Remarks at the Left Forum

When I lived in New York 20 years ago, the United States was beginning a 20-year war on Iraq. We protested at the United Nations. The Miami Herald depicted Saddam Hussein as a giant fanged spider attacking the United States. Hussein was frequently compared to Adolf Hitler. On October 9, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl told a U.S. congressional committee that she'd seen Iraqi soldiers take 15 babies out of an incubator in a Kuwaiti hospital and leave them on the cold floor to die. Some congress members, including the late Tom Lantos (D., Calif.), knew but did not tell the U.S. public that the girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, that she'd been coached by a major U.S. public relations company paid by the Kuwaiti government, and that there was no other evidence for the story. President George H. W. Bush used the dead babies story 10 times in the next 40 days, and seven senators used it in the Senate debate on whether to approve military action. The Kuwaiti disinformation campaign for the Gulf War would be successfully reprised by Iraqi groups favoring the overthrow of the Iraqi government twelve years later.

My Congressman in Virginia from 2008 to 2010 Tom Perriello, who was beloved by all the national progressive groups for reasons never explained and who is now president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund and one of the founders of Avaaz, holds up the first Gulf War as a model of a good and humanitarian war, while Avaaz pushes for war in Syria as philanthropy and Senator John McCain pushes for it as a way to overthrow a government that is allied with Iran, the same Iran strengthened by 20 years of war and sanctions against Iraq.

Are the lies that have to be told to get these wars going a necessary part of the process of stirring up weak souls' emotions for the truly necessary and noble work of war? Are we all, each and every one of us, wise and knowing insiders who must tolerate being lied to because others just don't understand? This line of thinking would be more persuasive if wars did any good that could not be done without them and if they did it without all the harm. Two intense wars and many years of bombing and deprivation later, the evil ruler of Iraq, and former U.S. ally, Saddam Hussein is gone, but we've spent trillions of dollars; a million Iraqis are dead; four million have been displaced and left desperate and abandoned; violence is everywhere; sex trafficking is on the rise; the basic infrastructure of electricity, water, sewage, and healthcare is in ruins (in part because of the U.S. intention to privatize Iraq's resources for profit); life expectancy has dropped; cancer rates in Fallujah have surpassed those in Hiroshima; anti-U.S. terrorist groups are using the occupation of Iraq as a recruiting tool; there is no functioning government in Iraq; and most Iraqis say they were better off with Saddam Hussein in power. We have to be lied to for this? Really?

I was back in New York on February 15th 2003 to oppose a new assault on Iraq. That effort, the single biggest day of protest in history, created international alliances, prevented the United Nations from sanctioning the war, dragged non anti-war groups into the anti-war effort at least as long as the president was a Republican, discouraged military recruitment, and kicked off a movement that -- along with other factors -- eventually ended a war in Iraq, is about to end a war in Afghanistan, and has thus far prevented a war on Iran -- a war that the masters of war have tried very hard to start a number of times in the past 9 years. Of course, the war on Iraq has neither ended completely nor ended in the way people are often told.

I got an email last fall from the Huffington Post telling me that Obama was keeping his campaign promise to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. Not quite. Obama said, "I will promise you this: that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." Here's how the Huffington Post claimed this promise was kept: "Fulfilling a long-held campaign promise, President Barack Obama announced Friday that he will pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of the year, as conditioned by the Status of Forces Agreement with the country." What exactly is a long-held campaign promise? Is it one that it takes you a long time to keep? Does that work even if the promise was specifically what your first action would be? Was this somehow Obama's belated first action? Of course, not. This was compliance with a treaty that Bush and Maliki had made three years earlier, which the Iraqi government had refused to modify to accommodate Obama's desire to keep troops in Iraq longer. That refusal, specifically the refusal to allow mercenaries and troops immunity from Iraqi law, was apparently motivated in part by the release of the collateral murder video allegedly given to Wikileaks by Bradley Manning, whom Obama kept in solitary confinement for a year and whom Obama's subordinates will now provide with the pretense of a trial following Obama's public declaration of his guilt.

