Norman Birnbaum, Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University

Herbert Bix, Emeritus Professor of History and Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton

Reiner Braun, Co-presidentInternational Peace Bureau and Executive Director of International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms

Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

John W. Dower, Professor Emeritus of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alexis Dudden, Professor of History, University of Connecticut

Daniel Ellsberg, Senior Fellow at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, former Defense and State Department official

John Feffer, Co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) at the Institute for Policy Studies

Bruce Gagnon, Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

Joseph Gerson(PhD), Director, Peace & Economic Security Program, American Friends Service Committee

Richard Falk, Milbank Professor of International law Emeritus, Princeton University

Norma Field, Professor Emerita, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Kate Hudson(PhD), General Secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Catherine Lutz, Professor of Anthropology and International Studies, Brown University

Naomi Klein, Author and journalist

Joy Kogawa, Author of Obasan

Peter Kuznick, Professor of History, American University

Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace laureate

Kevin Martin, Executive Director, Peace Action Gavan McCormack, Professor Emeritus, Australian National University

Kyo Maclear, Writer and Children's author

Michael Moore, Filmmaker

Steve Rabson, Professor Emeritus, Brown University/ Veteran, United States Army, Henoko, Okinawa, 1967-68

Mark Selden, a Senior Research Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University

Ernest Stewart, Author and journalist

Oliver Stone, Filmmaker

David Vine, Associate Professor of Anthropology, American University

The Very Rev. the Hon. Lois Wilson, Former President, World Council of Churches

Lawrence Wittner, Professor Emeritus of History, State University of New York/Albany

Chris Christie has been Wall Street's anointed son for the presidency. He is backed by the most ruthless and corrupt figures in New Jersey politics, including the New Jersey multimillionaire and hard-line Democratic boss George Norcross III. Among his other supporters are many hedge fund managers and corporate executives and some of the nation's most retrograde billionaires, including the Koch brothers. The brewing scandal over the closing of traffic lanes on the George Washington Bridge apparently in retaliation for the Fort Lee mayor's refusal to support the governor's 2013 re-election is a window into how federal agencies and the security and surveillance apparatus would be routinely employed in a Christie presidency to punish anyone who challenged this tiny cabal's grip on power.

Christie is the caricature of a Third World despot. He has a vicious temper, a propensity to bully and belittle those weaker than himself, an insatiable thirst for revenge against real or perceived enemies, and little respect for the law and, as recent events have made clear, for the truth. He is gripped by a bottomless hedonism that includes a demand for private jets, huge entourages, exclusive hotels and lavish meals. Wall Street and the security and surveillance apparatus want a real son of a bitch in power, someone with the moral compass of Al Capone, in order to ruthlessly silence and crush those of us who are working to overthrow the corporate state. They have had enough of what they perceive to be Barack Obama's softness. Christie fits the profile and he is drooling for the opportunity.

Activists, Democratic and Republican rivals for power, liberals, reformers and environmentalists will, if Christie becomes president, see the vast forces of the security state surge into overdrive to stymie and reverse reform, gut our tepid financial and environmental regulations, further enrich the corporate elite who are pillaging the country, and savagely shut down all dissent. The corporate state's repression, now on the brink of totalitarianism, would with the help of Christie, his corporate backers and his tea party loyalists become a full-blown corporate fascism.

Wall Street was unable to mask Mitt Romney's cloying sense of entitlement and elitism, along with his Mr. Rogers blandness. But Wall Street sees in the profane, union-busting New Jersey governor the perfect Trojan horse for unfettered corporate power. Christie, eyeing a bid for the presidency in the 2016 election, has been promised massive financial backing by the Koch brothers; hedge fund titans such as Stanley Druckenmiller, Kenneth C. Griffin, Daniel S. Loeb, Paul E. Singer, Paul Tudor Jones II and David Tepper; financiers such as Charles Schwab and Stephen A. Schwarzman; real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman; former New York Stock Exchange Chairman Richard Grasso; former AIG head Maurice "Hank" Greenberg; former Morgan Stanley CEO John J. Mack; former GE Chairman Jack Welch; and Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone. David Koch has called Christie "a true political hero" and said he is "inspired by this man." Rupert Murdoch, whose ethics seem to align with Christie's, is similarly besotted with the governor.

