Airports: Surrender All Liberty, Ye Who Enter By Me

Wasn't it great in the holiday season to enjoy friends, family, good meals... and, of course, being radiated or groped at the airport security line.

Authorities have spent billions of our tax dollars on airport technology and agents, supposedly to catch terrorists. But the system amounts to a governmental intrusion that is based on a fundamentally un-American presumption: you are guilty until you proven innocent. The founders – who faced the terrorists of their day – would upchuck at out leaders' willingness to so meekly sacrifice the basic right of the presumption of innocence.

And how do you prove you are NOT a fiendish terrorists hellbent on destroying America? By meekly surrendering the very freedoms that the authorities say actual terrorists want to take from us. First, remove your shoes – a mass bowing-down gesture that must cause terrorists to giggle with fervent delight. Now, though, we must also submit either to being groped or to having a radiation scan that lets agents peek beneath your skivvies. The scan, appropriately enough, requires you to raise both hands in the surrender position.

The authoritarians and their apologists bark that liberty is a privilege that must be sacrificed for security. As one writer of a letter-to-the-editor put it: "I say scan away and grope away if that makes flying safer." Well, sir, that turns out to be a mighty big "if."

The chief flaw in our present technology-based security scheme is that it doesn't do any good. Hundreds of millions of passengers have been searched, and the system has yet to catch even one terrorist. In fact, the few would-be terrorists who've even attempted an airplane assault were hapless nincompoops who were not deterred by our vast security system, but were brought down by their own incompetence or by alert passengers.

How long will Lady Liberty be forced to bow down to autocratic government rules that aren't working?
(c) 2011 Jim Hightower's latest book, "If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates," is available in a fully revised and updated paperback edition.

The Healing Dance Of The Ye'ii Bi' Cheii
By James Donahue

The aboriginals don’t always dance for the pure joy of movement. The dances are part of the ritual of daily and religious life. A casual observer watching the dancing, however, is left with no doubt that the participants and even the watchers are having a good time.

It was during the winter of 1995-96 that my wife Doris and I lived with a Navajo medicine man and his wife on the Navajo reservation in northeast Arizona. We came to learn about the culture and experience the ways of the people on the reservation. We were well received by hour hosts and treated to many strange and memorable experiences. One night we had the privilege of attending a dance of the Ye’ii Bi’cheii (pronounced Yea-Bee-Jay). It was a strange ritual among an intricate web of dancers and chanters who worked to heal two men who were going deaf.

This is a ritual rarely observed by outsiders so it was a special honor when we were invited. While among a large crowd of Navajo men, women and children, we noted that we were the only white visitors attending. I believe the invitation was given after we proved in word and deed to our hosts that we were truly interested in learning about the Navajo culture, and we were not hostile to native belief systems that went beyond the bounds of the white man’s Christian oriented world.

The dance had been going on for eight consecutive nights before we arrived. We came on the final night. This was a time when the dancers appeared in full regalia, wearing eerie costumes that gave them an alien appearance in the light of the large bonfires surrounding the dance area. The dancing began at about midnight and continued until dawn.

The dance was held at an isolated place, miles from any sign of civilization. To get there, we drove a maze of dirt trails, all cut so deeply in the dry red desert clay that at times the car headlights gave us a feeling that we were moving through a tunnel. At last, we arrived at an isolated Navajo house. The dancers were gathered around a nearby Hogan. Several large bonfires already were lighting the sky in a nearby field.

Ye’ii Bi’cheii dances are held during the winter months. We were there in January. Even though this was Arizona, the high desert where the Navajo live, at an altitude of about 7,000 feet, gets bitterly cold. We came bundled for the cold. I was wearing thermal underwear, dungarees, a heavy wool shirt, a thin winter coat, and over this, a thick winter goose down coat. Gloves and a wool scarf wrapped around my ears and neck, and a leather western style hat covered my head. Even with this, I found comfort standing close to the bonfires.

We were warned that we were attending a most solemn event. Yet there was no doubt that the people present lacked all the reverence they were supposed to have. There was an air of gaiety and celebration, as if the people were gathering on any street in America to watch a parade. They brought folding chairs, wrapped themselves in brightly colored Navajo blankets, and munched on hot-dogs, hamburgers and fry bread. The food was sold at two portable concession stands.

Before the dancers appeared, children laughed and played tag games along the edge of the dance field, sometimes dashing out into the arena, a place considered sacred. Although a forbidden thing for the children to be doing, the parents overlooked their antics. Once the dancing began, however, the children sat quietly, paying respect to the sacredness of the event.

Something was going on inside the Hogan. We could hear a number of men chanting around a hot burning fire. The smoke and burning cinders occasionally flew upward through a hole in the center of the roof. Suddenly a blanket over the door was thrown back and the two men who were being healed walked out, each wrapped in personal blankets.

They stood in the arena on a large furry buffalo hide. Out of the darkness emerged a line of Ye’ii Bi’cheii. These mythical beings, according to Navajo legend, are something comparable to powerful demons in the Christian realm. They had the power to do terrible things, even kill. But if appeased in a special way, the Ye’ii Bi’cheii also can heal and bring benefit to those who knew how to ask.

