk about the reality of peak oil while still mouthing the imperatives of economic growth? How long will this cognitive dissonance hold out? I give it no more than a decade, at the most, if our financial system manages to be kept propped up for that long. For to finally come to grips with the finiteness of the earth and its resources and the illusoriness of the economic growth dictate is to admit that the “American way of life” never was “non-negotiable.”

They Hate Us for Our (Fictitious) Freedoms???

11 Saturday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I noticed today that our Department of (In)Justice will allow the crimes of their corporate masters, i.e. Goldman Sachs, to stand. The Department of (In)Justice has bigger fish to fry like the poor guy in this recent story:

A protester belonging to an Occupy Wall Street group in rural Pennsylvania is being charged with felony attempted bank robbery and a terrorism-related charge for holding signs up during a demonstration at a local Wells Fargo branch.

David C. Gorczynski, 22, was charged on Tuesday with attempted bank robbery and terroristic threatening, both felonies, as well as one misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. Police detained him after he walked into an Easton, PA Wells Fargo branch with a sign that read “You’re being robbed” and another that said “Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob a country.”

Gorczynski was at the Wells Fargo bank as part of a demonstration led by Occupy Easton, the small Pennsylvania town’s OWS offshoot…

“He is not the criminal. If the police were truly there to protect and serve the taxpayers, the banksters would be arrested and this man would be called a hero,” the Occupy Easton group responds on Facebook.

Gorczynski was released on $10,000 bond after a defense and bail fund established online helped bring in enough money to buy his freedom after his arrest.

Remember what little man Bush said: “They hate us for our freedoms.” So Bush, the Neocons, and the Faux Democrats proceeded to dismantle the very freedoms that were purported to be the reason for why the terrorists hated us. We should be thankful our dear leaders were wise enough to know how to get at the root of the problem, our freedoms, in order to prevent further animosity toward America.

So as to not incur the wrath of future terrorist attacks, our every movement, thought, and expressed opinion must be tracked to ensure we are not exercising any freedoms believed to be so inflammatory to the terrorists amongst us:

…So what is TrapWire, and why has its leak created such a commotion? According to reporting at RT, TrapWire is a detailed surveillance system that “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw[s] patterns, and do[es] threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” Anything suspect gets input into the system to be “analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.”

According to the article, this system has been secretly installed in most major cities and around landmarks across the United States, in Canada, and in the UK. Most local police forces are installing their own monitoring software that works in conjunction with TrapWire. Private properties, including casinos, are now signing up to TrapWire. Essentially, it sounds like Big Brother identifying you, watching you, assessing your every move for abnormalities, then indexing your behavior.

…

Last year, while the occupy movement peacefully protested in cities across the country, a new-militarized police force presented itself, and moved to brutalize protesters exercising their rights to freedom of speech and assembly. It was as if these long-cherished American values had suddenly become viewed by our government as threats to its power. The scores of video footage capturing these egregious acts of brutality — from city to city, in a seemingly coordinated effort — resemble scenes carried out in faraway lands by despotic regimes.

Here is the reality about freedom: you may have a bill of rights, but if you are brutalized anytime you attempt to exercise those rights, you eventually become intimidated from ever doing so. And that appears to be the new order in America.

The brutality against occupy protesters became such an issue for human rights groups, as well as media groups whose reporters were being assaulted (including NY Times, The Associated Press, The New York Post, The Daily News, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones & Company, etc.), that even the U.N. felt compelled to intervene. Two U.N. human rights envoys petitioned the Obama Administration to “protect Occupy protesters against excessive force by law enforcement officials.” The White House completely ignored their petition, and did absolutely nothing to reign in, much less condemn, the brutality.

Legal experts from NYU and Fordham University filed complaints with the NYPD, the U.S. Department of Justice and the United Nations, accompanied by a 132 page report entitled Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street. The document “catalogs 130 specific alleged incidents of excessive police force, and hundreds of additional violations, including unjustified arrests, abuse of journalists, unlawful closure of sidewalks and parks to protesters, and pervasive surveillance of peaceful activists.” This document barely scratches the surface, since its scope is limited just to the police response in NYC. The group plans to release similar publications for Boston, Charlotte, Oakland, and San Francisco.