The vast bulk of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is gone, much to the credit of the Iraqis and of the peace movement that existed in the United States three, four, and five years ago when peace groups were joined by Democratic groups that saw an advantage in opposing a particular war. But the United States had already built the world's largest so-called embassy, until it completes a bigger one in Afghanistan, and the treaty that Bush and Maliki rammed through without the Congress, as Obama consequently believes he can do for Afghanistan, only required the removal of troops employed by the U.S. Department of so-called Defense. Mercenaries employed by the State Department, as well as the CIA, can stay. In February, the State Department said it would be cutting its staff from 16,000 to 8,000. Thousands of those staff will be nothing other than armed mercenaries. The U.S. Army has also hired mercenaries to escort shipments of supplies from Kuwait into Iraq, although it also has use of an airport in Iraq. The United States has a military presence in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Eritrea, Djibouti, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean, plus a closely aligned and U.S. funded military in Israel, and there are those in the U.S. government who want to bring back a larger occupation of Iraq, while President Obama does not hesitate to send drones anywhere.

As U.S. troops have been withdrawn from Iraq a number of things have not happened:

· Iraq has not descended into the worst hell imaginable, many times worse then the hell we've helped to create there.

· The reputation of the U.S. military has not collapsed to the point where every little nation with a grudge to settle has attacked Washington.

· The people of Iraq have not risen up to demand a longer occupation.

· The U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq have not come back from their graves to insist that their memories require additional years of pointless killing and dying by others, and

· The rule of law has not suffered a fatal blow (partly because it was already dead).

Not gone from Iraq are Exxon Mobil, BP, and Shell. They didn't get everything they'd hoped for, and Chinese, Russian, and Singaporean companies are in there too. But they got hugely valuable contracts that give them far more profit and the Iraqi people far less than is the norm. They also raked in huge profits from the increased price of oil during the war, as during the current threat of war with Iran. Also profiting, of course, have been the direct war profiteers, the weapons makers and other military contractors and mercenary firms. But outside of that group, which tends to profit enormously from military spending whether or not there's a war, the U.S. economy as a whole has been badly hurt -- from the 99% to the 1%. Even Donald Trump wants out of Afghanistan. This kind of madness doesn't benefit the conquering nation -- even if the threat of war facilitates the exploitation of other countries. I recently read an article about Iraq choosing to buy crops from nations other than the United States that quoted U.S. farmers who were absolutely furious that Iraq would choose not to buy their products after the United States had gone to so much trouble bombing and occupying Iraq. Michael Froomkin recently wrote: "The population of Iraq is about 32,000,000. So that means the war cost us about $25,000 per Iraqi. I think my suggestion back in 2003 that instead of staying in Iraq we just give every Iraqi $3000 per year for the next year or two is looking awfully good in retrospect." Of course, that model could be enlarged. Far more Afghan children starve and freeze to death than any soldiers massacre, and it would cost a lot less to feed and clothe them than it does to massacre them. And doing so would create a lot more peace and stability. A trillion-dollar army cannot win an occupation. There's no such thing as winning. That's what Iraq ought to have shown them. There will be no nuclear weapons moved into Afghanistan and no U.S. controlled pipelines. Apart from the weapons makers and mercenary profiteers, nobody gains.

We in the United States didn't just lose money in Iraq. We lost our civil liberties at home, our representative government, our vestigial restrictions on presidential war powers. Obama went into Libya without even bothering to lie to Congress, and Panetta just told Senator Sessions that Obama can go into Syria without Congress or the United Nations. We lost our prohibitions on torture, murder, and lawless imprisonment. We lost religious tolerance. And we lost the idea that there is anything a president can do, other than sex, that can get him impeached. We created temporary despots.

The authorizations to use military force from 2001 and the one for Iraq from 2003 are still on the books. Obama or another president or Congress could send drones or troops into Iraq. The Iraq AUMF is broader than the Afghanistan one. Bush and Obama have used it to justify worldwide war on people they label terrorists who do not have any plausible connection to September 11th, and to wiretap the rest of us.