Christie is pitched to the public, as was George W. Bush, as a regular guy, someone who speaks bluntly and candidly, someone you would want to have a beer with. But this is public relations crap. He is and has long been a hatchet man for corporate firms and big banks. He began his career as a corporate lobbyist in Trenton, N.J., working for clients such as the Securities Industry Association. He has done their bidding ever since. His wife, Mary Pat Christie, is a bond trader who has worked at JPMorgan Chase, Fleet Securities and Cantor Fitzgerald and is currently a managing director at Angelo Gordon, an investment firm in New York.

If Christie implodes politically, Wall Street will no doubt find another candidate to be its lackey. The system of corporate power, not the individual at the helm, is fundamentally the problem for democracy. But this does not mean we should not fear the excesses that surely would occur under a Christie presidency. Christie and those who want him to occupy the Oval Office have little regard for the impediments of law and do not know the meaning of the word "restraint."

The quality of most of the reporting on Christie has been pathetic. The numerous portraits of the "regular-guy" governor are rewritten versions of the fatuous press releases provided by the governor's public relations team. New Jersey desperately needs a version of the late columnist Mike Royko, whose unauthorized biography of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, "Boss," laid bare the Mafia-like inner workings of the Daley political juggernaut. The Christie forces, which have made an unholy alliance with the state's corrupt Democratic Party bosses to create an unassailable gang of corporate rulers, are as brutal and colorful as anything Royko chronicled in Chicago. The Democratic machine, led by Norcross, allied itself with the Republican Christie to crush the Democratic candidate for governor, Barbara Buono, who lost last November's election by roughly 22 percentage points.

Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in their book "Double Down: Game Change 2012" give us perhaps the best glimpse of Christie, who flirted with running for the Republican nomination during the last presidential race and was considered as a running mate for Romney. The authors devote a chapter to Christie called "Big Boy," a nickname George W. Bush bestowed on the corpulent governor. When Romney met with Christie at the governor's mansion in Princeton to obtain his endorsement, Christie not only demurred but warned Romney he better not approach any major donors in his state. "If you jump the gun and start raising money here, you can certainly kiss my support good-bye," Christie told Romney, according to the book. The authors describe the conversation as "something out of 'The Sopranos.'"

The Romney campaign, which reluctantly agreed to Christie's incessant demands for private jets, ungainly entourages and expensive hotel rooms in return for campaign appearances by the governor in behalf of the GOP nominee, decided against selecting him as running mate because, as the authors write, Romney's vetters were "stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record."

A 2010 U.S. Department of Justice inspector general's investigation of Christie's spending patterns in the federal job he held before he became governor, the book notes, called Christie "the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification" and someone who offered "insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification" for stays at exclusive hotels such as the Four Seasons. In addition, the inspector general's report raised questions among Romney's vetters about "Christie's relationship with a top female deputy who accompanied him on many trips," the book said.

"There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official-and sought an exemption from New Jersey's Consumer Fraud Act," Halperin and Heilemann wrote. "There [also] was Christie's decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies such as former attorney general John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie, arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie [the governor's brother], who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making 'hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.' (Todd also oversaw a family foundation whose activities and purpose raised eyebrows among the vetters.) And all of that was on top of a litany of glaring matters that sparked concern on [the Romney] team: Christie's other lobbying clients; his investments overseas; the YouTube clips that helped make him a star but might call into doubt his presidential temperament; and the status of his health."

Christie's large public entourage always includes a videographer who captures the governor's frequent public humiliation of those-public school teachers are his favorite targets for ridicule-who have the audacity to question his judgment. These exchanges are immediately edited and uploaded to YouTube. There are now more than 600.

State politicians who do not kowtow before Christie receive acidic notes and emails. A former acting New Jersey governor, Richard J. Codey, after defying Christie abruptly lost his police escort. A state senator who angered the governor was denied a promised judgeship. A Rutgers professor and political scientist who declined to endorse Republican redistricting plans abruptly lost state funding for his program at the university.

