The Vicious Price/Demand Cycle of Peak Oil & Blackouts in Greece

06 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Peak Oil

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Various groups will continue to deny Peak Oil because to accept that oil is finite is to completely pull the rug out from under their entire construct of free markets and unlimited economic growth. To accept the reality of Peak Oil would turn their entire life upside down since Capitalism cannot exist in the energy constrained world coming at us full speed. And as you know, the resource constraints of our modern world with 7 billion humans, and 250,000 added every day, is not confined to just energy, but across the board with minerals, soil, fish, fresh water, etc.

So it comes as no surprise that we would have such a denial coming out of The American Enterprise Institute. If you do a quick search on the background of the AEI, then it becomes obvious why they would be using old-world, linear thinking to make sense of our present situation:

Some AEI scholars are considered to be some of the leading architects of the second Bush administration‘s public policy.[7] More than twenty AEI scholars and fellows served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government’s many panels and commissions. …AEI is the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism, in both the domestic and international policy arenas.[13]

Peak oil does not mean peak price. As I explained in an earlier post, Peak Oil: the Yoke on Future Growth, we are now in the world of a vicious cycle where the economy fluctuates with spurts of GDP growth which increase demand for oil and thus a rise in price. The consequent rise in price then dampens the economy which results in a decrease in demand and the price drops. This is the ‘rinse and repeat’ cycle we will see while riding the plateau of peak net energy, as explained by people such as Colin Campbell PhD:

…I’ve reached the conclusion that this industrial age that opened only about 200 years ago — started with coal which provided the energy which changed the world radically; provided the steam engine, the trains and everything that started to stimulate trade and industry and transport grew and that was followed by oil, as you say. And over the last 100 years or so we’ve seen the rapid expansion of oil that has just fueled everything that you can imagine.

But we are now more or less half way through the oil age and the production begins to go down and, as you say, once you reach the barrier of supply, the price goes through the ceiling, it prompts a recession, demand collapses, the price falls again and then the governments, who don’t really seem to understand what we’re talking about, they print more money out of thin air, make more credit available in the hope of stimulating consumerism and restoring past prosperity, but — and they meet a little brief success, but as they do, the demand for oil goes up again; it soon goes through the barrier and the price starts to surge. So the future price of oil is an interesting subject. And I would say myself that we’re talking about something in the range of $100-150 a barrel because if it goes above that, it just kills demand and you have growing recessions.

So I think you’re absolutely right. We have these, sort of, cycles of a little surge of prosperity followed by another recession. And we are entering the second half of the age of oil when this stuff just gradually declines.

Blackouts may occur in Greece this summer due to the acute problems it is facing in its energy flows:

Ekathimerini reported DEPA’s Haris Sachinis has advised the caretaker government that the liquidity crisis is so dire that the issue of a probable blackout should be considered a “special national emergency.”

DEPA[Greek Public Gas Corporation] is owed around €300 million by electrical energy producers, leaving DEPA unable to pay its own Turkish, Italian and Russian suppliers. Meanwhile Greece’s Public Power Corporation, DEI, is struggling to cope with hugely increased costs in its energy purchase bill. Athens News reported prices for natural gas and oil, which it relies on to produce electricity, have increased by 83 percent.

To compound the energy crisis Greece faces, the issue of oil imports is critical. Since the suspension of Iranian oil imports to Greece due to the EU embargo on Iranian oil, the debt-ridden nation is forced to purchase oil at premium prices, Ekathimerini reports.

Prior to the EU ban on Iranian oil Greece was largely dependant on the Persian state to supply crude oil on credit. Greece initially vetoed the ban on Iranian oil imports until it succumbed to pressure from its European partners, the majority of whom were not reliant on Iranian imports.

Now the bulk of oil imports are provided by Glencore and Vitol who charge a premium due to the risk. Ekathimerini reports that neither supplier would say if they would continue to supply oil to Greece in the event of a default and euro exit.

There can be no doubt that with our present way of life, which is extremely energy and resource intensive, we are somewhere over the arc of ecological overshoot. As we push the planetary boundaries past some unknown breaking point, there will be a convulsion of enormous magnitude in our complex and fragile, interconnected global civilization which will take out large chunks of the world population. Corporations have been on a land grab in recent years, securing dwindling resources at the expense of millions of subsistence farmers.

The Presidential Electoral Complex & The Military Industrial Complex: Both are ‘the Tail Wagging the Dog’

05 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Corporate State, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

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Danny Schechter, journalist, author (Plunder: The Crime of Our Time), television producer and an independent filmmaker, has a new essay today describing the takeover of our political process by big money and the subsequent formation of what can only be called the ‘presidential electoral complex,’ an industry unto itself. This industry consists of armies of consultants and experts well-versed in perception management, public relations, advertising and marketing, and even psychological warfare. The facts don’t matter any more, only the public’s perception of it. And so politics is more about controlling the sentiment of the masses than anything else. Thus like the military industrial complex controlling foreign policy and America’s militarism, we can say that the Presidential Electoral Complex has also perverted the nation’s ability to hold true democratic elections which represent the will of the people. The tail is wagging the dog in both instances:

Money, Politics, and Propaganda

…one of Jimmy Carters’s advisers, Pat Cadell, …said in 1979 that just because you have been elected doesn’t mean you stop campaigning, He wrote in his “Initial Working Paper on Political Strategy,” “it is my thesis governing with public approval requires a continuing political campaign.”

Journalist Sidney Blumental, before he joined the Clinton White House, wrote The Permanent Campaign in 1980, revealing that political parties were dead and had been replaced by political consultants and other campaign professionals. (Disclosure: I helped get the book published by Beacon Press.)

In other words, politics had changed fundamentally: the old-style bosses were out and a new style media-driven system was in. Politics had also become a business with a whole retinue of advertising specialists, market researchers and pollsters.

Today, political journalist Joe Hagen labels this new army of experts for hire a “presidential electoral complex” – almost on the same scale as the military industrial complex. Their advice does not come cheap, with the tail today wagging the dog.

Any serious candidate hires his team and then has to raise millions to pay for it. When politics spawned a profession, the big money that’s transformed politics no longer went just to candidates but to the industry around them.

They also developed a stake in the fostering polarization and continuing crisis so that their counsel will be solicited more often. Increasingly political campaigns were run like military commands with centralized top-down direction, defensive and offensive strategies and tactics as well as psychological warfare. The campaign gurus are well schooled in the techniques of perception management.