The first line of dancers, all men, walked in single file. They wore brightly colored kilts, much like the Scots wear, only brighter. Also like the Scots, they wore matching purses with leather straps slung over their shoulders. Had it not been for the head piece, one might expect these men to be marching to the sound of bagpipes instead of native drums.

The kilts were short, stopping just above the knees. The dancers wore tan leather boots that came up over their calves. At their back, fox pelts hung from the waist. In each right hand was a large rattle made of gourds. The men’s bare skin at the chest was dabbed with white clay that made them appear ghostly and somewhat surreal. The head pieces were turquoise, oval and distorted. They appeared to be made of clay and covered the entire head. Tiny slits were cut for the eyes and at the bottom of what should have been the face hung a large dark purple bulb looking much like a clown’s nose, except that it was squared off at the tip.

Leading this strange lineup was the camelback, another mystical being depicted on Native American art throughout the southwest. This strange fellow was bent over, with his back arched. A line of feathers decorated his body from head to feet. We were told that his appearance was an extremely rare event and we were honored to be allowed to see him. I have yet to understand the significance of his showing.

Yet another odd character trailed the line of dancers. He was a true clown. The Hopi call this odd fellow a Qaletaqa, or Guardian. He is always a member of the Coyote Clan. His mask was white and his head was adorned with a spray of eagle feathers. He was dressed in dungarees. A bright blanket was wrapped over his shoulders. It was soon apparent, after watching his antics that this character’s purpose was to distract the minds of the watchers. It was a form of crowd control, so that collective mental energy would not interfere with the magical work going on in the center of the arena. This little guy, probably no older than a boy of 16, grabbed people’s hats, flirted with the ladies, and caused as much silent ruckus as possible without interrupting the dance.

There was a ritual that went on, in constant repetition, throughout the night. The line of dancers first stopped in front of the two men who were being healed. A medicine man spent about 15 minutes or longer chanting prayers, while the dancers stood in cold silence. I shivered from the cold and I was next to a fire, bundled up for the Arctic. I marveled that the dancers could stand quietly in the cold that long, wearing nothing more than a thin clay lining.

When the prayers were over, the two patients blessed the dancers by sprinkling a powder of crushed corn meal over them. Once blessed, the dancers began shaking their rattles in stiff, forward arm movements, creating a strange beat. At this, the dancers began chanting and moving around in unified single steps.

I call it dancing for lack of a better term. Each participant moved in stilted, controlled steps, feet sliding sideways in perfect unison. Almost like marching. Arms bend rigid, they swung forward and backward more like mechanical dolls would move. The chanting and rattles created the beat by which the dancers moved against the flickering firelight.

The Ye’ii Bi’cheii continued circling the arena four times before coming to a stop. Then the dancers began walking off into the night as if they were about to leave. Suddenly they stopped, turned around, and returned in single file back to where they started. Again the two patients blessed them with a sprinkling of corn, and the ritual was repeated. This continued for four consecutive times. Then the dancers disappeared into the darkness.

More prayers were chanted in the Hogan. Then more dancers appeared, and the same ritual was repeated. It was impossible to tell if they were the same dancers or new ones. This continued throughout the night until dawn. At one time, young girls joined the male dancers. They, like the men, wore turquoise masks, although their masks were not quite as grotesque. The girls, who were probably all in their early teens, wore black dresses with bright red symbols. They had bright belts with silver inlay around their waists, and they wore white boots. Their appearance was a colorful addition to the night’s event. We learned that women rarely appear in Ye’iiBi’cheii dances. I had the distinct feeling that we were being entertained as special guests.

The ritual affected all of us. One can watch films of such dancing and listen to taped versions of the chants, but until you are there to personally see it, one cannot sense the power of the ritual. Doris and I were stunned by the power and beauty of what we were allowed to see that night.

There is a story among the Navajo that the dancers must keep their lives in order both prior to and for many days following a Ye’ii Bi’cheii ceremony. Any infraction of the rule could cause the illness removed from the sick patient to fall upon the violator.

Did the ceremony really heal the deaf men?

When I asked this aloud an elderly gentleman standing next to me answered: “How many Navajo do you see wearing hearing aids?”
(c) 2011 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles. He currently produces daily articles for this web site.

A "Pledge of Resistance" To Defend Social Security And Defund The Empire
By Robert Naiman

For the third time in the last 20 years, establishment voices, with high-profile slots in traditional media, are trying to convince the public to accept cuts to Social Security by endlessly claiming such cuts are necessary without giving coherent evidence to justify the claim. Twice, under President Clinton and the second President Bush, these voices were defeated. But they didn't give up. And now they are in striking distance of their goal: the fact that Republicans have taken over the House, combined with the fact that the President appointed a deficit reduction commission which nearly recommended a cut in Social Security benefits, and might well have done so if Rep. Schakowsky hadn't worked to undermine the co-chairs' plan, means that one can't be complacent; some reports have suggested that the President may indicate support for cuts to Social Security in his State of the Union speech. Of the two principal Washington political actors who will shape the outcome - the Republican leadership and the President's team - one is a determined adversary of the public interest, the other a very uncertain ally. The most successful anti-poverty program in U.S. history is again in grave danger.