Christie's warped pathology, as is evidenced in this 2010 YouTube video in which he belittles a public school teacher, is a source of pride for the governor and has made him a darling of the right-wingers who target those who teach the vast majority of American schoolchildren.

In another incident, Christie angrily shouts to a man who had questioned his attacks on public school teachers: "You're a real big shot. You're a real big shot shooting your mouth off." The man replies, "Nah, just take care of the teachers." Christie, pushing his bulk before him and surrounded by his security detail, strides toward the man, who slowly backs away. "Keep walking away," Christie says menacingly. "Really good. Keep walking." The brief clip is a disturbing window into the governor's vindictiveness, one that is augmented by access to power.

As Colorado proceeds with its effort to disrupt the failed drug war and host a startup marijuana industry, a powerful lawmaker who made his fame and fortune peddling a different, more dangerous, drug is slamming the initiative.

That's right, beer-brewer-turned-governor John Hickenlooper is deriding his state for overwhelmingly voting to end its prohibition of marijuana, a drug that is a) far-less-toxic than Hickenlooper's beloved alcohol and b) a drug the federal government recently called "the safest thing in the world."

Hickenlooper's hypocrisy borders on the comical. In an interview with the Durango Herald, the first-term governor insisted that "we should not try to get people to do more of what is not a healthy thing." He apparently expects Coloradans to forget that he himself made a career out of getting customers to consume lots of alcohol, which by most objective measures is "not a healthy thing" - and certainly less healthy than consuming marijuana. Likewise, as he rails on cannabis, he also somehow expects us to forget that he hasn't just personally profited off selling alcohol - he has also gone out of his way to more broadly brand himself as synonymous with beer drinking (just click here, here, here, here and here to get a sip of that latter branding campaign).

In the same Durango Herald interview, the governor additionally promised that "we are going to regulate the living daylights out of (marijuana)," and, according to the Herald, "said he's committed to regulating it more strenuously than alcohol."

The contradiction inherent in Hickenlooper's position wasn't lost on Marijuana Policy Project communications director Mason Tvert, whose work leading Colorado's legalization campaign was recently profiled by Pando.

"I doubt Gov. Hickenlooper felt like he was participating in an experiment when he was making a living selling alcohol in a legal market," Tvert told The Huffington Post, adding:

"Our state has been successfully regulating alcohol for quite some time, so regulating a less harmful substance like marijuana is hardly something new. Does the governor want to go back to a system in which cartels control marijuana instead of licensed businesses and thousands of responsible adults are punished each year simply for using it? We let that experiment go on for 80 years and it never worked..."

"Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it is less toxic than alcohol, less addictive, and less likely to contribute to violent and reckless behavior," Tvert continued. "If he is truly concerned about public health, he should be encouraging adults to consider making the safer choice to use marijuana instead of alcohol when they are socializing or relaxing after work."

In terms of Hickenlooper's specific attitude toward other dangerous substances, recall that while crusading against the alleged scourge of marijuana, Hickenlooper has been one of the most outspoken defenders of hydraulic fracturing (aka "fracking") in the Democratic Party. Indeed, despite mounting evidence that toxic fracking chemicals imperil water supplies and that fracking operations result in dangerous levels of air pollution, Hickenlooper has positioned himself as the political bulwark against serious regulation of the controversial natural gas extraction process. Last year, for instance, Hickenlooper appeared at a US Senate hearing to insist fracking fluid is safe, and then weeks later killed a bill to merely study the health effects of living near fracking operations. He has also threatened to sue communities that vote to regulate fracking, and has overseen a reduction in the level of pollution fines assessed against energy companies. Yet when it comes to marijuana rather than his campaign contributors in the fossil fuel industry, he is suddenly concerned about health and safety.

Similarly, in terms of Hickenlooper's general posture toward regulation, notice that this is the governor who at one moment attacks legal marijuana businesses and then in another moment insists that his entire administration's "goal here is to make sure we support the business community." The Herald noted that while pledging more regulatory red tape for legal marijuana businesses, the governor "touted the ability of state agencies to cut through red tape for businesses."

Of course, nobody is arguing that marijuana should be free of regulation. In fact, quite the opposite, as the architects of Amendment 64 named the initiative the "Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act" and included provisions for tough rules in the text of measure.