For those of you who believe that our nation’s dramatic shift towards a police-state is justifiable, in light of 9-11, you should know that nearly every police-state throughout history became so under the guise of national security threats. Most despotic regimes faced real, perceived, or sometimes manufactured threats to their national security. And most of them could point historians back to their own 9-11-like ‘turning point’.

For example, Adolph Hitler would surely point historians to the burning of the Reichstag building on February 27, 1933 as Germany’s ‘turning point’. He blamed the arson on the Communists (Note: some prominent historians believed the Nazis themselves were responsible for the arson). But regardless of who actually burned Reichstag, the Nazis capitalized on that crucial moment in a way that would forever change the course of history.

They used the shock and fear generated by that event as justification for the Reichstag Fire Decree. This new law suspended basic rights of all Germans and allowed detention without trial. Sound familiar? That was Hitler’s very first step in consolidating his power, and transforming Germany into a despotic regime.

A government shifting towards despotism always works to capitalize on a nation’s fear. It uses that fear as the impetus to strip its citizens of their inalienable rights. And unfortunately, once those rights have been fleeced, it often takes a full-scale revolution or war just to restore them.

America, land of the free feeble and home of the brave bamboozled…

Climate Chaos: The Monkey Wrench that Unravels Everything

11 Saturday Aug 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,


“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The water-energy-food nexus is an interlocking problem. For example, biofuel production takes land and water away from food production. Besides the contamination to water reservoirs, the process of hydrofracking and tar sands utilizes massive amounts of water which could otherwise be saved for farming:

Oil sands extraction uses significant amounts of water (2-4.5 barrels per barrel of oil produced), which ends up in toxic tailings lagoons that have never been successfully reclaimed. An analysis using industry data estimated that these lagoons already leak over a billion gallons of contaminated water into the environment each year.
– source

Hydrofracking injects large volumes of water (up to six million gallons of water per gas well) mixed with sand and toxic chemical additives at high pressures to release the gas. Most of the water is then returned to the surface as polluted wastewater – that must be treated by wastewater treatment plants already overburdened and not necessarily designed to remove these chemicals. Industry analysts predict it will cost $3 billion to treat the industrial wastewater associated with Marcellus shale development…
Groundwater supplies may become contaminated with these chemicals as they already have in parts of Pennsylvania and other states. Currently, oil and gas companies that use hydraulic fracturing are exempt from regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act that would require them to disclose the cocktail of chemicals they use.
– source

Scaling back on the production of these unconventional energy sources in order to conserve land and water for food will increase the cost of conventional oil, and thus food prices, since industrial agriculture is dependent on fossil fuels:

Due to the vast size of these [industrial] farms, the farms are operated in a similar manner to that of large industrial factories. And these “factories” require large quantities of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and fuel all derived from fossil fuels, which is a limited natural resource on our planet (Hidden Costs of Industrial Agriculture, 2008). “After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent.” This high dependence on fossil fuels makes industrial agriculture heavily unsustainable. “Twentieth-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food” (Pollan, 2008).

The monkey wrench of climate change is now thrown into the picture…

What happens to the stability of the world when fertile lands become dust bowls, when rainfall no longer follows its traditional seasonal pattern, when crop yield forecasts become less and less reliable as climate change begins to bite? We don’t have to look very far back to see the upheaval caused in countries whose majority population lives on the razor-edge of starvation:

2007–2008 – Food riots in India, Peru, Morocco, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, 
Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Yemen, Guinea, Cameroon, 
Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal. [64][65][66][67][68][69]

And again in 2010-2011: 

 
For those who think that adaption to climate change is feasible, please consider what Kurt Cobb articulates in a recent post:

…costly existing agricultural infrastructure won’t be easily moved or replaced. …soil quality is not uniform from place to place. [Do you] think that as temperatures warm and devastate the American grain belt with recurrent drought, we can simply transfer the growing of much of the world’s export grain crop north to the Canadian Shield which has soil so thin it has never supported agriculture?