We also lost in Iraq all credibility as supporters of the rule of law. Those who had seen immunity effectively given to the killers of Haditha knew what to expect when the Afghan government demanded an open trial in Afghanistan for the killer of Kandahar.

We lost all sense of gratitude and requirement of protection for whistleblowers, as Obama has expanded on Bush's approach of treating them as traitors.

We lost the good will of much of the world. We became hated, loathed, despised, and detested. Some of those in power in the United States recovered a reluctance to launch huge wars and lose lots of U.S. military lives. But they found an alternative in bombs and drones. And if relatively few drone pilots lose their minds or kill themselves, that doesn't mean there won't be blowback or that there is not a direct cost to our culture in becoming an empire that uses robots to kill.

The damage to U.S. veterans, their families, and those around them will go on for decades. The brain damage, PTSD, and suicide epidemics just begin to tell the story of human and financial cost. The divorce, child neglect, and child abuse will be very long lasting, not to mention the desire of many of those children to please their parents by going to war themselves.

Unbeknownst to the U.S. media of course the bulk of the cost of a war is born by the nation where the war is fought. On the question of what has been done to Iraq I recommend Michael Otterman's book "Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage."

Last year we watched the people of Egypt overthrow a U.S.-backed dictator in three weeks at a cost of 300 deaths. They only overthrew that one individual, not the corrupt military government. They have a long ways to go. But compare Iraq. Over 20 years the United States has replaced a dictator with a corrupt military government at a cost of millions of lives, trillions of dollars spent, trillions of dollars in infrastructure destroyed, a regional refugee crisis, ethnic and religious strife, segregated towns and neighborhoods, empowered religious fanatics. We've set back women's rights horribly, effectively eliminated gay and lesbian rights, nearly killed off some minority groups, decimated the nation's cultural heritage, and created a generation of people without the experience of peace, without education, without proper nutrition, without tolerance, without proper healthcare, without a functioning government, and without affection for or even indifference to the United States. What a bargain. Surely nonviolence could never have done so much. Or as Obama put it, when accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, just after rejecting the model of Martin Luther King, Jr., "Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."

In place of reason, the war on Iraq gave us this, as recounted by U.S. soldier Ethan McCord: "We had a pretty gung-ho commander, who decided that because we were getting hit by IEDs a lot, there would be a new battalion SOP [standard operating procedure]. He goes, 'If someone in your line gets hit with an IED, 360 rotational fire. You kill every motherfucker on the street.'"

Another way to kill "every motherfucker on the street" is to destroy water supplies, sewage plants, hospitals, and bridges. This we have done most extensively in 1991 and 2003. On the first occasion, a U.S. Air force planning officer justified these criminal acts as no worse and having no other purpose than economic sanctions: "People say, 'You didn't recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.' Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions -- help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions."

Sanctions on Iran are for the same purpose. Either they will provoke Iran, just as they did Japan so many years ago. Or they will create a logic that explains war on the grounds that the sanctions haven't succeeded in overthrowing a sovereign government that we haven't overthrown since 1953.

The Madeleine Albrights of the world who thought that killing a half-million Iraqi children was a price worth paying for some strategic purpose need to be asked now, now that the strategic purpose has presumably been achieved or been abandoned, why in the hell are we not making reparations to the Iraqi people?

We haven't built them a nation. We haven't built anyone a nation, unless you count Germany and Japan which we first burned to the ground and have since never left. Supposedly we built a nation in Grenada and another, over a mere 23 years in Panama, although I'm not convinced that both wouldn't have been better off left alone. Nobody claims we built a nation in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Well, maybe some do, but they don't live there. Half the world's refugees are from Afghanistan and Iraq. Possibly half the world's torture victims are from Afghanistan and Iraq. We owe reparations.