Twenty years ago, Social Security was called the "third rail" of U.S. politics. Touch it, you die. But it turned out that was not true. The Establishment greedheads were not, in fact, afraid to try to mess with this wildly popular program. Maybe Wall Street political power is the third rail.

In these two decades, Social Security hasn't been the third rail. Instead, it's been the Grey Goose of folk song legend. The knife couldn't cut him and the fork couldn't stick him. Try as they might, they couldn't kill him. Can the Grey Goose survive the next assault?

You might think that this would be the worst time to try to cut Social Security, with 10% measured unemployment, with many people's private savings having been wiped out first in the stock market collapse and then with the collapse in house prices. You might think is a great time to remember why we have Social Security: because it's secure. Housing bubbles and stock market bubbles may inflate and burst, industries that paid living wages may be shipped to Mexico and China, but since the program was established during the Great Depression, Social Security has never failed to pay scheduled benefits.

But this reality is being turned upside down. The presence of unnecessary suffering is being used not as an argument to alleviate suffering, but as an argument for creating more unnecessary suffering. "We all have to make sacrifices in these difficult times," although of course the people at the top of the income and wealth distribution - in particular, the high rolling gamblers on Wall Street who brought down the economy - are not being asked to make any sacrifices.

So far, the public has not yet been rolled. In a new 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll, asked >O?"what would you do first," 61%? say raise taxes on the wealthy. Twenty percent say cut military spending. Three percent say cut Social Security.

If there were ever an issue and a time that seemed ripe for militant protest, this should be the issue and the time. It's the broad public vs. the establishment, and for the establishment to win, they seek an environment of unquestioning obedience, like in the Milgrom experiment, where people obey instructions to subject someone to torture (so they think) because that's what Authority says to do. As in the Milgrom experiment, a little bit of protest can go a long way to disrupt the power of Authority, because intuitively, most people know that what Authority is saying is wrong. Authority says we have to accept Social Security cuts. It ain't so.

In the 1980s, during Reagan's war in Central America, there was a movement called the Pledge of Resistance. The basic idea was that you sign a pledge that if Reagan invades Nicaragua, you're willing to get arrested in mass civil disobedience. Of course, people involved in the Pledge of Resistance did not just sit around waiting for Reagan to invade Nicaragua to take action. They lobbied Congress to cut off funding for the US-organized Contra terrorists who were killing Nicaraguan civilians; they wrote letters to the editor; they gave talks in church basements; they organized material aid to Nicaragua; they opposed Reagan's air war in El Salvador and US military aid to the death squad government there. The pledge was to "resist" US "intervention" in Central America by all the nonviolent means at our disposal. But the willingness to participate in mass arrests in the event of a US ground invasion was a fundamental animating idea.

We need a Pledge of Resistance now to defend Social Security from cuts to benefits, including raising the normal retirement age. If Members of Congress know that if they refuse to pledge to vote against cuts to Social Security, their district offices are going to be occupied, that they and their staffs are going to be dogged at every public appearance, that their names are going to be mud in local media, support for cutting Social Security will evaporate.

Moreover, a Pledge to Resist cuts to Social Security will allow local activists to force a national discussion which traditional, establishment media have so far largely excluded: the one in which proposed cuts in domestic spending and proposed military spending are examined on the same chalkboard, so everyone can see and discuss the trade-offs that are implicit in the choices that are being proposed. This will allow anti-war activists to pursue the Holy Grail of anti-war activism: connecting the cost of the endless war with cuts in domestic spending for human needs.

There are two ways to think about Social Security. One way is to recognize that Social Security is a separately funded program with its own dedicated tax stream and its own Social Security-tax funded Trust Fund. According to this way of thinking, there is absolutely no urgency to do anything about Social Security in terms of the budget, because without touching the system at all it is projected to be able to pay scheduled benefits through 2037, and if revenue adjustments are needed before then there is plenty of time to enact them, and it would be far more sensible to consider doing so after the economy has recovered.

The other way to think about it is that there is one government budget which collects all the taxes and pays out all the expenses. According to this view, the (combined) government deficit is too big, and although Social Security is not the cause of projected deficits, nonetheless Social Security is a good place to cut.

But, in the second view, in which the advertised goal is to cut the deficit in the combined budget, there's nothing magic about Social Security that indicates that it's an especially worthy place to seek cuts, except the fact that some folks are just looking for any pretext to cut it, and these same folks want to protect other parts of the combined budget, like the spectacularly bloated military budget that funds their beloved Empire, from any meaningful cuts. You will notice that op-eds and editorials demanding cuts to Social Security typically will omit the crucial fact of how much money will be saved by the proposed cuts; still more they will typically omit any consideration of what cuts elsewhere in the budget - like the military budget - would achieve the same savings, while leaving Social Security alone.