The ‘Catch-22’ kicker is that the continued use of fossil fuels, the indispensable elixir of industrial civilization’s existence, is exactly what is causing climate chaos in the first place. And as I showed with one simple chart in a previous post, we are using more of this deadly ingredient than ever before. In his latest article ‘The hunger wars in our future’, Michael Klare warns us about the social disruptions that lie in the future as a result of the insidious water-energy-food nexus that grips our modern-day way of life:

…When we think about climate change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things, this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies. These are, of course, manifestations of warming in the physical world, not the social world we all inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and survival. The purely physical effects of climate change will, no doubt, prove catastrophic. But the social effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and deadly…

At this point, the focus is understandably on the immediate consequences of the still ongoing Great Drought: dying crops, shrunken harvests, and rising food prices. But keep an eye out for the social and political effects that undoubtedly won’t begin to show up here or globally until later this year or 2013. Better than any academic study, these will offer us a hint of what we can expect in the coming decades from a hunger-games world of rising temperatures, persistent droughts, recurring food shortages, and billions of famished, desperate people.

Remember when both Bush, Cheney and Obama famously quipped that “the American way of life was non-negotiable.” Mother Nature and the Grim Reaper have rephrased that self-righteous slogan to read:

“The American way of life is unsustainable, non-redeemable, and a limited-time-only.”

Iran and Its Threat to the U.S. Dollar Hegemony

10 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

In a recent article by Christopher Doran, author of Making the World Safe for Capitalism: How Iraq Threatened the US Economic Empire and had to be Destroyed, the underlying reasons for America’s bellicosity toward Iran are revealed. Threatening the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency seems to have resulted in a death sentence for a few countries, most recently Iraq and Libya:

…By accepting and encouraging countries to pay for its oil in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, Iran has deliberately taken the same action that, I argue in Making the World Safe for Capitalism, led directly to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In September 2000, Saddam Hussein announced that Iraq would no longer accept the “currency of its enemy”, the U.S. dollar, and from that time onwards any country that wanted to purchase oil from Iraq would have to do so in euros. I further argue that the motivation for the United States’ invasion of Iraq was to eliminate the threats a post-U.N. sanctions Iraq posed to the key underpinnings of American economic hegemony, and to install a pro-U.S. client state and permanent American military presence in the region. The book examines how a post-U.N. sanctions Iraq either directly threatened the ongoing success of American economic power, or provided enormous opportunities to extend it.

All the same considerations are in play with Iran, starting with Iran’s direct threat to the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency. But that is just one aspect of the much larger issue: that Iran openly defies U.S. neoliberal hegemony. Like Iraq pre-invasion, Iran is not a member of the WTO, has not had any dealings with the IMF since 1984, and does not have any debt with it or the World Bank. Like Iraq before it, and evidenced by China’s oil development contracts, the U.S. and its oil companies are cut out of any future oil development in Iran. Like a post-sanctions Iraq, Iran has the potential to be the dominant power in the region and to provide development assistance on a vastly different model to that imposed by the WTO, World Bank and IMF, against which so much of the Middle East is rebelling….

The article details how the BRIC countries and many other nations are circumventing the U.S. sanctions with Iran and using gold as well as other commodities to buy Iranian oil. The sanctions have pretty much been rendered worthless because so many countries are defying what was designed to isolate and starve Iran into submission.

He explains how the Petrodollar System works:

In a nutshell, any country that wants to purchase oil from an oil producing country has to do so in U.S. dollars. This is a long standing agreement within all oil exporting nations, aka OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The UK for example, cannot simply buy oil from Saudi Arabia by exchanging British pounds. Instead, the UK must exchange its pounds for U.S. dollars. The major exception at present is, of course, Iran.

This means that every country in the world that imports oil—which is the vast majority of the world’s nations—has to have immense quantities of dollars in reserve. These dollars of course are not hidden under the proverbial national mattress. They are invested. And because they are U.S. dollars, they are invested in U.S. Treasury bills and other interest bearing securities that can be easily converted to purchase dollar-priced commodities like oil. This is what has allowed the U.S. to run up trillions of dollars of debt: the rest of the world simply buys up that debt in the form of U.S. interest bearing securities.

The flip-side of this are the countries that produce and export oil, in particular Saudi Arabia and the other Arab producers. The only way the system can possibly work is if oil producers refuse to accept anything other than U.S. dollars as payment for their oil. This they have done since the Nixon Administration’s manipulation of the OPEC oil crisis in the mid-1970’s, which succeeded in getting Saudi Arabia, traditionally the world’s dominant producer, to agree to accept only dollars for oil. The Saudis used their influence to get the rest of OPEC to agree as well. In return, the U.S. offered to militarily defend not so much Saudi Arabia, but the horrifically repressive monarchy that ruled it.[11]