Instead, with the crime ending in Iraq, its architects are on book tours instead of on trial, and their successor in the White House has embraced the lies, the lie that invading Iraq was about so-called weapons of mass destruction, and the lie that escalating the war on Iraq helped to win it. These lies are carried over as lessons for Afghanistan and elsewhere. It is critical that we continue to counter them. U.S. polling on belief that the Iraq War was based on lies paralleled and led polling on opposition to that war. But memories are short. We have a great deal to be gained from continually reminding our country of the lies.

George Galloway, the great former British Member of Parliament recently wrote, "I told Tony Blair – outside the men's lavatory in the library corridor of the House of Commons, to be precise – that the fall of Baghdad would be not the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning. And that the Iraqis would fight them, with their teeth if necessary, until they had driven them from their land. I told Blair that there was no al-Qaida in Iraq, but that if he and Bush were to invade there would be thousands of them. But two things, as George Bush would put it, I 'mis-underestimated'. First, that when the tower of lies on which the case for the Iraq war had been constructed was exposed, the credibility of the political systems of the two main liars would collapse under the weight. And second, that the example of the Iraqi resistance would trigger seismic changes in the Arabian landscape from Marrakesh to Bahrain. Almost nobody in Britain or America any longer believes a word their politicians say. This profound change is not wholly the result of the Iraq war, but it moved into top gear following the war and the militarised mendacity that paved the way to it. In America this malaise has fuelled both the Tea Party phenomenon and the Occupy movement alike, even if the word Iraq seldom crosses their lips. And from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf the plates are moving still."

Yes, but here in the Land of Free people have a tendency to believe their government lies about everything except war. That it lies about war too we need constantly to remind each other. In that spirit, I have drafted what I take to be the top 10 lying scheming reasons to treat Iran as we treated Iraq:

1. Iran has threatened to fight back if attacked, and that's a war crime. War crimes must be punished.

2. My television says Iran has nukes. I'm sure it's true this time. Just like with North Korea. I'm sure they're next. We only bomb places that really truly have nukes and are in the Axis of Evil. Except Iraq, which was different.

3. Iraq didn't go so badly. Considering how lousy its government is, the place is better off with so many people having left or died. Really, that one couldn't have worked out better if we'd planned it.

4. When we threaten to cut off Iran's oil, Iran threatens to cut off Iran's oil, which is absolutely intolerable. What would we do without that oil? And what good is buying it if they want to sell it?

5. Iran was secretly behind 9-11. I read it online. And if it wasn't, that's worse. Iran hasn't attacked another nation in centuries, which means its next attack is guaranteed to be coming very soon.

6. Iranians are religious nuts, unlike Israelis and Americans. Most Israelis don't want to attack Iran, but the Holy Israeli government does. To oppose that decision would be to sin against God.

7. Iranians are so stupid that when we murder their scientists they try to hire a car dealer in Texas to hire a drug gang in Mexico to murder a Saudi ambassador in Washington, and then they don't do it -- just to make us look bad for catching them.

7. b. Oh, and stupid people should be bombed. They're not civilized.

8. War is good for the U.S. economy, and the Iranian economy too. Troops stationed in Iran would buy stuff. And women who survived the war would have more rights. Like in Virginia. We owe Iranians this after that little mishap in 1953.

9. This is the only way to unite the region. Either we bomb Iran and it swears its eternal love to us. Or, if necessary, we occupy Iran to liberate it like its neighbors. Which shouldn't take long. Look how well Afghanistan is going already.

10. They won't give our drone back. Enough said.

The National Weather Service is kind of the anti-Mike Daisey, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It's collected billions of records (I've seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards, and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the NWS are pretty slim.

Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. "There's extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented," Chicago NWS meteorologist Richard Castro said. "It's extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day," the office added in an official statement.