Consider, for example, proposals to raise the normal retirement age. How much would that save? How else could we save the same amount of money?

On September 29, the Washington Post editorial board - Fox on 15th Street - expressed outrage that President Obama, as portrayed in Bob Woodward's book, "repeatedly cites the cost of the war and the need to shift resources to domestic priorities," despite the fact, the Post assured us, that "spending on Afghanistan is well below 1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product." Thus, for the Washington Post, when considering the war, spending of less than 1% of US GDP is not a big deal.

At the time, I asked economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research how much then-current proposals to raise the Social Security retirement age would save. He said they would save about 0.7% of GDP. For example, a proposal to raise the retirement age to 70 by 2040 would save $155 billion by 2020. [This is shown in CEPR's Deficit Reduction Calculator.] Thus, less than 1% of GDP is not a big deal when it is spending for the war that the Washington Post supports, but it is a very needed savings when it comes to proposals for cutting Social Security benefits by raising the normal retirement age, a proposal that the Washington Post - Fox on 15th Street - supports.

This is not a mere rhetorical point. In the next few months, the Obama Administration is expected to make a decision about the war that is likely to dramatically affect its future cost: how fast to draw down troops from the military escalation President Obama ordered a year ago.

The rough estimate is that it costs about a billion dollars, all told, to put 1000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a year. Right now, there are 100,000 U.S. troops, for an annual cost of about $100 billion.

Consider two scenarios for 2012-2014.

In scenario one, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan until 2014 remains about the same as it is today, for a total cost of $300 billion over 2012-2014.

In scenario two, starting July 1, U.S. forces in Afghanistan are drawn down over the next year so that when President Obama runs for re-election in mid-2012, they are at roughly the same level as when he took office, about 40,000. They remain at roughly this level - about the same level as we currently have in Iraq - until the U.S. fully hands off responsibility for security in Afghanistan to a Karzai-Taliban power-sharing government at the end of 2014.

Even putting to the side all the savings past 2014 that scenario two would imply if there are zero U.S. troops there at the end of 2014, as opposed to tens of thousands of troops, and also ignoring reduced future costs for veterans' health care, scenario two would save about $150 billion over 2012-2014 compared to scenario one.

By comparison, cutting Social Security benefits by lowering the cost of living adjustment as called for by the co-chairs of the President's deficit commission would save about $70 billion by 2020, Dean Baker says. The co-chairs' proposal to raise the retirement age wouldn't even go into effect until 2027, so no savings from that would be seen for 17 years.

So, far from being uninformed, the public opinion to cut military spending rather than Social Security makes much more sense than the position of the Washington Post editorial board.

But what makes most sense won't necessarily carry the day, if a media jihad for cutting Social Security isn't disrupted. We need to disrupt the Milgrom experiment for throwing Grandma off the bus. If you would sign a Pledge to Resist cuts in Social Security benefits, tell us in the comments.
© 2011 Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy.

The 2010 "Are You Serious?" Awards
By Conn Hallinan

The Harry Potter Award to the British technology company ATSC Ltd for its invention of a “wand” that, according to the company, detects explosives, drugs, and human remains for up to six miles by air and three fifths of a mile by land. The ADE 651 sells for $16,000 a unit.

The only problem is that it doesn’t work, which users might have figured out by reading the manual: the device has no batteries or internal parts. It is powered by “static electricity” generated by the holder walking in place. A wand-like antenna then points to the drugs, bodies, or explosives.

This past January ATSC Ltd was charged with fraud and banned by the British government. One ATSC source told the New York Times, “Everyone at ATSC knew that there was nothing inside the ADE 651,” and that the units cost only $250 to make.

But the wand was widely used in Iraq. Ammar Tuma, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s Security and Defense Committee, bitterly attacked the company for causing “grave and massive losses of the lives of innocent Iraqi civilians, by the hundreds and the thousands, from attacks we thought we were immune to because we have this device.” The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior purchased 800 ADE 651s at a cost of $85 million.

The managing director of ATSC, Jim McCormack, staunchly defended the wand, which he claims the company has sold to 20 countries. He did admit, “one of the problems is that the machine looks primitive,” and said the company was turning out an upgraded model “that has flashing lights.”

Runner-up for this award was the British firm, Global Technology Ltd, which sold $10 million worth of very similar wand—the GT 200—to Mexico. The unit retails for $20,000 apiece. In one demonstration the GT 200 detected drugs in a Volkswagen sedan. After thoroughly searching the car, authorities turned up a bottle of Tylenol (suggesting that one should switch to Advil). Human Rights Watch says it is “troubled” by the use of the wand, which is widely used in Thailand and Mexico. “If people are actually being arrested and charged solely on the basis of its readings, that would be outrageous,” the group said in a press release.

A Mexican interior official defended the GT-200, however, claiming that it “works with molecules.” Hard to argue with science.