This industry is bi-partisan with hired guns always shopping for the best deal irrespective of party. One-time dirty trickster Roger Stone who worked first for Richard Nixon ended up advising everyone from Al Sharpton to Donald Trump, to Libertarian Gary Johnson.

Some of these advisers step over the legal line like GOP operative Alan Raymond but few get caught. The New York Times reported In New Hampshire’s hotly contested 2002 Senate race, Democratic get-out-the-vote phone banks were jammed with incoming calls on Election Day. The Republican, John Sununu, won re-election by under 20,000 votes, and Allen Raymond, a Republican Party operative, went to jail for his role in the jamming.

Raymond has now written a book about his experiences, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative. In it, he paints a picture of the corruption of modern politics that should leave no doubt about the creativity and cynicism of operatives like Raymond or the need for tough new election-reform legislation.

Wikipedia had two other examples of the focus on permanent campaigns:

“A famous example that illustrates just how strongly this mind-set has come to influence politics was during the Clinton Administration when pollster Dick Morris asked voters to help decide where Bill Clinton would go on vacation.

“In the words of columnist Joe Klein, ‘The pressure to “win” the daily news cycle – to control the news – has overwhelmed the more reflective, statesmanlike aspects of the office.’ (After getting caught in a sex scandal, Morris was fired by Clinton and later resurfaced as a pundit at Fox News.)

“Scott McClellan, former White House Press Secretary for U.S. President George W. Bush, wrote in his 2008 memoir What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception that the Bush White House suffered from a ‘permanent campaign’ mentality, and that policy decisions were inextricably interwoven with politics.”

Many of the press secretaries and campaign managers work hard to contain mistakes. The bookshelves are filled with advice about how to do that. This is from an email promoting interviews with a campaign expert turned author:

“Every word and action on the campaign trail from a televised debate to a town meeting, to an innocent question from a voter to a pointed question from the media … all of these daily events call for immediate, strategic communication.

“Any blunder should be a wake-up call: communication has power. But as with any form of power, it needs to be harnessed effectively or it can all too often backfire.

“This year’s primaries were riddled with missteps and over-reaching. As the focus shifts from primaries to the general elections, Romney will have to walk the line between connecting to the audience and pandering. On the other hand, President Obama will be less under scrutiny for potential gaffes, but more for his inattention to issues that are brewing, followed by a dramatic game-changing address.

“‘However, this can all change in a split-second, as proven by the undeniable power of word choice,’ comments Helio Fred Garcia, President of the crisis management firm Logos Consulting Group and the Executive Director of the Logos Institute for Crisis Management & Executive Leadership.”

Garcia, who teaches now at NYU, discusses strategies that might be useful in a new book on the Power of Communication, or is it manipulation:

“– Leaders are judged on the fulfillment of expectations. Leaders must resist saying what merely sounds good in the moment and creating a say-do gap.

“– The only reason for communication is to change something – to influence the way audiences think and feel. Before you communicate, know what it is you want to change.

“– Facts do not speak for themselves. If we speak only facts, the audience will either not pay attention to those facts or will provide their own context to make sense of the facts, which could trigger a negative frame.

“– Communication is a continuation of business by other means. You need to engage your audience to enhance your position, thereby improving your competitive advantage.

“–Leaders must conquer the first mover advantage – a maneuver that prevents critics and adversaries from framing the situation. This has become increasingly more important in today’s world of social media.”

This same techniques are also used to sell war, as Mother Jones reported: “As long as the United States appears to be on the move against foreign adversaries, the question of whether any action is actually taken becomes of secondary interest. As Blumenthal suggested two decades ago, results and concrete proposals are less important than perception and image.”

Even as Blumenthal was partial to Hillary Clinton, who hired him for her unsuccessful primary campaign in 2008, The Economist noted that his description of a permanent campaign soon became President Obama’s prescription:

“Mr. Obama is currently deploying the formidable resources he built up during his campaign — including contact details for 10m donors, supporters and volunteers — to sell his policies. David Plouffe, the man who managed Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, has sent millions of e-mails to encourage them to support the White House’s agenda.

“One of them contains as good a definition of the permanent campaign as any: ‘In the next few weeks we’ll be asking you to do some of the same things we asked of you during the campaign — talking directly to people in your communities about the president’s ideas for long-term prosperity.’ “Another, which includes a video of the president, asks supporters to put pressure on their congressman to pass Mr. Obama’s budget, by calling his or her office and reciting a little pro-Obama speech.”

The Republicans have learned these lessons too and now have more money than Democrats to invest in them. Politics is now a growing industry with money and politics more joined at the hip than ever and an interest in keeping the big money flowing into its bank account.”

Operating in concert with the Presidential Electoral Complex are the Army of Lobbyists representing the monied interests of corporations and the financial elite. Republican political operative and financial consultant Mallory Factor appeared on CurrentTV in April, saying no one party has access to the big donors and that Democrats and Republicans both rely on money. This video was available on YouTube, but has since been taken off. You can still see it here.

A couple weeks ago, Jennifer Granholm from CurrentTV aired an editorial video in which she says that “the super rich are monopolizing our democracy and effectively ruining the founding fathers’ vision of how the United States should operate, sending us back to an era that is more like a one-king rule than a real democracy.” She names Romney as the willing supplicant of the monied interests. She says the Democrats have been forced to play the same game, but I think she doesn’t go far enough: both parties are equally corrupt in my eyes. Anyone who still puts one iota of faith in our perverse, money-driven political system is just plain stupid.


Cenk Uyger did a better job of describing our systemically corrupt system back in November 2011. See also David Cohen’s excellent post: “The Idiot’s Guide To Buying A Congressman“.


Hope? Don’t make me laugh. If change was possible through our political system, they’d make it illegal.