But there was a kicker: Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also got the Saudis to agree to invest their mega oil profits in the U.S. economy. In addition to buying interest bearing U.S. government securities, the Saudis also invested in New York banks. Because the OPEC oil embargo had quadrupled global oil prices, the Saudis and other Arab producers suddenly had a great deal of money to invest. The money parked in those New York banks then became available to be loaned to the rest of the world, which faced major financial crises due to—yes, you guessed it—the sudden quadrupling of oil prices. By the year 2000 and Iraq’s dramatic switch to selling Iraq’s oil in euros, Saudi Arabia had recycled as much as $1 trillion, primarily in the United States. Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates recycled $200–300 billion.[12]

And because those loans were in U.S. dollars, they had to be paid back in U.S. dollars. When U.S. interest rates skyrocketed to 21 percent in the early 1980’s, interest on the loans also skyrocketed. This in turn precipitated a third world debt crisis, which was mercilessly exploited by Wall Street and the U.S. In this case, the exploitation came in the form of requiring countries to “structurally adjust” their economies along neoliberal lines in return for World Bank and IMF bailout loans. By 2009, the total debt owed on these bailouts and other loans was an astounding $3.7 trillion. In 2008, they paid over $602 billion servicing these debts to rich countries, primarily the United States.[13] From 1980 to 2004, they paid an estimated $4.6 trillion.[14]

The history of how this came about is fascinating, and I discuss it in detail in Making the World Safe for Capitalism. The short version is that from the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement which set up the International Monetary Fund and the precursors to the World Bank and World Trade Organisation, the dollar was accepted as the international currency for all trade. Crucially though, the dollar was backed up by gold, which was fixed at $35 an ounce. This meant the U.S. had to have enough gold on hand to back up any and all dollars it printed.

Faced with escalating costs from the Vietnam War, in the early 1970s Nixon abandoned the gold standard and replaced it with the petrodollar system described above. Almost simultaneously, he abolished the IMF’s international capital constraints on American domestic banks, which in turn allowed Saudi Arabia and other Arab producers to recycle their petrodollars in New York banks.

The petrodollar system, and U.S. ability to manipulate the dollar as the global reserve currency and hence global debt, has been the bedrock of American economic power...

…But as the article explains, since the financial crisis of 2008, the status of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world has been thrown into question and challenged by even formerly staunch U.S. allies. As the lifeblood of a country’s economy, i.e. oil, becomes increasingly hard to come by, the demands of an old ‘friend’, named Uncle Sam, will likely fall on deaf ears, especially when he’s now seen by the rest of the world as a drunken, pickpocketing buffoon swinging at shadows.

The Amorality of Science and the Rise of Transnational Capitalism

09 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Inequality

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Continuing on my last post’s theme of technology and man’s insatiable quest for more lethal weapons, Chris Hedges wrote an article this week in remembrance of the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. He reminds us that science and technology are amoral, advancing of their own accord, and that they have become the new religion, heralding solutions to all that ails modern man. Geoengineering, anyone?

The atomic blasts, ignited in large part to send a message to the Soviet Union, were a reminder that science is morally neutral. Science and technology serve the ambitions of humankind. And few in the sciences look beyond the narrow tasks handed to them by corporations or government. They employ their dark arts, often blind to the consequences, to cement into place systems of security and surveillance, as well as systems of environmental destruction, that will result in collective enslavement and mass extermination. As we veer toward environmental collapse we will have to pit ourselves against many of these experts, scientists and technicians whose loyalty is to institutions that profit from exploitation and death…

It was science, industry and technology that made possible the 20th century’s industrial killing. These forces magnified innate human barbarity. They served the immoral. And there are numerous scientists who continue to work in labs across the country on weapons systems that have the capacity to exterminate millions of human beings. Is this a “rational” enterprise? Is it moral? Does it advance the human species? Does it protect life?

For many of us, science has supplanted religion. We harbor a naive faith in the godlike power of science. Since scientific knowledge is cumulative, albeit morally neutral, it gives the illusion that human history and human progress also are cumulative. Science is for us what totems and spells were for our premodern ancestors. It is magical thinking. It feeds our hubris and sense of divine empowerment. And trusting in its fearsome power will mean our extinction…

Now on to the second point – Transnational Capitalism. This is an excellent article written by a former hedge fund manager that gives an overall, system-wide summation of the capitalist system controlling the world. It’s well worth the read and helps to flesh out what I have alluded to in other posts – the emergence of an elite capitalist class that has no allegiance to any country and shares more in common with its global members than with the fellow countrymen and the nation-state from whence they originated. Some excerpts:

This federation of convenience by the global elite is a lingering problem for the lower economic classes in America. The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told Chrystia Freeland that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.” Notice the CEO’s reference to “not such a bad trade” as representative of free market lingo, i.e., “trade.” Everything is measured in trade terms, like statistics, if you look in the mirror, you’ll see the reflection of a commodity.