The Golden Lemon Award goes to the Conservative government of Canada for shelling out $8.5 billion to buy 65 Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters. According to Defense Minister Peter MacKay, “This multi-role stealth fighter will help the Canadian forces defend the sovereignty of Canadian airspace.” Exactly whom that airspace is being defended from is not clear.

The contract also includes a $6.6 billion maintenance agreement, which is a good thing because the F-35 has a number of “problems.” For instance, its engine shoots out sparks, and no one can figure out why. It is generally thought a bad idea for an engine to do that. There are several different types of F-35, and the vertical lift version of the aircraft doesn’t work very well. It seems the fan that cools the engine, doesn’t, and the panels that open for the vertical thrust, don’t. Also switches, valves and power systems are considered “unreliable.”

The F-35 is looking more and more like the old F-105 Thunderchief, a fighter-bomber used extensively at the beginning of the Vietnam War. Pilots nicknamed it the “Thud” (the sound the plane made when it hit the ground after failing to clear a runway, a rather common occurrence). One pilot said it had all the agility of a “flying brick,” thus its other nickname: the “lead sled.”

The U.S. is spending $382 billion to buy 2,457 F-35s, although the price tag keeps going up as more and more “problems” develop. Maintenance and spare parts for the aircraft will run several hundred billion extra.

One normally thinks of Canadians as sensible, but the country’s Conservative government is apparently as thickheaded as our own. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently had a summit meeting on the Arctic and didn’t invite the Inuit (whom most Americans call Eskimos).

Well, the F-35 may not fly very well, but it works just fine for Lockheed Martin: second quarter profits saw a jump from $727 million to $731 million over last year, and revenues rose to $11.44 billion, 3 percent over last year.

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The Panjandrum Award to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. For those unfamiliar with the “Great Panjandrum,” it was an enormous rocket-propelled explosive wheel developed by Great Britain for breaching the Atlantic Wall that Nazi Germany had built on the French coast to defend against amphibious invasions. Tested on a Devon beach, it roared ashore, turned smartly to port, and thundered into a bevy of admirals and generals, scattering them hither and yon. Thus “Panjandrum” became a metaphor for really silly military ideas.

And there is not a whole lot sillier idea than the one to deploy M1-Abrams tanks in southern Afghanistan. The M1 is a 68-ton behemoth, powered by a jet engine (miles per gallon is not its strong point). Since Afghanistan has virtually no roads and a good deal of the terrain is vertical—at least the part where the insurgents are ensconced—how the M1 is going to get around is not obvious.

However, one U.S. Marine officer told the Washington Post, “The tanks bring awe, shock and firepower. It’s pretty significant.” Right. Show the Wogs a tank and they will be begging for mercy.

Except the Taliban are quite familiar with tanks. The initial Soviet invasion included 1,800 of them, many of them T-72s. The T-72 is admittedly smaller than the Abrams—41 1/2 tons vs. 68 tons—but the former actually packed a bigger gun. The M1 sports a 120mm gun, the T-72 a 125 mm gun. T-72 carcasses are scattered all over Afghanistan, and the Taliban even managed to capture some of them.

Tanks are effective against stationary targets and other tanks. The Taliban don’t have tanks, and they don’t stick around when one shows up. But shocked and awed by their appearance? Don’t these people read history? Try “The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan,” by Lester Grau.

The George Orwell Award to the U.S. Defense Department for dropping the name of “Psychological Operations”—“Psyops” for short—because the “term can sound ominous.” Instead Psyops will now be known as Military Information Support Operation, or MISO, which sounds like a Japanese soup.

Some military contractors, however, apparently didn’t get the memo about using names and acronyms that sound “ominous.” Northrop Grumman just successfully tested a radar system that will be attached to Predator and Reaper armed drones to allow the killer robots to “detect individuals walking over a wide area” and track vehicles, watercraft, people, and animals, as well as “stationary targets of interest.” Given that the drones pack Hellfire missiles and 500 lb. bombs, you really don’t want to be “interesting” when they are around.

The news system is called the “Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar” or “Vader” for short. Sound of heavy breathing are not included in the basic package.

The Rudyard Kipling Award to the Pentagon and its program to train officers for extended service in Afghanistan. For those unclear on this award, a few lines from Kipling’s poem, “Arithmetic on the Frontier” about Britain’s unsuccessful effort to subdue Afghanistan, and how one adds up the cost of occupation:

A scrimmage in a Border Station--
A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education
Drop to a ten-rupee jezail•

It is comforting to know that there are other legislators in the world just as wacko as U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn), who recently suggested that legislators “slit their wrists in a blood pact” to block health reform and said that people had to be “armed and dangerous” to block efforts to mitigate global warming.
© 2011 Conn Hallinan writes the column Dispatches From the Edge.

The Cynical War On Public Sector Workers

But mainly, it’s a great distraction. Those who rig the system and reward themselves would rather that workers fought among themselves than focused their anger upwards.
(c)2011 Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

Deep Hole Economics

So back to my original point: whatever the recent economic news, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole. We can only hope that enough policy makers understand that point.
(c) 2011 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

The Quotable Quote...