John Michael Greer & The Long Descent

04 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by in Peak Oil

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Here is a new and lengthy interview with John Michael Greer on a website called Legalise Freedom:

 

 

“The politicians don’t know what’s going on; they have no clue. They don’t get it. There’s a lot of very good reasons why they shouldn’t get it because one of the things that’s going to happen down the road is that they are toast. Their entire world is toast. The only reason that the politicians and the financiers, the modern rich and powerful, have the wealth and the power that they do is that they know how to manipulate. They are in a position to manipulate this very complex, very intricate, very brittle, very fragile system that runs on vast amounts of fossil fuel energy. As that system breaks down, their power goes away. And they’re going to be in roughly the same situation as all those heads of Communist Parties in Eastern Europe when the Communist Parties in Eastern Europe suddenly dissolved out from under them. This is what happens when very complex civilizations start breaking down. The former leadership finds that it has no skills at all that are relevant to the current situation. In the meantime they’re going to increase their grip on the levers of power and flows of money with everything they’ve got.

And you can go out there and protest; you can wave a sign; you can shout obscenities at the status quo or what have you and it will either be ignored or, if it causes sufficient embarrassment, the police are going to come and beat the living crap out of you. Or eventually you may be dragged from you bed at 3 a.m. and shot in the head and tumbled into an unmarked grave. This is the kind of thing that can happen, and it does happen all the time in the Third World. And this is something we can understand in our current situation where the modern industrial nations are becoming Third World countries. The Third World country is a country in the modern world that doesn’t have access to a lot of energy.” – JMG

A bit of background on Mr. Greer:

Background
The world is finally beginning to wake up to its critical dependence on oil and the vitally important issues associated with it such as rapidly rising energy prices and the threat of climate change. Unlike the energy crisis of the 1970s, however, there is a lurking fear that now the times are different and the crisis may not easily be resolved.

The Long Descent examines the basis of such fear through three core themes:

1. Industrial society is following the same well-worn path that has led other civilizations into decline, a path involving a much slower and more complex transformation than the sudden catastrophes imagined by so many social critics today.

2. The roots of the crisis lie in the cultural stories that shape the way we understand the world. Since problems cannot be solved with the same thinking that created them, these ways of thinking need to be replaced with others better suited to the needs of our time.

3. It is too late for massive programmes to implement top-down change; the change must come from individuals.

Hope exists in actions that range from taking up a handicraft or adopting an ‘obsolete’ technology, through planting an organic vegetable garden, taking charge of your own health care or spirituality, and building community.

John Michael Greer is a certified Master Conserver, organic gardener, and scholar of ecological history… Follow him at The Archdruid Report.

The Parasitic War Profiteers Continue to Grow while the Masses are Targeted for Austerity

03 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil

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Two blog posts caught my eyes this weekend, one on our parasitic war economy and the other on the parasites readying their blueprint to bleed the masses dry. A related article to the first story lays out Obama’s pre-election connections to one of the primary recipients of tax dollars feeding the Military Industrial Complex – General Dynamics, as mentioned also by John Hively here.

In regards to the second blog post on the elite’s blueprint for squeezing the life out of the rest of us, austerity is a failed option because it attempts to preserve the paradigm of perpetual economic growth in a world of depleted resources, and it’s designed to preserve the social hierarchy of the capitalist system. Dr. Dan Bednarz at Health After Oil talks about this in his latest essay:

Socioeconomically, reaching the limits to growth means the impossibility of repaying accumulated debt and that massive unemployment will worsen under current institutional conditions. Politically we are witnessing governments not only caught up in a contraction of tax and revenue bases, but utterly failing and concomitantly repressing their citizens so as to maintain –and deepen- class inequalities and support for too big to fail private entities. This is the antithesis of resilience…

Until recently energy was cheap and seemed limitless, as did other natural resources; climate change risks remain “political,” not corporeal and existential. The overexploitation of natural resources and population growth should be apparent and frightening, but they are not; and wastes and pollution continue to be –from a grossly misguided economic growth point of view- “externalized” or “discounted” for future generations to gag on….

And the hypocritical remarks by the IMF chief Christine Lagarde:

Her hypocrisy–she claims to have great concern and sympathy for poor African schoolchildren, whose plight she compares with the problems of comparatively well-off Greeks–is frankly nauseating in light of the IMF’s contribution to African suffering and misery. The agency’s so-called structural adjustment programs, akin to austerity for Europeans, have forced African nations to slash spending on healthcare, food, and education, and to boost exports of raw materials and privatization of industries by multinational corporations, resulting in dramatically increased national debts. Not for nothing do critics of the IMF and its partner in exploitation in the name of assistance, the World Bank, speak of Africa’s new “overlords.”

But one suspects that there is more to the Lagarde affair than mere hypocrisy. The IMF managing director’s Africa reference can be seen as a telling slip of the tongue that calls attention to her true aim–the strategic objective of the global elites whose interests she serves–which is the permanent pauperization of the middle classes of the industrialized world. The objective isn’t to raise Africa up to the level of Europe–not even close to that. Rather, the elites seek to lift Africa only marginally while bringing the West down–meaning, the workers who have become too prosperous and too politically powerful in the eyes of the powers that be–closer to the level of the impoverished inhabitants of the resource-rich continent that was ravaged by imperialism and colonialism. A global leveling off is the real goal. Grinding Greece down is the beginning of what is intended to be a grand restructuring for purposes of creating a new world order in which a few privileged population segments will labor in well-paying, favored industries, including high technology and finance, with decent benefits and opportunities for advancement and upward mobility, while the great masses of workers will be condemned to toil like drones, or serfs, in deadening, dead-end jobs that will barely pay subsistence wages and little or no benefits of any kind.

Hence, the seemingly irrational, international obsession with promoting austerity during times of depression and recession. For the IMF and its backers, mass unemployment isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a strategy to bemanaged. Degrees of joblessness that have not been seen since the Great Depression are meant to become the new normal; meaningful social safety nets and social services, things of the past.

Already, the argument can be made that “we are all Greeks.” Absent a reversal of the trend, unless the IMF’s iron heel is broken before it can complete its crushing mission, we will soon all be Africans … and Asians … and Latin Americans … anything but the middle class Americans and Europeans we once were … as social services are dismantled and workers rights are shredded in the name of “reform.”

Now on to the two blog posts I mentioned at the beginning:

America’s murderous drone campaign is fuelling terror

“More than a decade after George W Bush launched it, the “war on terror” was supposed to be winding down. US military occupation of Iraq has ended and Nato is looking for a way out of Afghanistan, even as the carnage continues. But another war – the undeclared drone war that has already killed thousands – is now being relentlessly escalated.”