This viewpoint is typical of how the global ruling class thinks, and proof positive of it is reflected in today’s politics in America. The right wing embodies this same viewpoint by striving to strip the federal government of public welfare services, privatizing governmental assets, and undercutting benefits to society at large, especially via manipulation of the federal tax code. This same occurrence is happening in real time right now in Greece, Spain, and Portugal as the cadre of elite technocrats out of Brussels, de facto capital of the EU, dictate nation-state policies to those three forlorn countries. The world’s elites love hard times/recessions because of the set up. It makes it easier for them to strip away government largess via austerity programs that they force upon governments, and it allows for undercutting the wages of average citizens as well as dismantling of governmental regulations. This, in turn, prompts protestors to congregate in the streets of capital cities, but over time, the capitalist class waits them out, temporarily residing in one of their homes elsewhere, away from danger, and with time on their side, the capitalists win.

Upon reading Chrystia Freeland’s article in Atlantic Magazine, one comes away with the impression the elite capitalists look down with disdain upon the masses of people, expressing a contempt for those in society who do not have the personal merit to rise to the occasion of wealth and power. Meritocracy is their biblical source, not equality and fraternity. These are hackneyed terms from ‘America of old’ and no longer applicable in the new technologically enhanced world, which itself is the major source of many of the new self-made wealthy.

This global ruling class controls the levers of an emergent trans-national state apparatus of global decision-making and orders emanate from the IMF, World Bank, the EU, and the WTO. The ruling bloc of this world order consists of chieftains of global corporations and financial conglomerates, major players in the dominant political parties of the world, media conglomerates, and technocratic elites….

…

According to William Robinson: Transnational capital has been able to break free of nation-state constraints to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide sharply in its favour and to undercut the strength of popular and working class movements around the world. One new structural dimension of 21st century global capitalism is a dramatic expansion of the global superfluous population or that portion marginalized and locked out of productive participation … constituting some one-third of humanity. The need to assure the social control of this mass of humanity living in slums gives a powerful impetus to neo-fascist projects and facilitates the transition from social welfare to social control, otherwise known as police states. Over time, this system becomes ever more violent and the ability of economic power to determine electoral outcomes opens the door for 21st century fascism to emerge without a rupture in electoral cycles and/or a constitutional change.

The door for 21st century fascism has more than opened. It has been blown off the hinges…

Just as science is amoral, so is capitalism which treats everything living and inanimate as a commodity ripe for exploitation. Welcome to a world ruled by the new globe-trotting, predatory elite who will profit from what remains of the planet’s depleting resources and exhausted ecosystems while paying no heed to the plight of the masses or future generations.

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi

“We’re Gonna Be Blown Up One of These Days”

08 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sometimes, in order to move forward we must look back. I am reflecting once more on another man’s life and words, very prescient and witty words. I was reminded again of his legacy this morning after reading the Congressional Record honoring the life and accomplishments of Gore Vidal by US Congressman Steve Cohen who was brave enough to give it. Before we get to Gore, let’s talk a bit about mankind’s technological prowess in terms of lethal weaponry.

In the great expanse of Earth’s history, industrial civilization will be chronicled as a mere blip in geologic memory, but in the human scale of time perception, our self-inflicted demise by way of ecocide is slow and seemingly imperceptible. And so while we quietly commit self-extermination by breaching environmental tipping points, mankind’s annihilation may also arrive via the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, facilitated by the ongoing advancement of technology:

Scott Kemp, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the worry with SILEX laser technology “is that it is particularly suited for nuclear proliferation, even better than centrifuges. SILEX can also enrich fuel-grade uranium to weapons-grade in fewer steps than a … centrifuge.”

Kemp was until 2011 science advisor in the Office of the Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms Control at the U.S. State Department.