In light of all that, Hickenlooper's anti-marijuana crusade seems less like a call for fair and equitable regulation than a deliberate attempt to punitively target a legal startup industry for special persecution.

Suddenly it's O.K., even mandatory, for politicians with national ambitions to talk about helping the poor. This is easy for Democrats, who can go back to being the party of F.D.R. and L.B.J. It's much more difficult for Republicans, who are having a hard time shaking their reputation for reverse Robin-Hoodism, for being the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.

And the reason that reputation is so hard to shake is that it's justified. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that right now Republicans are doing all they can to hurt the poor, and they would have inflicted vast additional harm if they had won the 2012 election. Moreover, G.O.P. harshness toward the less fortunate isn't just a matter of spite (although that's part of it); it's deeply rooted in the party's ideology, which is why recent speeches by leading Republicans declaring that they do too care about the poor have been almost completely devoid of policy specifics.

Let's start with the recent Republican track record.

The most important current policy development in America is the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare. Most Republican-controlled states are, however, refusing to implement a key part of the act, the expansion of Medicaid, thereby denying health coverage to almost five million low-income Americans. And the amazing thing is that they're going to great lengths to block aid to the poor even though letting the aid through would cost almost nothing; nearly all the costs of Medicaid expansion would be paid by Washington.

Meanwhile, those Republican-controlled states are slashing unemployment benefits, education financing and more. As I said, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the G.O.P. is hurting the poor as much as it can.

What would Republicans have done if they had won the White House in 2012? Much more of the same. Bear in mind that every budget the G.O.P. has offered since it took over the House in 2010 involves savage cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other antipoverty programs.

Still, can't Republicans change their approach? The answer, I'm sorry to say, is almost surely no.

First of all, they're deeply committed to the view that efforts to aid the poor are actually perpetuating poverty, by reducing incentives to work. And to be fair, this view isn't completely wrong.

True, it's total nonsense when applied to unemployment insurance. The notion that unemployment is high because we're "paying people not to work" is a fallacy (no matter how desperate you make the unemployed, their desperation does nothing to create more jobs) wrapped in a falsehood (very few people are choosing to remain unemployed and keep collecting benefit checks).

But our patchwork, uncoordinated system of antipoverty programs does have the effect of penalizing efforts by lower-income households to improve their position: the more they earn, the fewer benefits they can collect. In effect, these households face very high marginal tax rates. A large fraction, in some cases 80 cents or more, of each additional dollar they earn is clawed back by the government.

The question is what we could do to reduce these high effective tax rates. We could simply slash benefits; this would reduce the disincentive to work, but only by intensifying the misery of the poor. And the poor would become less productive as well as more miserable; it's hard to take advantage of a low marginal tax rate when you're suffering from poor nutrition and inadequate health care.

Alternatively, we could reduce the rate at which benefits phase out. In fact, one of the unheralded virtues of Obamacare is that it does just that. That is, it doesn't just improve the lot of the poor; it improves their incentives, because the subsidies families receive for health care fade out gradually with higher income, instead of simply disappearing for anyone too affluent to receive Medicaid. But improving incentives this way means spending more, not less, on the safety net, and taxes on the affluent have to rise to pay for that spending. And it's hard to imagine any leading Republican being willing to go down that road - or surviving the inevitable primary challenge if he did.

The point is that a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor.

Will this ever change? Well, Republicans weren't always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs - Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit - used to have bipartisan support. And maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P.

For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America's poor. And that will remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us otherwise.
(c) 2014 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

The "new reality" spoken of above was old capitalist private profit-public loss economics. It only seemed new to those raised in a time that averted total systemic collapse under what is now being called "unbridled capitalism", by those who still seem to think a terminal threatening pandemic can be treated with band aids, aspirin and cough syrup. Getting people to believe that is part of the selling job that seems to have succeeded among consumers still under the total control of corporate mind management. Their numbers are shrinking.