The drone wars are all about raising corporate profits, for General Dynamics and other master’s of war. They have President Obama on a leash. He is their good little boy in the white house, ordering the murder of innocent people for profits. Sure, there might be a terrorist that he gets now and then, but the terrorists aren’t his targets; Wall Street analysts tell corporate CEO’s what their profit targets will be every quarter, and every drone strike is intended to push up those profits to reach Wall Street expectations. The more drone strikes, the more drones need to be built, the more profits are obtained, and all at tax payer expense.

That means the drone wars are all about redistributing income from working people to the rich via higher corporate earnings, rising dividends and soaring share prices. The drone wars also mean the president, like President Bush before him, is the terrorist.

America’s murderous drone campaign is fuelling terror

VIDEO: Scott Walker’s Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Is

“The New Model For The Country”

Coming soon to your state: The anti-union, education-cutting, free-market-leaning, divide-and-conquer playbook of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

According to a leading conservative activist, the Walker agenda in Wisconsin is the new conservative game plan for all states in the union. That was the key message delivered at a rally Friday evening in Madison by Tim Phillips, national president of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative nonprofit started with money from the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. “The Wisconsin approach to changing and making state government better is the new model for the country,” he said. “You are the model for the country.”

Here a video of Phillips’ remarks:


Since taking office in January 2011, Walker has slashed collective bargaining rights for public-employee unions, cut funding to public schools by $800 million, signed a controversial voter ID bill that critics say discriminates against students and minorities, and approved a divisive redistricting bill that benefitted his fellow GOP lawmakers. Walker managed to eliminate a $3.6 billion deficit, but did so, his critics say, at the expense of workers’ rights, teachers and students, and the public sector as a whole. In a January 2011 conversation with billionaire businesswoman Diane Hendricks, a top donor of his, Walker admitted that his plan was to “divide and conquer” the unions in Wisconsin. Walker’s agenda has turned Wisconsin into the most polarized state in America.

This agenda, AFP’s Tim Phillips insisted, is the new model for state governments. “Today every other governor in the country and every state legislator in the country is watching Wisconsin,” he said. “Because the Wisconsin approach to changing and making state government better is the new model for the country. You are the model for the country. For fiscal prosperity and economic freedom and getting the state moving again. You’re the model!”…

Capitalism’s Self-Preserving Tactics: Crushing Dissent Covertly & Overtly

02 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by in Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex

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You better believe that the financial elite who run this country do have OWS and any other social movement under 24/7 surveillance. Anything that strives to change the status quo of neoliberal capitalism will be undermined and crushed, whether through covert actions or co-optive schemes. Social justice, the environment, and the very habitability of planet earth are not on the agenda of the 1%’ers.

Michael Parenti’s son, Christian, gives the methods by which the capitalist power structure controls rising social movements:

Parenti starts by noting a paradox within the capitalist system. “Capitalism needs poverty,”(2) states Parenti unequivocally, arguing that without enough poor people around workers start demanding better conditions and higher wages. However, at the same time, capitalism is threatened by too much poverty. Poverty, he argues, tends to breed dissatisfaction, which makes revolt more likely. The question is “How do you have poverty and manage the threat of poverty?”(3) The answer, for Parenti, is by expanding social control mechanisms through the criminal justice system. The buildup of prisons and policing in the last two decades is not a result, as some might have it, of corporations expanding into the criminal justice system for profits.(4) Rather, the growth comes from an increasing need by the capitalist class (in collusion with the state) for greater social control, a growth necessary to keep the poor from revolting. Prisons, mandatory sentencing, and the “war on drugs” become the means by which the state is able to subdue the working class and keep poverty at a level that maximizes profits while minimizing dissent. Here we see a clear example of “hard-line” social control.

Parenti also describes a second, softer tactic of social control, mainly co-optation. He briefly describes the way that workers’ movements in the 1960s were co-opted by turning their leaders into administrators of low income housing and social services. This co-optation happened at a time when the Unites States was economically strong enough to absorb the poor in order to legitimize the system. However, the economic crisis in the 1970s put an end to this tactic and brought with it the harder modes of social control. Parenti concludes that, “In a class society, rule comes down to two things, as Machiavelli said. The prince has two choices. He can either treat men [sic] well or crush them. . . . Sometimes economic conditions are plush enough that people can be treated well, but more often then not, in a capitalist society, the ruling class, through the state, must crush and intimidate people to reproduce their system. And that is what the criminal justice system is all about.”(5)

 

And tying together the previous post about Drones and the earlier post about the State’s oppressive security and surveillance apparatus, we have this essay which contains a perfect example of how the Corporate State crushes dissent:

“…I see other things coming even sooner, caused by the same ruling elite’s insatiable greed and lust for power, and by the same political system’s actions in support of their goals.

First there is the accelerating march towards a police state, which began in earnest during the first year of the Bush/Cheney administration with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the passage of the cynically named USA PATRIOT Act, and the launching of the so-called War on Terror, but which has been carried forward to a place I could never have imagined by Bush’s successor, Barack Obama. Today, police in America ride around with fully automatic M-16s in their squadcars, routinely taser people, including children, the elderly and the disabled, for minor offenses, and when confronted with a peaceful and permitted political demonstration, respond in full military SWAT gear, complete with guns, pepper spray, clubs, tear gas, and undercover agents who deliberately try to incite violence.

Just yesterday, long-time Latino activist Carlos Montes, 64, was arrested in Los Angeles during a joint LAPD/FBI SWAT-team midnight raid on his house. The charge: possessing illegal weapons. But Montes possessed only licensed guns in his home. The catch was, the FBI, which was clearly after Montes, a retired Xerox salesman, for political reasons, conveniently told local police that he was not allowed to register firearms because of a (get this!) 1969 felony conviction for allegedly throwing a coke can at a cop (Montes says he never threw such a can). Note that the police knew all about that conviction when Montes first registered his guns. He has not been in trouble with the law since then. Clearly he could have simply been informed that his gun registrations were invalid, and the guns had to be turned in. Why Montes, who has remained politically active and a critic of the government, was really arrested in this Gestapo-like manner became clear when an FBI agent hopped in the car with him right after he was picked up, and said, “I am from the FBI and I want to talk to you about the Freedom Road Socialist Organisation.” Montes is now facing a possible 22 years in jail for possessing legally registered guns that the LAPD has known for years that he had in his home, and that nobody ever cared about before. (I had to learn about this from the British newspaper the Guardian. The corporate media in America have covered up this outrageous political bust.)