It wasn't just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation simmered under bizarre heat. International Falls, MN, the "icebox of the nation," broke its old temperature records-by 22 degrees, which according to weather historians may be the largest margin ever for any station with a century's worth of records. Winner, South Dakota reached 94 degrees on the second-to-last day of winter. That's in the Dakotas, two days before the close of winter. Jeff Masters, founder of WeatherUnderground, the web's go-to site for meteorological information, watched an eerie early morning outside his Michigan home and wrote "this is not the atmosphere I grew up with," a fact confirmed later that day when the state recorded the earliest F-3 strength tornado in its history. Other weathermen were more...weathermanish. Veteran Minneapolis broadcaster Paul Douglas, after noting that Sunday's low temperature in Rochester broke the previous record high, blogged "this is OFF THE SCALE WEIRD even for Minnesota."

It's hard to overstate how impossible this weather is-when you have nearly a century and a half of records, they should be hard to break, much less smash. But this is like Barry Bonds on steroids if his steroids were on steroids, an early season outbreak of heat completely without precedent in its scale and spread. I live in Vermont, where we should be starting to slowly thaw out-but as the heat moved steadily east ski areas shut down and golf courses opened.

And truth be told, it felt pretty good. Most people caught in the torrid zones probably reacted pretty much like President Obama: "It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures," he told the audience assembled at a fundraiser at Tyler Perry's Atlanta mansion (records were falling in Georgia too). "On the other hand I have really enjoyed the nice weather."

Anyone thinking about the seasons ahead was at least as ambivalent, and most were scared. Here are a few of the things that could happen with staggering warmth like this early in the year:

The plants that have budded out prematurely (there's fruit budding across the nation's apple belt) can be easily killed by the freezes that will come if temperatures revert to anything like normal. (Frost is common here, for instance, late into May).

The soils left exposed by the early retreat of snow will dry out much earlier in the growing season, raising dramatically the risk of drought

Forests dry out too. In recent years three-quarters of the big fires across the West have come in years when snow melted well ahead of schedule. Across the East the next six or eight weeks, before trees are fully leafed out, will be scary for forest rangers unless we get heavy rains.

One could go on: mild winters and early springs allow ticks to spread into new places, carrying disease. Reservoirs can start evaporating early. We see wickedly strong storms along the frontal boundaries of these record-setting zones. But the real fears are the things we can't anticipate, simply because we are moving into uncharted territory. We know that we can make a normal seasonal cycle, with variations within a typical range, work-we know, because we've done it as long as we've been here. But we've never seen anything like what we're seeing this week.

Except, of course, in the models that the climatologists have been printing out on their supercomputers for the last two decades. This is what climate change looks like, just like last year's new record for multi-billion dollar weather disasters is what climate change looks like. As Masters put it in a recent blog post, notable for its understatement, "it is very unlikely that the intensity of the heat would have been so great unless we were in a warming climate."

One could make some sad jokes about the coincidence of Chicago's record heat with the Illinois primary, or with the president's tour this week of drilling rigs to convince Americans that he's a great champion of fossil fuel (with a visit to a solar production facility thrown in for good measure). But the power of our politics seems puny this week compared to the power of the carbon we've unleashed for a century.

THIS week, Robert De Niro made a joke about first ladies, and Newt Gingrich said it was "inexcusable and the president should apologize for him." Of course, if something is "inexcusable," an apology doesn't make any difference, but then again, neither does Newt Gingrich.

Mr. De Niro was speaking at a fund-raiser with the first lady, Michelle Obama. Here's the joke: "Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady?"

The first lady's press secretary declared the joke "inappropriate," and Mr. De Niro said his remarks were "not meant to offend." So, as these things go, even if the terrible damage can never be undone, at least the healing can begin. And we can move on to the next time we choose sides and pretend to be outraged about nothing.

When did we get it in our heads that we have the right to never hear anything we don't like? In the last year, we've been shocked and appalled by the unbelievable insensitivity of Nike shoes, the Fighting Sioux, Hank Williams Jr., Cee Lo Green, Ashton Kutcher, Tracy Morgan, Don Imus, Kirk Cameron, Gilbert Gottfried, the Super Bowl halftime show and the ESPN guys who used the wrong cliche for Jeremy Lin after everyone else used all the others. Who can keep up?