The improvement in the lives of workers who became a middle class by receiving credit cards and other debt tools with which to consume all it produced and more, lasted from the end of the second world war to the 1970s. It was preceded by that devastating event that destroyed much of Europe, the Pacific and points between, leaving America untouched militarily and unchallenged economically. Prior to that war, the "New Deal", a social democratic policy to help capitalism survive the Great Depression, created job programs that helped a crippled society. But it did not become healthy again until that war and its forced production of greater military might and full employment. Only the military budget has grown bigger, and more dangerous to humanity since then, while the employment tank is anything but full and moving dangerously close to empty.

One generation of workers in the developed western world became middle class, but only at the expense of many of its own and even more of a third world population that may have suffered more than in its colonial past as profits sucked from its resources enabled the rich western minority to have some of its excess trickle down to this relatively privileged working class. Those privileges have been slowly stripped away since the time of that opening quote, with wages, pensions and jobs themselves all declining for a global as well as American majority. Meanwhile, wealth has increased scandalously for minority upper classes that also span the globe in what the high priests, rabbis and mullahs of corporate capital call a "new" economy. And they are echoed by their fundamentalist parishioners still under the sway of the "selling job", but this is a very old economy dating back to at least the 19th century, and possibly going back even further in its roots to biblical times. Whenever it started, it's time to bring it to an end, before all of us suffer that fate.

Making life better for some at the expense of most is what's wrong with a profit and loss market system controlled privately by capitalists. Any maintenance of that system under the guise of making things better in the short term while continued social disintegration is assured for the long term will keep humanity on the path to failure. Evidence is overwhelming that even positive reforms undertaken without connection to a program for total transformation of the system will only make our problems worse. Much worse.

As one among countless examples, the attempt to fight carbon pollution by putting profit and loss economics in further control of carbon production is truly putting not only the fox but the wolf, the hyena, and as many other predators imaginable in charge of the hen house. Just as dangerous in a time when we should be drastically reducing - as a prelude to ending - our reliance on fossil fuel is the deadly fracking technique said to soon make the USA the biggest producer of fossil fuel in the world. Such measures will bring increasing stress to an environment already threatening humanity's future. Even the 1% would ultimately suffer, though seemingly so far in the future that their professional class servants can disregard such beyond-our-lifetime problems and continue supporting existential live-in-the moment crackpot consumerism.

Of course, these things and more will produce jobs and profits, but so does war, poverty, disease, famine and plague. That's what's wrong with a system that always profits some for doing just about anything, including killing people.

It isn't necessary to have evil, greedy monsters in control of institutions that serve such a system. The nicest people who do their jobs with the highest intentions are part of the problem. The system in which they/we carry out our assignments needs to be confronted and transformed.

If a devastating earthquake were to strike the San Francisco Bay Area and kill thousands while destroying most of that city and its surrounding communities, great profits would be created for private firms collecting the dead, helping the wounded, cleaning up the debris and rebuilding the area. They would not be bad people and most might well do their jobs with the highest ideals. The humanitarian owners of a business which pays its employees well and gives them wonderful benefits will still have to lay them off if business is bad, since that is the nature of the system. And if that business is producing band-aids, the less people bleed the worse it will be for those wonderful employers and their workers. Auto collisions? Wreckage? Broken bodies? All are part of the economy of profits for some, at obvious loss to others. That is why we call it a "gross" domestic product; in essence, it is truly gross.

Creation of and cures for disease both create profits. Fighting wars and struggling for peace are profitable ventures, especially for those not doing the fighting or struggling but merely producing weapons, banners, programs, battles and counter battles. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is produced or distributed unless it creates a private profit. And that works very well, for some, but always at a loss to far more. That does not happen simply because one corporation is run by greedier people than another; it happens because private profit making corporations are the rule, the norm and the only reality. Until they are replaced by democratically owned and operated businesses which are run on behalf of the greater good for the general population, the system will continue to get worse.

Whether dubbed local, state, municipal or global policies, all adhering to profit and loss capitalism are parts of a system that is ravaging the earth and a majority of its people while making a small group wealthier beyond the dreams of even those who still remain under the sway of the selling job. The number of global billionaires increases as global poverty skyrockets, and this is duplicated in essence if not in numbers in the western nations formerly rewarding their workers and now reducing them to a growing class of working poor people.