America today is crawling with secret police–local, state and federal. They’re all connected too, through 72 so-called Fusion Centers that receive federal funds, but remain insulated from any kind of public oversight. Our phones and our internet communications are monitored automatically by National Security Agency super-computers that look for key words like “airport, exercise, flu, blizzard, bridge, or fundamentalism,” any of which prompt closer attention to what we are saying or writing.

Meanwhile, the president has claimed the right to detain–in secret, without charge–any American he deems to be a threat, and to hold such people indefinitely, without any recourse to lawyer or trial. He is even claiming the right to execute such captives. So much for the Fourth Amendment, as well as the First, Second, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth!

While I don’t think we live in a police state yet (having lived in China for two years, and visited there as a journalist over four other years, I know what a real one looks and feels like), but all the elements for one have been put in place and await only the throwing of a switch.

In the vision I clearly have, I feel strongly that someone, whether Obama or Romney, or whoever follows him, will throw that switch. When power is available to political leaders, they inevitably avail themselves of it. It’s just a question of time.

But there is another vision I have too. It has to do with America’s increasing international lawlessness and bellicosity.  As the nation turns increasingly to technology for its aggressive purposes, through the use of armed robotic drones, and through internet attacks on purported “enemies,” it not only opens the door to others to do the same to us; it virtually assures that we will be attacked ourselves in like manner to what we are doing.

It was one thing to be the world’s superpower when being a superpower meant having the biggest ICBMs and the most nuclear warheads — weapons that required an enormous military budget and a massive industrial base. Drone technology and internet “weapons” are something else altogether. As Israel has demonstrated with its Stuxnet virus, a very small nation can easily construct a weapon of tremendous destructive power.  Iran demonstrated its own capability in that area by using computer savvy to take control of a sophisticated US surveillance drone flying over its airspace, actually stealing it electronically, landing it, and now, apparently, back-engineering it. And remotely-piloted drones are not particularly complex technologically. Basic ones can be purchased off the shelf in any hobby shop.

How long will it be before foreign predator drones begin flying over US airspace, taking out targets without leaving any clue as to who was the attacker?  How long before other countries begin destroying American power systems, industrial sites or military command centers using internet-based computer viruses?

This is a game that many people can play, and I predict that it will not be long before we Americans will rue the day this country began playing it….”

Automating Totalitarianism in the Empire

01 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex

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“MQ-1 Predator drones kill civilians.” This great wall of screen printed street posters is up around the corner from my house.”

Humans love to automate their life. That’s why we have such things as cruise control in our vehicles, robotic assembly lines in factories and ATM machines at banks, to name a few examples. Then you have more insidious automating like algo trading or high frequency trading in the stock market, NSA/CIA/FBI data mining and collection, and Targeted Drone assassination. With our so-called Drone War, the assumption of innocence has been thrown out the window in favor of a George Zimmerman vigilante style assumption of guilt. Glenn Greenwald adds detail to this State Terrorism mindset here. This sort of power that Obama has assumed circumvents any form of trial by jury and issues of constitutionality and moral consciousness. It is also designed, whether intentionally or not, to strike fear into the world and inhibit/control people’s behavior. It’s a high-tech, automated form of totalitarianism which does not waste time on frivolities such as freedom of speech, criminal investigation, and the judicial process of ascertaining guilt or innocence. GLOBAL GUERRILLAS has a post on this:

The US President’s Hit List or “Death by PowerPoint”

Last Friday, I wrote a post on how:

  1. US national security agencies increasingly use computerized analysis of collected data to designate a person as an enemy combatant.
  2. The US currently uses non-judicial Presidential “hit lists” to simplify the killing of people (including US citizens) designated as enemy combatants.
  3. The US is rapidly increasing its use of drones to kill enemy combatants nearly anywhere in the world 24x7x365.

The scary part is that the combination of these trends is the path of least resistance to an automated totalitarianism.

For those of you out of the loop on what is going on, it probably seemed to be a bit of a stretch.  Particularly, the idea that the President could put American citizens on a military hit list without going through a judicial process.

If you were skeptical on the existence of a hit list, here’s an article from today’s (almost on cue) New York Times.

Some choice bits from the article.  It shows there are still humans in the loop, although the process used to nominate people (including Americans) to kill is largely ad hoc.

Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.

Obama … insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war.

Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people”

a disputed method for counting civilian casualties… counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials…

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

It [the hit list nomination process] is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al Qaeda.

Remember also that local police forces will be the recipients of the Drone technology America is using to obliterate those smarmy, suspicious-looking terrorists on the other side of the globe. Back in February, Congress passed Bill, HR 658 which will fund 30,000 DRONE UNMANNED AIRCRAFT for use inside America’s boundaries at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security. And the Drone lobbyists are out in full force on the Washington Beltway:

 

“The more our government, eased of any former legal moorings, abuses its position to maintain the edge of secrecy, the more it demands transparency of citizens. From naked body scans at airports, to urine samples, from the huge base being built to store our PERSONAL correspondences, to the “right” of government to listen in. I mean all this is STILL being sold to the Fox-viewing public under the banner of freedom!

……

We’ve crossed the rubicon where literature becomes reality, and the progeny of 1984, Kafka’s “The Trial,” and the Star Wars trilogy merge together into a dystopian display that no doubt is sending many to either anti-depressants, booze, or (undiagnosed symptoms of) Stockholm Syndrome. As the troops fight “them” over there, so they don’t have to fight “them” over here… and all for our FREEDOMS! The heists underway impact our liberties, pocketbooks, minds, and bodies!”

———

“Whenever “security forces” become overmighty they also become paranoid. Look at the Soviets; look at Hitler’s Germany. There were enemies everywhere, not least within.

More than this, however, is the chaotic nature of how the power forces within an autocracy evolve. In both Hitler’s Germany and Lenin’s Russia, sheer chaos played a major part – things get hot and sizzle off in unexpected directions.

In America the same forces are at work, but they are evolving in relation to a different set of political givens and a radically different technological environment. With current technology, Hitler or Stalin would have ruled the world in no time. There will be no coup, revolution, or Reichstag moment in America. It will be the world’s first auto-autocracy – a voluntary (or at least non-resistant) slide into a police state, in which everyone denies it is a police state. Naomi Wolf has all the details.”