‘The Left Has Nowhere To Go’

“The black swan question is whether something will erupt that is rare, extreme and unpredictable,” Nader said. “It is amazing that it hasn’t happened in any pockets of the country. How much more can the oppressed take before they revolt? And can they revolt without organizers? These are the two important questions. You have got to have organizers, and as of now we don’t.”
(c) 2011 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His latest book is, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."

Happy New Year, 2030

Thanks, Fool.
(c) 2011 David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles, but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

The Dead Letter Office...

Fred gives the Corpo-rat salute!

A New Year's Resolution For The Rich
By Sam Harris

While the United States has suffered the worst recession in living memory, I find that I have very few financial concerns. Many of my friends are in the same position: Most of us attended private schools and good universities, and we will be able to provide these same opportunities to our own children. No one in my immediate circle has a family member serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, the only sacrifice we were asked to make for our beloved country was to go shopping. Nearly a decade has passed, with our nation's influence and infrastructure crumbling by the hour, and yet those of us who have been so fortunate as to actually live the American dream--rather than merely dream it--have been spared every inconvenience. Now we are told that we will soon receive a large tax cut for all our troubles. What is the word for the feeling this provokes in me? Imagine being safely seated in lifeboat, while countless others drown, only to learn that another lifeboat has been secured to take your luggage to shore...

Most Americans believe that a person should enjoy the full fruits of his or her labors, however abundant. In this light, taxation tends to be seen as an intrinsic evil. It is worth noting, however, that throughout the 1950's--a decade for which American conservatives pretend to feel a harrowing sense of nostalgia--the marginal tax rate for the wealthy was over 90 percent. In fact, prior to the 1980's it never dipped below 70 percent. Since 1982, however, it has come down by half. In the meantime, the average net worth of the richest 1 percent of Americans has doubled (to $18.5 million), while that of the poorest 40 percent has fallen by 63 percent (to $2,200). Thirty years ago, top U.S. executives made about 50 times the salary of their average employees. In 2007, the average worker would have had to toil for 1,100 years to earn what his CEO brought home between Christmas in Aspen and Christmas on St. Barthes.

We now live in a country in which the bottom 40 percent (120 million people) owns just 0.3 percent of the wealth. Data of this kind make one feel that one is participating in a vast psychological experiment: Just how much inequality can free people endure? Have you seen Ralph Lauren's car collection? Yes, it is beautiful. It also cost hundreds of millions of dollars. "So what?" many people will say. "It's his money. He earned it. He should be able to do whatever he wants with it." In conservative circles, expressing any doubt on this point has long been synonymous with Marxism.

And yet over one million American children are now homeless. People on Medicare are being denied life-saving organ transplants that were routinely covered before the recession. Over one quarter of our nation's bridges are structurally deficient. When might be a convenient time to ask the richest Americans to help solve problems of this kind? How about now?

It is easy to understand why even the most generous person might be averse to paying taxes: Our legislative process has been hostage to short-term political interests and other perverse incentives for as long as anyone can remember. Consequently, our government wastes an extraordinary amount of money. It also seems uncontroversial to say that whatever can be best accomplished in the private sector should be. Our tax code must also be reformed--and it might even be true that the income tax should be lowered on everyone, provided we find a better source of revenue to pay our bills. But I can't imagine that anyone seriously believes that the current level of wealth inequality in the United States is good and worth maintaining, or that our government's first priority should be to spare a privileged person like myself the slightest hardship as this once great nation falls into ruin.

And the ruination of the United States really does seem possible. It has been widely reported, for instance, that students in Shanghai far surpass our own in science, reading, and math. In fact, when compared to other countries, American students are now disconcertingly average (slightly below in math), where the average includes utopias like Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Albania, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia. President Obama was right to recognize this as a "Sputnik moment." But it is worse than that. This story was immediately followed by a report about giddy Creationists in the state of Kentucky being offered $40 million in tax subsidies to produce a full-scale model of Noah's ark. More horrible still, this ludicrous use of public money is probably a wise investment, given that such a monument to scientific ignorance will be guaranteed to attract an ovine influx of Christian tourists from neighboring states. Seeing facts of this kind, juxtaposed without irony or remedy at this dire moment in history, it is hard not to feel that one is witnessing America's irreversible decline. Needless to say, most Americans have no choice but to send their children to terrible schools--where they will learn the lesser part of nothing and emerge already beggared by a national debt now on course to reach $20 trillion. And yet Republicans in every state can successfully campaign on a promise to spend less on luxuries like education, while delivering tax cuts to people who, if asked to guess their own net worth, could not come within $10 million of the correct figure if their lives depended on it.

American opposition to the "redistribution of wealth" has achieved the luster of a religious creed. And, as with all religions, one finds the faithful witlessly espousing doctrines that harm almost everyone, including their own children. For instance, while most Americans have no chance of earning or inheriting significant wealth, 68 percent want the estate tax eliminated (and 31 percent consider it to be the "worst" and "least fair" tax levied by the federal government). Most believe that limiting this tax, which affects only 0.2 percent of the population, should be the top priority of the current Congress.