Writing in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, he says that before the plant is licensed the U.S. government or Congress should commission an independent inquiry into whether its benefits outweigh the added proliferation risk. Other U.S. nuclear scientists and arms control specialists have previously called for similar action….

A U.S. State Department assessment in 1999 of the SILEX technology and the plans to start commercial processing conceded that a laser enrichment facility “might be easier to build without detection and could be a more efficient producer of high enriched uranium for a nuclear weapons program.”…

“It seems likely,” the State Department said, “that success with SILEX would renew interest in laser enrichment by nations with benign intent as well as by proliferants with an interest in finding an easier route to acquiring fissile material for nuclear weapons.”

And recently, John Robb of Global Guerillas had some disturbing news on this new technological breakthrough:

While there are still some details to sort out, it’s pretty clear that making weapons at home using 3-D printers from commonly available materials is going to become much more commonplace in the near future. In fact, as 3-D printing technology matures, materials feedstock improves, and designs for weapons proliferate, we might soon see the day when nearly everyone will be able to print the weapons of their choice in the numbers they desire, all within the privacy of their own homes.

In an October 22, 2002 speech, Sam Nunn quoted a letter by Warren Buffett:

“Through my work at NTI, I’m often asked, “What are the odds of nuclear use by a terrorist group?” Today, I received a letter from Warren Buffett, who is an adviser to NTI, describing the statistical chance of a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon attack in the United States. His letter said:”

If the chance of a weapon of mass destruction being used in a given year is 10 percent and the same probability persists for 50 years, the probability of the event happening at least once during that 50 years is 99.5 percent. Thus, the chance of getting through the 50-year period without a disaster is .51 percent — just slightly better than one in 200.

“If the probability of similar weapons being utilized can be reduced to 3 percent per year, the world has a 21.8 percent chance of making it through 50 years without an event. And if the annual chance can be reduced to 1 percent, there is a 60.5 percent chance of making it through 50 years.

Now back to the insightful and prophetic words of Gore Vidal:

 
JAY: Fascism in Germany wasn’t a coup; it was a many-year process. [crosstalk] feel normal. I’m not suggesting we’re living in an equivalent period, but there are lessons to be learned about.

VIDAL: But it is equivalent. I mean, don’t be shy of saying that. The response to the Reichstags Fire is precisely that to 9/11, which was invoked by this administration’s people. “And if we don’t fight them over there, we gotta fight ’em over here.” This little fool. How are they going to get here? Greyhound bus? I mean, he is so stupid himself that he assumes everybody else is equally stupid. If he had been really elected, I would say everybody else was stupid, but he wasn’t.

…

VIDAL: After all, you are in opposition to American media, and so am I. And we know how false it is, and how corrupt it is, and how engaged they are for mischief, making money for the ownership of the country. There’s nothing to be done about them. And no wonder, even when the American people might ever again, which I doubt, have an uncorrupted presidential election. 2000 was corrupted. 2004 was corrupted. I don’t think we’ll ever get to know the people’s voice, and the people have no voice because they have no information. That is why you’re doing useful work here. That’s why I’m chatting with you here. That could be useful, to tell them actually what happens around the world. That poor guy running for Congress, everybody jumped on him, particularly [inaudible] people. He suggested that our foreign policy might have had something to do with 9/11, that we were deeply disliked in the Muslim world for other reasons. It’s the same presidential, I guess. “Do you believe in evolution?” said this idiot. I mean, to reveal the leadership of the United States hasn’t made it to the 20th century, that our leadership is as ignorant as that. Five of them said, no, no, thinking little lord Jesus was going to vote for them.

JAY: It’s in these moments of crisis, like terrorist attack, that you start to see people’s colors.

VIDAL: Yellow.

JAY: In Britain as well, and I was really taken aback. After the bus London bombings, Ken Livingstone, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, was asked, was there any connection between these bombings and UK foreign policy, and he said there’s no connection whatsoever. This is just people that hate our way of life.

VIDAL: Yeah, that’s the new lie that they like to tell. Well, that’s Bush allover. “They just hate us.” Why? Nobody has to ask them why. He doesn’t know why. “Well, they envy us, our form of government.” Who envies us that can of worms we’ve got in Washington? And it’s been many years in the United States since I have seen a Norwegian coming to get a green card.

 
JAY: The economic structure of television makes what I’m going to ask difficult to accomplish. But do you think television journalists have learned anything from this last four years?