Review of an Important Documentary

31 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex

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The following is a review of the documentary “The War You Don’t See” which I highly recommend seeing if you can find a copy. I originally wrote this for Media Roots, but never finished it. I have reworked it with edit suggestions by Abbey Martin. “The War You Don’t See” is not available in America. It was originally scheduled to debut at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico but was mysteriously cancelled at the last minute.

Review of John Pilger’s

“The War You Don’t See”

John Pilger’s powerful documentary, “The War You Don’t See,” explores what the media’s role has been during today’s rapacious wars, like those of Iraq and Afghanistan. What Pilger reveals is both frightening and sad: the so-called “Fourth Estate” of the media, once thought of as a bulwark against corruption in government and big business, is now no more than a cheerleader and mouthpiece for what has become the Corporate State.

Interviewing with western news reporters, Pilger questions the efficacy of today’s media in living up to its duty of critically analyzing the government narrative while providing unbiased information to the public. In response, he is met with exasperated replies like that of David Manion, editor in Chief of ITV news, who says, “I don’t think you are suggesting that we [the media] should completely dismiss the words of arguably the second most powerful man in the western world [Dick Cheney].”

Manion completely abdicates his responsibility of fact-finding when he states, “…we allowed the viewers to make up their [own] minds as to whether this[Cheney] was a man telling the truth or not.” With responses such as these, it becomes apparent that the Fourth Estate has been rendered a neutered servant to government/corporate power and agendas. 

Major media outlets have simply become unthinking stenographers of the ‘official word’, not daring to ask substantive or probing questions about government/social policy. Television, print, and radio have been reduced to hollow conduits through which runs the government/corporate PR machinery, continuously pumping out lies and spin in order to generate legitimacy for its criminal acts. Bradley Manning exposed the inner workings of this deception with his access to U.S. state department cables from embassies and consulates around the world:

The non-PR-versions of world events and crises …like everything from the buildup to the Iraq War during Powell, to the actual content of “aid packages”: for instance, PR that the US is sending aid to Pakistan includes funding for water/food/clothing… that much is true, it includes that, but the other 85% of it is for F-16 fighters and munitions to aid in the Afghanistan effort, so the US can call in Pakistanis to do aerial bombing instead of Americans potentially killing civilians and creating a PR crisis.

Edward Bernays, who coined the term ‘public relations’ and pioneered modern propaganda as a form of psychological warfare, declared once that “the intelligent manipulation of the masses is an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.” The ability of the U.S. to wield ‘soft power’ by way of effective propaganda techniques is ever-evolving, and the ability of the Corporate State to frame the public debate and spread the Big Lie through its control of the nation’s digital media stream has consequently dumbed down the public discourse on important subjects.

In speaking about the advancement of nonstop digital news feeds, British reporter Rageh Omar explains that “twenty-four hour news is the easiest to manipulate, because it’s a giant echo-chamber.”  Constant 24/7 repetition of the Big Lie all across the nation’s digital media stream ensures the successful brainwashing of the masses.

Author Chris Hedges experienced firsthand the mind-numbing shock of our corporatized culture when he moved back to America after having spent twenty years outside of it:

I remember when I was twenty years outside the United States, I moved back to New York City, and I was overwhelmed by the electronic hallucinations that bombarded me in my public and private space. And so, I retreated into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I could contemplate objects or paintings that didn’t move. You need to spend significant amounts of time with print material to grasp complex thoughts, and that requires silence. It requires an absence of noise. It requires an absence of moving images. And the less we do that, the more — the shallower or the more manipulated we become.

And those pulling the levers of the mass media machine are the über-wealthy and power elite who have one foot in government and the other in the corporate world. In their quest for profit and control, the reality and facts of the world are politically malleable tools.

Investigative journalist Mark Curtis explains that the relationships western governments cultivate with oppressive foreign regimes are accompanied by a sophisticated PR operation touting foreign policy objectives of “promoting democracy, human rights, and economic development.” However, these fake altruistic claims hide an insidious agenda. Actual government planning files clearly state the intended policy is based on “controlling oil resources, creating an international economy that works in the interests of corporations, and maintaining their power status.” If one looks at the current influx of multinational oil firms into Iraq, the intentions of military intervention are made obvious.

When investigative journalists report the truth, such as Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Charles J. Hanley who personally went to Iraq in 2003 and found no WMD after visiting every site named by Bush officials, they are simply blackballed and shut out of the mainstream media.

Of particular concern is the symbiotic relationship between the military industrial complex, driven by the profit-seeking objectives of corporations, and the major news conglomerates which, if not directly owned by military weapons manufacturers, receive advertising dollars from them. This intertwined relationship has been called the Military-Industrial-Media Complex. For instance, GE  happens to be one of the largest defense contractors in the world and owns NBC. Another example is Lockheed Martin, which spends large sums of money advertising on CNN.

In his book War made Easy, Normon Solomon explained that “a military-industrial-media complex … now extends to much of corporate media. … Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links — financial and social— with the military industry and Washington’s foreign policy establishment.”

Pilger adeptly illustrates this perverse alliance with a string of TV clips in which news commentators are seen gushing and fawning over the extreme efficiency and performance of various industrial-killing weaponry. This groveling self-worship within the military-media complex is especially disturbing when recalling the images shown earlier in the film of children’s limp bodies being pulled out of rubble from Afghan villages obliterated by hi-tech armaments. With the ongoing censorship of such massacres and the sanitizing of western news reporting, Americans have become desensitized and normalized to war. The fact that over a million Iraqis have been snuffed out is simply not reported in the MSM (mainstream media), nor the fact that Iraq’s infrastructure remains crumbling and destroyed from the invasion.

Professor Melvin Goodman, former CIA analyst, explains that “pentagon officials have contracts with news organizations in terms of how to manipulate the news” as well as “pentagon officials involved in press releases to the media in which intelligence is used to manipulate public opinion (a violation of the charter of any intelligence organization).” Goodman claims that 80-90% of what you hear and read is ‘officially inspired’, meaning influenced by the ‘official’ narrative of the government. With 90% of the media in the hands of six corporations, can there be any doubt that the majority of news emanating from the self-serving interests of the corporatocracy’s military-media complex is all-pervasive. The dawning of the twentieth century has seen propaganda from the Corporate State taking on a truly global initiative. There also exists a revolving door between top military brass and defense contractors, making conflicts of interest inevitable and systemic. The degree to which utter moral decay and corruption has overtaken the American Empire is emphasized in an interview Pilger conducts with Julian Assange, whose character assassination by the U.S. government is currently playing out in the news:

Assange: Looking at the enormous quantity and diversity of these military and intelligence insider documents… what I see is a vast, sprawling estate — what we would traditionally call the military intelligence complex or military industrial complex. And that this sprawling industrial estate is growing, becoming more and more secretive, becoming more and more uncontrolled.