The truth, however, is that everyone must favor the "redistribution of wealth" at some point. This relates directly to the issue of education: as the necessity of doing boring and dangerous work disappears--whether because we have built better machines and infrastructure, or shipped our least desirable jobs overseas--people need to be better educated so that they can apply themselves to more interesting work. Who will pay for this? There is only one group of people who can pay for anything at this point: the wealthy.

To make matters more difficult, Americans have made a religious fetish of something called "self-reliance." Most seem to think that while a person may not be responsible for the opportunities he gets in life, each is entirely responsible for what he makes of these opportunities. This is, without question, a false view of the human condition. Consider the biography of any "self-made" American, from Benjamin Franklin on down, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make, and of which he was a mere beneficiary. There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. Consequently, no one is responsible for his intelligence, range of talents, or ability to do productive work. If you have struggled to make the most of what Nature gave you, you must still admit that Nature also gave you the ability and inclination to struggle. How much credit do I deserve for not having Down syndrome or any other disorder that would make my current work impossible? None whatsoever. And yet devotees of self-reliance rail against those who would receive entitlements of various sorts--health care, education, etc.--while feeling unselfconsciously entitled to their relative good fortune. Yes, we must encourage people to work to the best of their abilities and discourage free riders wherever we can--but it seems only decent at this moment to admit how much luck is required to succeed at anything in this life. Those who have been especially lucky--the smart, well-connected, and rich--should count their blessings, and then share some of these blessings with the rest of society.

The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research. For instance, the billionaire Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, recently helped kill a proposition that would have created an income tax for the richest 1 percent in Washington (one of seven states that has no personal income tax). All of these funds would have gone to improve his state's failing schools. What kind of society does Ballmer want to live in--one that is teeming with poor, uneducated people? Who does he expect to buy his products? Where will he find his next batch of software engineers? Perhaps Ballmer is simply worried that the government will spend his money badly--after all, we currently spend more than almost every other country on education, with abysmal results. Well, then he should say so--and rather than devote hundreds of thousands of dollars to stoking anti-tax paranoia in his state, he should direct some of his vast wealth toward improving education, like his colleague Bill Gates has begun to do.

There are, in fact, some signs that a new age of heroic philanthropy might be dawning. For instance, the two wealthiest men in America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, recently invited their fellow billionaires to pledge the majority of their wealth to the public good. This is a wonderfully sane and long overdue initiative about which it is unforgivable to be even slightly cynical. But it is not sufficient. Most of this money will stay parked in trusts and endowments for decades, and much of it will go toward projects that are less than crucial to the future of our society. It seems to me, however, that Gates and Buffett could easily expand and target this effort: asking those who have pledged, along with the rest of the wealthiest Americans, to immediately donate a percentage of their net worth to a larger fund. This group of benefactors would include not only the super-rich, but people of far more modest means. I do not have 1/1000 the wealth of Steve Ballmer, but I certainly count myself among the people who should be asked to sacrifice for the future of this country. The combined wealth of the men and women on the Forbes 400 list is $1.37 trillion. By some estimates, there are at least another 1,500 billionaires in the United States. Something tells me that anyone with a billion dollars could safely part with 25 percent of his or her wealth--without being forced to sell any boats, planes, vacation homes, or art. As of 2009, there were 980,000 families with a net worth exceeding $5 million (not including their primary residence). Would a one-time donation of 5 percent really be too much to ask to rescue our society from the maw of history?

Some readers will point out that I am free to donate to the treasury even now. But such solitary sacrifice would be utterly ineffectual, and I am no more eager than anyone else is to fill the pork barrels of corrupt politicians. However, if Gates and Buffett created a mechanism that bypassed the current dysfunction of government, earmarking the money for unambiguously worthy projects, I suspect that there are millions of people like myself who would not hesitate to invest in the future of America.

Imagine that Gates and Buffett raised a trillion dollars this way: what should we spend it on? The first thing to acknowledge is that almost any use of this money would be better than just letting it sit. Mindlessly repairing every bridge, tunnel, runway, harbor, reservoir, and recreation area in the United States would be an improvement over what are currently doing. However, here are the two areas of investment that strike me as most promising:

Education: It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion. The future of this country will be entirely shaped by boys and girls who are just now learning to think. What are we teaching them? Are we equipping them to create a world worth living in? It doesn't seem so. Our public school system is an international disgrace. Even the most advantaged children in the United States do not learn as much as children in other countries do. Yes, the inefficiencies in our current system could be remedied, and must be, and these savings can then be put to good use--but there is no question that a true breakthrough in education will require an immense investment of further resources. Here's an expensive place to start: make college free for anyone who can't afford it.