VIDAL: Well, they’ve always been lazy, and they’re not used to getting to the heart of problems, of matters. They’re not used to investigating anything. Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living, and that is an absolute truth. Those who want to examine life don’t go in for journalism, because they’re not allowed to. So they’ve got to be very careful. They have to think about tenure if they’re at a university. They’ve got to think about, you know, the publisher and advertisers. So it’s a difficult row to hoe, and we have no intellectual tradition of any kind in the United States. I even told Arthur Schlesinger, “You know, Arthur, one Schlesinger does not make a spring.” He was horrified.

…

VIDAL: …It’s when the news starts to break, how two presidential elections, 2000 and 2004, were stolen and The New York Times would not review the book written about it by Congressman Conyers, nor Washington Post, nor Wall Street Journal, the great instruments of news were silent. Well, they’re saying, “We don’t give a goddamn about the United States. Just stew in your own juice. Leave us alone. We have corporate figures to add up now, and we have certain things we want to put in place, and we may have a couple of candidates for you dumdums, but you probably won’t like them.” You know, I’ve been around the ruling class all my life, and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country. And the Republican machine became so good at transmitting its own feelings about the world to the enemy, to the liberals, once anyone, any of the right wing hear what I just said, he’ll say, “Oh, the liberals have always hated America. We know that. They despise family values, because they’re only interested in gang bangs and drugs and so forth.” This is the way they deal. And whenever they have a real coward for president, like Bush himself, and you have a hero like Kerry, “Oh, he’s a coward. Didn’t you know that? We’ve got five guys who were in Vietnam with him.” What they do is whatever is their transgression, whatever are their faults, they lie and apply it to the other person. That confuses everything. If I were an average voter in the United States, I wouldn’t know who was telling the truth, whether Kerry really had run away and didn’t get purple hearts, or whether Junior, you know, had actually learned how to fly a plane.

JAY: And television news covers the lies like news.

VIDAL: Yes. It has a lock on it.

…

VIDAL: …There’s not anyone with an IQ above, you know, lowest room temperature who isn’t interested in something like this [truth in news]. Everybody is on to the con act of our media, that they are obeying bigger, richer interests than informing the public, which is the last thing that corporate America has ever been interested in doing. So I think, you know, the sky’s the limit to the amount of audience you can get. And one of the secrets is, aside from telling the truth which most people in America hate because they’ve been brought up on advertising, and they think the truth is just something irrelevant, irrelevant, you know. Everybody lies. You know, I love that line. So it’s alright to steal the election. Well, that isn’t what the world’s about. And I think it’s really come down to we’re going to be blown up one of these days. We have now acquired so many enemies with so much power in the world that, well, they’re going to take a couple of cracks at us. I would rather have Real News here telling us just where it was they struck, where it is, intelligence says they may strike again, and maybe why they’re doing it – we blew up their mosque, we killed their president, or whatever it was that set them off. What our fictional news does now, and this is–all it is is fiction, whether it’s CNN or CBS or NBC, it’s all fiction. The people making this junk know that. The viewers suspect it. But where are they going to turn to? Where are they going to find out? They can’t all go out and get a, you know, subscription to The Nation, which would help straighten them out, at least in print. So you’re going to be the only alternative, and the word will start to spread. Look at the speed with which, you know, just by telling jokes, John Stewart and company, got the attention of everybody. And now they say, well, most of the real news that the people know about they get from the satirizing of it that Stewart does. And very funny he is, too. In other words you build a better mousetrap, and the mouse will come to your door.

 
“…You can’t just go into Iraq and smash them to pieces and pretend that they are an enemy. They will become one if you knock down their houses and kill them. They get very grumpy, you know, when you do things like that to them. So he [Bush] managed to make a lot of enemies. We’re the ones the bombs are going to fall on… He’ll [Bush] be in his bunker in that awful place in Texas where he lives. He’ll be hidden away. He’ll be safe. It will be our cities that are going to get it when some of these suicide bombers get angry at us and blame us for his misdeeds… It was a coup d’état after 9-11. A bunch of ambitious hoods, from the oil and gas business mostly, decided now is the time to take over everything. And the neoconservatives were right there with them, and they wanted big armies in the Middle East to destroy countries they didn’t like. They wanted to get rid of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran… they have a long list, they’ve still got it. I don’t think they’re going to have a chance to utilize it because we ran out of money…”