This is not a sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top. This is a vast movement of self-interests by thousands and thousand of players all working together and against each other to produce an end result which is Iraq and Afghanistan and Columbia… and keeping that going…

We often deal with tax havens and people hiding assets and transferring money through off-shore tax havens. So I can see some really quite remarkable similarities. Guantanamo is used for laundering people to an off-shore haven, which doesn’t follow the rule of law. Similarly, Iraq and Afghanistan and Columbia are used to wash money out of the U.S. tax base and back in.

Pilger: Arms Companies

Assange: Arms Companies… yep.

Pilger: What you’re saying is money and money-making is at the center of modern war, and it’s almost self-perpetuating.

Assange: Yes, and it’s becoming worse.

The insanity behind America’s over-extended and bloated military war machine is highlighted when Pilger’s asks why the U.S. is in such a permanent state of war, when there is, in reality, no other country strong enough to stand up to it. The answer given by a government official to justify America’s never-ending militarism is “asymmetrical threats which transcend all geographic boundaries.” In other words, we wage war with an ever-shifting, nebulous enemy whom the Corporate State continually redefines. In reality, we create our own enemies to suit the interests of the elite who hold power. As the saying goes, state-sponsored war is simply terrorism with a bigger budget. The ‘War on Terror’ begets more of the same; it’s a self-perpetuating process. To quote Chalmer’s Johnson, “‘Blowback’ does not mean just revenge but rather retaliation for covert, illegal violence that our government has carried out abroad that it kept totally secret from the American public (even though such acts are seldom secret among the people on the receiving end).”

Carne Ross was the only official who expresses a higher form of moral consciousness in Pilger’s film when he states that he feels “actual shame running through [his] body” for what he did when working for the British government. He says, “…we should all be accountable to each other. That’s the only way to have a civilized society, with some kind of transparency and accountability with each other… with people holding others accountable for what they do, and that applies to journalists as much as it applies to anybody.”

In a world where resources are dwindling and the environment is showing clear signs of collapse, such a nihilistic war-mongering economy can only pull civilization down with it into chaos and barbarism. The remaining hope for mankind to survive the future and avoid the catastrophes of war and terrorism is for his ethical sense to evolve beyond what his scientific and technological capabilities have wrought. The war you don’t see is the true destructive and evil face of war whitewashed by a propaganda machine operating 24/7 to control and steer public sentiment in favor of underlying corporate interests. As Abraham Lincoln said, “He who molds the public sentiment… makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.” Pilger’s documentary is one of the most important to have come out in the last decade and is essential viewing for those who really want to better understand the machinations of the corporate-controlled political economy dominating our society.

Here is an entertaining video done by Diran Lyons using the art of political video remixing. Donnie Darko happens to be one of my all-time favorite films.

We Fight to support the Profiteers of War

30 Wednesday May 2012

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I’ll be off for several days. But before I go, I’ll post what Ted Rall says is Obama’s funniest quote:

“We hate war. When we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it’s necessary.”

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/05/28/remarks-president-commemoration-ceremony-50th-anniversary-vietnam-war

Harvesting the Slaves Down on the Plantation

29 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Corporate State, Inequality

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One of the more loathsome trends that has taken root since Neoliberal policies were embraced in the last few decades is the commodification of the imprisoned to line the pockets of prisons-for-profit corporations. In our deteriorating economy, this predatory business model has been a lucrative venture, especially for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) which is the largest Wall Street traded company of its kind extracting profit from our prison-industrial-complex.

With states desperate for cash, CCA has taken advantage of the situation and swooped in to offer this deal:

Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters recently to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for “challenging corrections budgets.” In exchange, the company is asking for a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Huffington Post.

The move reflects a significant shift in strategy for the private prison industry, which until now has expanded by building prisons of its own or managing state-controlled prisons. It also represents an unprecedented bid for more control of state prison systems….

And Corrections Corporation’s offer of $250 million toward purchasing existing state prisons is yet another avenue for potential growth. The company has billed the “corrections investment initiative” as a convenient option for states in need of fresh revenue streams: The state benefits from a one-time infusion of cash, while the prison corporation wins a new long-term contract. In addition, supporters of prison privatization have argued that states can achieve cost savings through outsourcing, as prison corporations give fewer benefits to employees.

“We believe this comes at a timely and helpful juncture and hope you will share our belief in the benefits of the purchase-and-manage model,” reads the letter from Harley Lappin, CCA’s chief corrections officer, who was a former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

CCA made almost 2 billion in profits in 2010.

You can bet that when such a capitalist model gets applied to the handling and rehabilitation of prisoners, strange things happen. Louisiana is one state that has embraced the prisons-for-profit business model at the local level. Charles Blow’s article in the New York Times entitled “Plantations, Prisons, & Profits” talks about a devastating eight-part series published in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and identifying Louisiana as the prison capital of the planet. Here are some shocking facts:

“Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.”

• One in 86 Louisiana adults is in the prison system, which is nearly double the national average.

• More than 50 percent of Louisiana’s inmates are in local prisons, which is more than any other state. The next highest state is Kentucky at 33 percent. The national average is 5 percent.

• Louisiana leads the nation in the percentage of its prisoners serving life without parole.

• Louisiana spends less on local inmates than any other state.

• Nearly two-thirds of Louisiana’s prisoners are nonviolent offenders. The national average is less than half.

The incarceration statutes in that state were purposefully strengthened (10 years for writing a bad check) so as to keep the prison cells full and the revenue stream from state tax dollars flowing in. Consequently, more money is spent on imprisonment, thereby leaving less funds available for prisoner rehabilitation programs. The for-profit incarceration business is thus assured a steady stream of profit from a revolving door of recidivism.