This week, President Obama's chief political strategist, David Axelrod, described Mitt Romney's constant advertising barrage in Illinois as a "Mittzkrieg," and instantly the Republican Jewish Coalition was outraged and called out Mr. Axelrod's "Holocaust and Nazi imagery" as "disturbing." Because the message of "Mittzkrieg" was clear: Kill all the Jews. Then the coalition demanded not only that Mr. Axelrod apologize immediately but also that Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz "publicly rebuke" him. For a pun! For punning against humanity!

The right side of America is mad at President Obama because he hugged the late Derrick Bell, a law professor who believed we live in a racist country, 22 years ago; the left side of America is mad at Rush Limbaugh for seemingly proving him right.

If it weren't for throwing conniption fits, we wouldn't get any exercise at all.

I have a better idea. Let's have an amnesty — from the left and the right — on every made-up, fake, totally insincere, playacted hurt, insult, slight and affront. Let's make this Sunday the National Day of No Outrage. One day a year when you will not find some tiny thing someone did or said and pretend you can barely continue functioning until they apologize.

If that doesn't work, what about this: If you see or hear something you don't like in the media, just go on with your life. Turn the page or flip the dial or pick up your roll of quarters and leave the booth.

The answer to whenever another human being annoys you is not "make them go away forever." We need to learn to coexist, and it's actually pretty easy to do. For example, I find Rush Limbaugh obnoxious, but I've been able to coexist comfortably with him for 20 years by using this simple method: I never listen to his program. The only time I hear him is when I'm at a stoplight next to a pickup truck.

When the lady at Costco gives you a free sample of its new ham pudding and you don't like it, you spit it into a napkin and keep shopping. You don't declare a holy war on ham.

"But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way."

"Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?" ~~~ Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Bankruptcy is intended to give a fresh start to persons and enterprises overwhelmed by creditors. In the case of American (like other airlines before it), the main "creditors" are its employees. The costs of American's bankruptcy will be borne mainly by its workers and secondarily by taxpayers. The contracts being broken are union contracts and legal promises to honor pension obligations. American is laying off 13,000 workers, slashing wages, and reducing its annual pension contribution from $97 million to $6.5 million. The airline hopes to stick the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation with liability for much of the $6.5 billion that it owes its workers and retirees.

This national indulgence for corporate bankruptcy has a certain logic. The Wall Street Journal editorial page recently termed bankruptcy "one of the better ways in which American capitalism encourages risk-taking," and that is the prevailing view. Thanks to Chapter 11, a potentially viable insolvent enterprise is given a fresh start as a going concern, rather than being cannibalized for the benefit of its creditors.

However, what's good for corporate capitalism is evidently too good for the rest of us. Suppose everyone felt that way?

Wall Street has convinced lawmakers that relief for the masses, even in a deflationary economic emergency, would not only inflict unacceptable costs to bank balance sheets; it would also promote "moral hazard"-the economist's term for rewarding and thereby inviting improvident behavior. Thanks to a revision in the bankruptcy law passed in 2005 and signed by President George W. Bush after nearly a decade of furious lobbying by the credit-card industry and the banks, consumers generally face far more onerous bankruptcy terms than do corporations.

The housing collapse, depressing trillions of dollars of consumer assets, is the single biggest drag on the recovery. But underwater mortgage holders, unlike submerged corporations, have never been eligible for bankruptcy relief. Homeowners are explicitly prohibited from using the bankruptcy code to reduce the amount of the mortgage to the present value of the house or to a monthly payment that could enable them to keep their home.

The selective privileges of bankruptcy display yet another facet of the convenient concept of corporate personhood. Some persons are evidently more equal than others. The gross disparity in the way that bankruptcy law treats corporate persons and actual people is only one of multiple double standards that increasingly define our age.