Clean Energy: As Thomas Friedman and many others have pointed out, our dependence on nonrenewable sources of energy is not only bad for our economy and the environment, it is obliges us to subsidize both sides of the clash of civilizations. Much of the money we spend on oil is used to export the lunatic ideology of conservative Islam--building mosques and madrassas by the tens of thousands, recruiting jihadists, and funding terrorist atrocities. We should have devoted ourselves to a clean-energy Manhattan Project thirty years ago. Success on this front would still yield enormous wealth in this country, while simultaneously bankrupting the Middle Eastern states that only pretend to be our allies. Our failure to rise to this challenge already counts as one of the greatest instances of masochistic stupidity in human history. Why prolong it?

I am aware that a proposal of this kind is bound to seem quixotic. But what's to stop the wealthiest Americans from sponsoring a 21st Century Renaissance? What politician would object to our immediately spending a trillion dollars on improvements in education and energy security? Perhaps there are even better targets for this money. Let Gates and Buffett convene a team of brilliant people to lay out the priorities. But again, we should remember that they could scarcely fail to improve our situation. Simply repaving our roads, the dilapidation of which causes $54 billion in damage to our cars every year, would be better than doing nothing.
(c) 2011 Sam Harris is the author of "The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" and "Letter to a Christian Nation" and is the co-founder of The Reason Project, which promotes scientific knowledge and secular values. Follow Sam Harris on Twitter.

WikiLeaks cables: McDonald's Used US To Put Pressure On El Salvador
Burger giant tried to delay US legislation in order to aid lawsuit being fought in Central American country, cables reveal
By Sarah Boseley

McDonald's tried to delay the US government's implementation of a free-trade agreement in order to put pressure on El Salvador to appoint neutral judges in a $24m (£15.5m) lawsuit it was fighting in the country. The revelation of the McDonald's strategy to ensure a fair hearing for a long-running legal battle against a former franchisee comes from a leaked US embassy cable dated 15 February 2006.

Five days earlier, the firms's vice- president for government relations, Dick Crawford, and general counsel for Latin America and Canada, Maria Legett, had briefed the US ambassador on their efforts to get the case settled, using the Central America-Dominican Republic-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) essentially as a bargaining chip. "They explained that the company has engaged in a Washington-focused advocacy effort to put pressure on the Salvadorans to resolve the case according to the rule of law, suggesting that CAFTA-DR implementation should be delayed pending resolution of the case," the cable says.

Ambassador Hugh Barclay argued strongly that what McDonald's was doing "ran directly counter to US interests in seeing CAFTA-DR implemented as soon as possible." Embassy officials also noted that "McDonald's invocation of CAFTA-DR in the lead-up to legislative elections would play into the hands of those who have resisted CAFTA-DR by alienating senior government officials who are already working to see that the case is resolved according to the rule of law and by complicating efforts to get additional CAFTA-related reforms through the legislative assembly." The diplomats also argued that the tactic would thrust the case against McDonald's further into the limelight, attracting the sort of negative publicity they did not want. "Crawford acknowledged these concerns and agreed to tone down, but not cease, his company's efforts on this issue."

The case against McDonald's was a long-running and expensive problem for the burger giant. It had been brought by a former franchisee, Roberto Bukele, whose company had opened the first McDonald's in El Salvador in 1972. In 1996, Bukele lost his franchise. McDonald's suggested to the embassy that he had not complied with conditions attached to its renewal, which included remodelling the three restaurants he, by then, owned, using McDonald's-approved sources for food products, establishing a staff hiring and training plan, and obtaining corporate approval of new restaurant sites and new menu items.

Protracted legal action led to a ruling of the appeals court in 2005 that McDonald's had illegally terminated Bukele's contract. It awarded him $24m (£15.5m) damages for loss of earnings.

McDonald's filed an appeal to the supreme court, but Legett was not optimistic about the prospects for an unbiased hearing. "She suggested that a fair resolution of the case was unlikely given the current composition of the civil chamber," the cables says. "Two neutral judges have recused themselves based on previous involvement in the case. Judging from her case record on the bench, the third judge, an FMLN partisan, will rule against McDonald's regardless of the merits of the case. McDonald's is seeking to have this judge removed, and three substitute judges named. McDonald's has filed a motion to have the FMLN-linked judge recused from the proceedings on the grounds that her well-documented anti-Americanism will prevent her from hearing the case impartially."

McDonald's lawyers said they would pursue every legal means to get a fair hearing, lobbying local businessmen and government officials to try to persuade Chief Justice Agustin Calderon to name three impartial judges to the civil chamber to hear the case.

The ambassador told McDonald's representatives that he had already raised the issue with President Saca, "emphasising the stakes at play for a government in desperate need of foreign investment."

He said he thought the government was interested in settling the case fairly and promised to continue raising the issues as appropriate.

McDonald's denies it had wanted to delay implementation of the free trade agreement. "Our purpose was to raise awareness of our concerns with the rule of law in El Salvador and our lawsuit specifically," said a spokesperson. "We had no interest in delaying CAFTA. Our hope was that our legal issue could be included in the CAFTA discussions already taking place between the two governments at that time. It's important to note we would have engaged with the US embassy under any circumstances regarding our case."
© 2011 Sarah Boseley

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