Louisiana is the starkest, most glaring example of how our prison policies have failed. It showcases how private prisons do not serve the public interest and how the mass incarceration as a form of job creation is an abomination of justice and civility and creates a long-term crisis by trying to create a short-term solution.

As the paper put it: “A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.”

Prisons-for-profit appear to be the new gulags of America:

Today, the U.S. prison system delivers profits to both government corporations and private enterprises in several ways:
1) Through the use of inmate labor to produce goods and services in federal and state prisons
2) Through the contracting of this labor to private companies at below-market wages and
3) By privatization of the prisons and detainment centers themselves. Given these perverse incentives to maintain a high inmate population, is it any wonder that the number of prisoners and the length of their sentences — Americans comprise 5 percent of the world’s total population but 25 percent of the world’s prison population — have skyrocketed since privatization began in 1984?

Number of inmates. 1920 to 2006.[1][2] (absolute numbers) General U.S. population grew only 2.8 times in the same period, but the number of inmates increased more than 20 times.

Obama: Figurehead for the Corporatocracy

28 Monday May 2012

Posted by in Corporate State, Empire, Inequality

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The Presidency is a figurehead position for American Empire which constitutes a conglomerate of corporations(examples and more examples, and also here) backed up by our global network of military bases. When it comes to the desires and well-being of the average Joe in America’s hinterland (everywhere else outside the “Washington Beltway”), the Presidency merely serves as a glorified public spokesman for the monied elite, just as the election process was about empty PR to win that corporate-collaborator government position. And to help the Commander-in-Chief orchestrate this massive con job of pulling the wool over the collective eyes of the nation’s 99%, he has the help of a servile corporate mass media which, for the most part, acts as a mouthpiece for the various corporate industrial complexes— military, financial, energy, food, pharmaceutical, prison, etc. The greatest con job by the American ruling elite over the last several decades was convincing and fooling the 99% that they live in a “classless society” and that Neoliberal Capitalism was not robbing them blind. If you view the scripted charade, faux democracy politics of today in this harsh light of reality, then you won’t be so disappointed by all the campaign promises that not only failed to materialize, but which went in the complete opposite direction of the very propaganda we were sold.

Take for instance the widening wealth gap in America which at this time is as large and deep as the Grand Canyon. How did Obama live up to his pre-election rhetoric of the defender of the average working stiff?:

Saez, who’s known for his work on the income gap, has highlighted a surprising and discouraging fact: during the post-recession period of 2009 and 2010, the rich snagged a greater share of total income growth than they did during the boom years of 2002 to 2007.

In other words, inequality has been even more pronounced under Obama than it was under George W. Bush….

Here’s how Saez’s math breaks down, for the curious: In the 2009-2010 period, a time of modest economic growth, the top 1 percent of U.S. earners captured 93 percent of all the income growth in the country.

Got that? Now compare it to how the mega-rich made out during the Bush upswing years of 2002 to 2007. During that time, the top 1 percent of earners captured just 65 percent of all the income growth.

That means the rising tide has lifted fewer boats during the Obama years — and the ones it’s lifted have been mostly yachts.

How about his promises of safeguarding the economy from monopolization and financialization by the “Too-Big-To-Fail” Banks?

According to Bloomberg:

Five banks – JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Bank of America Corp. (BAC), Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. – held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, equal to 56 percent of the U.S economy, according to central bankers at the Federal Reserve.

Five years earlier, before the financial crisis, the largest banks’ assets amounted to 43 percent of U.S. output. The Big Five today are about twice as large as they were a decade ago relative to the economy, sparking concern that trouble at a major bank would rock the financial system and force the government to step in as it did in 2008 with the Fed-assisted rescue of Bear Stearns Cos. By JPMorgan and with Citigroup and Bank of America after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the largest in U.s. history.

‘Market participants believe that nothing has changed, that too-big-to-fail is fully intact,” said Gary Stern, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

How about his record in other areas of policy? Let’s look at a list compiled by author Albert Bates:

“Obama, in 2008 the outsider, in 2012 must defend a governing record that looks like George W. Bush on steroids:
  • Suppression of news of serious war-crimes, including assassination of war correspondents, by prosecution of whistle-blowers like Bradley Manning and Julian Assange
  • Corruption of the Justice Department, NSA, FBI and CIA to cover an ongoing criminal enterprise involving some $5 trillion in long-term graft from no-bid contracts going to the 1% — $50,000 per average US family, being extracted in taxes, inflation, bank defaults, student loans and diminished public services
  • Conspiring with local police and mayors to quash and evict the Occupy movement
  • Pursuing murderous US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Orwellian opposition  to international law
  • Expanding US wars and armed attacks into more and more countries, despite treaties after both world wars that make use of military unlawful unless a country’s government attacks first (Kellogg-Briand and UN Charter)
  • Expanding terrorist-by-definition drone wars on Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen (now spending more on drone operations than the entire budget of the CIA)
  • Calling for more illegal wars on Syria and Iran while darkly hinting of an official first strike policy for use of nuclear weapons
  • Torpedoing the nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament negotiations and ramping up new nuclear weapon design, testing, and deployment
  • Suppression of news from Fukushima, including ordering EPA to halt air and food sampling and working with other countries towards the same ends
  • Assassination of Americans upon the non-reviewable dictate of the president
  • Maintaining the Bush-era torture prisons and black sites
  • Maintaining illegal rendition as official policy
  • Control-drown/waterboarding anyone deemed a “terrorist” and extending sensory deprivation to local jails and State prisons despite all US and international case law finding this to be torture
  • NDAA 2012 and 2006 Military Commissions Act that state the president can dictate any person as a “terrorist suspect,” and then disappear them without challenge or recourse
  • Signing presidential executive order saying the US government can seize any resource, any person, at any time for “national defense”
  • Minting his own Alberto Gonzales continuing criminal enterprise rubber stamp — Eric Holder
  • Siding with Exxon, BP and the Koch brothers to accelerate climate- and ocean-destroying pollution; and
  • Torpedoing the climate talks in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban. “

If I remember correctly, Obama ran as a Left-wing Progressive, a populist to change the system. Looking at his record since taking office, you would have to conclude that the Far Right is the New Left. …and the Left of yesteryear is certainly long since dead, suffocated and murdered by the Corporate State over the last several decades. Don’t take this rant as an endorsement for Romney, aka Mr. 1%… The Right has gone so far in that direction that they’ve fallen off a cliff.