Petty felons and 200,000 small-time drug users do prison time, while corporate criminals whose frauds cost the rest of the economy trillions of dollars are permitted to settle civil suits for small fines, with shareholders bearing the expenses. Ordinary families pay tax at a higher rate than billionaires. When fracking contaminates a property and makes a home uninhabitable, the homeowner rather than the natural-gas company suffers the loss. The mother of all double standards is taxpayer aid and Federal Reserve advances-running into the trillions of dollars-that went to the banks that caused the collapse, while the bankers avoided prosecution, and the rest of the society got to eat austerity.

Linking all of these disparities between citizens and corporations is the political power of a new American plutocracy. Until our politics connects these dots and citizens start resisting, the financial elite will rule. Despite the Occupy movement, most regular people have yet to experience the sudden enlightenment of Captain Yossarian, who decided, unpatriotically, that he didn't want to die. In the face of economic pillaging, we are behaving like damned fools.

Bankruptcy privileges for the elite have been with us for centuries. On October 29, 1692, Daniel Defoe, merchant, pamphleteer, and the future best-selling author of Robinson Crusoe, was committed to London's King's Bench Prison because he could not pay debts that totaled some 17,000 pounds. Before Defoe was declared bankrupt, his far-flung ventures had included underwriting marine insurance, importing wine from Portugal, buying a diving bell to search for buried treasure, and investing in 70 civet cats whose musk secretions were prized for the manufacture of perfume.

In that era, there was no Chapter 11. Bankrupts like Defoe ended up in debtors prison, an institution that would persist well into the 19th century. Typically, creditors could obtain a writ of seizure of the debtor's assets (historians record that Defoe's civet cats were taken by the sheriff's men); if the assets were insufficient to settle the debt, another writ would send the bankrupt to prison, from which he could win release only by negotiating a deal with his creditors. Defoe had no fewer than 140 creditors. However, he managed to negotiate his freedom by February 1693, though he dodged debt collectors for the next decade. His misadventures later informed Robinson Crusoe, whose fictional protagonist faces financial ruin as "an overseas trader" and lands bankrupt in prison four times, deeply in "remorse at having ruined his loyal and loving wife."

It gradually dawned on enlightened opinion that putting debtors in prison might be economically irrational. Once behind bars, a debtor stripped of his remaining assets had no means of resuming productive economic life, much less satisfying his debts. In this insight was the germ of Chapter 11.

With the accession of President George W. Bush and Republican control of Congress in 2001, the banking industry increased its efforts to tilt the bankruptcy code against consumers, spending about $100 million in lobbying over eight years. In 2005, Bush signed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. Its key provisions made it more difficult for consumers to file under Chapter 7, under which most debts are paid out of only existing assets and then forgiven, and compelled more people to file under Chapter 13, which requires a partial repayment plan over three to five years. The act introduced for the first time a means test, in which only debtors with income below the state's median are exempt from the more onerous provisions of the law. If a citizen has above-median income, there is a "presumption" of abuse, and future income is partly attached in order to satisfy past creditor claims, no matter what the circumstances. Many states have a "homestead exemption" protecting an owner-occupied home, up to a dollar limit, from creditor claims. This, too, is overridden by the 2005 federal act.

In promoting the law, financial executives testified that if losses could be reduced, savings would be passed along to the public in the form of lower interest rates. But after the law passed, the credit-card industry increased its efforts to market high-interest-rate credit cards to consumers, including those with poor credit ratings. Adding insult to injury, the industry invented new fees. Thanks to the "reform," when overburdened consumers did go broke, credit-card companies now had far more latitude to squeeze them for repayment.

Testifying against the bill, Elizabeth Warren warned:

Women trying to collect alimony or child support will more often be forced to compete with credit-card companies that can have more of their debts declared non--dischargeable. All these provisions apply whether a person earns $20,000 a year or $200,000 a year.

But the means test as written has another, more basic problem: It treats all families alike. It assumes that everyone is in bankruptcy for the same reason-too much unnecessary spending. A family driven to bankruptcy by the increased costs of caring for an elderly parent with Alzheimer's disease is treated the same as someone who maxed out his credit cards at a casino. A person who had a heart attack is treated the same as someone who had a spending spree at the shopping mall. A mother who works two jobs and who cannot manage the prescription drugs needed for a child with diabetes is treated the same as someone who charged a bunch of credit cards with only a vague intent to repay. A person cheated by a subprime mortgage lender and lied to by a credit-counseling agency is treated the same as a person who gamed the system in every possible way.

The financial crash that began rumbling in 2007 had numerous consequences, but in many ways the most durable and destructive one is the continuing undertow of the housing collapse. The collapse began with a housing bubble pumped up by subprime mortgages. It is being prolonged by the loss of several trillion dollars in household assets representing the collapse of housing prices. With about one homeowner in five holding a mortgage that exceeds the value of the house, and more than a million homeowners defaulting every year, the result is forced sales into a depressed housing market. This puts further downward pressure on prices, prolonging and deepening a classic deflationary spiral.

The housing deflation is such a widely recognized cause of the persistent economic slump that even the Federal Reserve has publicly criticized the Obama administration for its feeble response to the housing/mortgage crisis. Bill Dudley, president of the New York Federal Reserve, recently told a bankers' convention, "The ongoing weakness in housing has made it more difficult to achieve a vigorous economic recovery. With additional housing-policy interventions, we could achieve a better set of economic outcomes."

The administration's housing policy has been built on two programs of shallow relief, both intended to avoid direct reduction in principal owed and both widely dismissed as failures. The first, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), gives mortgage servicers bonus payments for voluntarily reducing monthly payments. It has helped fewer than one underwater homeowner in ten, and as many as half of those who get HAMP relief go right back into default. The program is a well-documented bureaucratic nightmare for the homeowner. The second, more recent program, known as HARP, for Home Affordable Refinance Program, allows moderately underwater homeowners to refinance mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as long as the debt is not more than 125 percent of the value of the home. But HARP does not reduce the principal owed, and its terms exclude those most in need of relief. The much-touted legal deal announced February 1, supposedly worth $26 billion, would actually give homeowners about $3 billion in mortgage write-downs (the rest is accounting changes and counseling outlays), compared to a $700 billion gap between the market value of homes and the mortgages against them.

The more straightforward solution, analogous to a corporate Chapter 11, would be to give a bankruptcy judge the power to adjust the outstanding mortgage debt. When congressional progressives proposed this as part of the legislation creating HAMP, Wall Street fiercely resisted. Several Democrats as well as nearly all Republicans ended up voting against it. Direct relief, from the perspective of the financial industry and its allies in the Treasury, is odious because it would require banks to acknowledge the actual, as opposed to nominal, condition of their balance sheets.

Republicans are desperate. They can't attack Obama on jobs because the jobs picture is improving.

Their attack on the Administration's rule requiring insurers to cover contraception has backfired, raising hackles even among many Republican women.

Their attack on Obama for raising gas prices has elicited scorn from economists of all persuasions who know oil prices are set in global markets and that demand in the United States has actually fallen.

Their presidential ambitions are being trampled in a furious fraternal war among Republican candidates.

Their Tea Party wing wants to reopen the budget deal forged with Democrats after Republicans got bloodied by threatening to block an increase in the debt limit.

So what are Republicans to do now? What they always do when they have nothing else to say.

Call for a tax cut, of course.

It doesn't matter that their new "tax reform" plan (leaked to the Wall Street Journal late Monday, to be released Tuesday morning) has as much chance of being enacted as Herman Cain has of being elected president.

It doesn't matter than the plan doesn't detail how they plan to pay for the tax cuts. Or whether an even bigger whack would have to be taken out of Medicare than Paul Ryan's original voucher plan - which would drowned many elderly under rising medical costs.

It doesn't even matter that the plan would probably raise taxes on many lower-income Americans.

All that matters is the headlines.

"House Republican Budget to Propose Lower Income Tax Rates," says Bloomberg Businessweek. "Republican Budget Plan Seeks to Play Up Tax Reform," says Reuters. "GOP's Budget Targets Taxes," blares the Wall Street Journal.