A few quick takes, as we dig out from the latest hack.

Money for Old Rope This is what $70 billion a year in whiz-bang, top-shelf "intelligence" buys you: Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor.

The United States of Insouciance

Since his return from a self-imposed hiatus, Paul Craig Roberts has been a man on fire, penning a series of riveting, ravaging articles that speak hard truth to the imperial state -- and to a society seemingly content to countenance, if not cheer, that state's worst malefactions. Roberts has done it again with his latest piece: "Insouciant Americans." Get thee hence, and read.

Mission Accomplished

It's hard to understand why all our serious commentators are writing that Barack Obama's presidency is in trouble, and offering sage advice, from right, left, and center, on what he needs to do to "get back on track." The truth, of course, is that Barack Obama's presidency is a smashing success -- indeed, a record-breaking success -- and that he is accomplishing exactly what he was put into office to do, as the New York Times reports today: Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Quarter.

Chronicles of Corruption

My old Moscow Times comrade Matt Taibbi adds another chapter to his on-going -- and jaw-dropping -- series of stories on the deliberate evisceration of ordinary Americans by their monied and minatory betters. Taibbi has few equals when it comes to explaining the true depth and extent of American corruption -- and almost no equal when it comes to actually reporting on it from the front lines. He is creating a record of the reality of our times that future historians (yes, yes, if there are any) will find invaluable.

The Dissident Path

Chris Hedges is another incendiary voice, burning through the threadbare curtain of liberal piety and exceptionalist myth to expose the corroded heart of a nation sliding into barbarity. His latest piece at Truthdig is an excellent example, so we'll finish here with a few choice quotes:

There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. The electoral process has been hijacked by corporations. The judiciary has been corrupted and bought. The press shuts out the most important voices in the country and feeds us the banal and the absurd. Universities prostitute themselves for corporate dollars. Labor unions are marginal and ineffectual forces. The economy is in the hands of corporate swindlers and speculators. And the public, enchanted by electronic hallucinations, remains passive and supine. We have no tools left within the power structure in our fight to halt unchecked corporate pillage.

The liberal class, which Barack Obama represents, was never endowed with much vision or courage, but it did occasionally respond when pressured by popular democratic movements. This was how we got the New Deal, civil rights legislation and the array of consumer legislation pushed through by Ralph Nader and his allies in the Democratic Party. The complete surrendering of power, however, to corporate interests means that those of us who seek nonviolent yet profound change have no one within the power elite we can trust for support. The corporate coup has ossified the structures of power. It has obliterated all checks on corporate malfeasance. It has left us stripped of the tools of mass organization that once nudged the system forward toward justice.

....

Our worst premonitions are becoming reality. Our intuition has proved correct. We are reaching the breaking point. An explosion, unless we halt the increased pressure, seems inevitable. And what is left for those of us who cannot embrace the contaminants of violence? If the system shuts us out how can we influence it through nonviolent mechanisms of popular protest? How can we restore a civil society? How can we battle back against those who will mobilize hatred to cement into place an American fascism?

I do not know if we can win this battle. I suspect we cannot. But I do know that if we stop resisting, if we stop rebelling, something fundamental will die within us. As the corporate vise tightens, as the vast corporate system begins to break down with fossil fuel decline, extreme climate change and the expansion of global poverty, even mundane and ordinary acts to assert our common humanity and justice will be condemned as subversive.

It is time to think of resistance in a new way, something that is no longer carried out to reform a system but as an end in itself. African-Americans understood this during the long night of slavery. German opposition leaders understood it under the Nazis. Dissidents in the former Soviet Union knew this during the nightmare of communism. Resistance in these closed systems was local and often solitary. It was done with the understanding that evil must always be defied. The tiny acts of rebellion—day after day, month after month, year after year and decade after decade—exposed to everyone who witnessed them the heartlessness, cruelty and inhumanity of the oppressor. They were acts of truth and beauty. We must take to the street. We must jam as many wrenches into the corporate system as we can. We must not make it easy for them. But we also must no longer live in self-delusion. This is a battle that will outlive us. And if we fight, even with this tragic vision, we will lead lives worth living and keep alive another way of being.

You’ve got to got see "Inside Job," the documentary about how Wall Street brought down our economy.

Written and directed by Charles Ferguson and narrated by Matt Damon, it explains, step by step, each of the reckless and swindling moves that Wall Street investment bankers made with such devastating results.

Far better than Wall Street II, which was incomprehensible as far as the scandal goes, "Inside Job" explains this complex story in a clear and easy to follow manner that most high school students could understand.

It documents how the CEOs of the largest investment banks in the country gambled on housing derivatives that they knew were highly risky, misled investors about those risks, and made out like the bandits they are with grotesque bonuses.

As Ferguson points out, no one's gone to jail. No one's had to repay those bonuses or make whole those swindled investors. The scandal just goes on and on.

Ferguson gets clips from some of the leading players (who refused to be interviewed, as he tells us) and does a terrific job skewering some of the lesser ones who do agree to be interviewed. To help provide commentary, Ferguson enlists George Soros, Eliot Spitzer, and NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini.

Ferguson doesn't just blame the Wall Street CEOs. "Inside Job" points out how the credit rating agencies were in on the scam, and how leading economists, including Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, were asleep at their textbooks.

What's more, it shows how one President after another, from Reagan through Clinton and George W, deregulated Wall Street at enormous cost.

And how Obama has not done nearly enough in response.

Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be — after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction.

So here’s what the very serious Mr. Simpson said on Friday: “I can’t wait for the blood bath in April. ... When debt limit time comes, they’re going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We’ve got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give ’em a piece of meat, real meat,’ ” meaning spending cuts. “And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary,” he continued.

Think of Mr. Simpson’s blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize.

Some explanation: There’s a legal limit to federal debt, which must be raised periodically if the government keeps running deficits; the limit will be reached again this spring. And since nobody, not even the hawkiest of deficit hawks, thinks the budget can be balanced immediately, the debt limit must be raised to avoid a government shutdown. But Republicans will probably try to blackmail the president into policy concessions by, in effect, holding the government hostage; they’ve done it before.

Now, you might think that the prospect of this kind of standoff, which might deny many Americans essential services, wreak havoc in financial markets and undermine America’s role in the world, would worry all men of good will. But no, Mr. Simpson “can’t wait.” And he’s what passes, these days, for a reasonable Republican.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.

Elite opinion has been slow to recognize this reality. Thus on the same day that Mr. Simpson rejoiced in the prospect of chaos, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, appealed for help in confronting mass unemployment. He asked for “a fiscal program that combines near-term measures to enhance growth with strong, confidence-inducing steps to reduce longer-term structural deficits.”

My immediate thought was, why not ask for a pony, too? After all, the G.O.P. isn’t interested in helping the economy as long as a Democrat is in the White House. Indeed, far from being willing to help Mr. Bernanke’s efforts, Republicans are trying to bully the Fed itself into giving up completely on trying to reduce unemployment.

And on matters fiscal, the G.O.P. program is to do almost exactly the opposite of what Mr. Bernanke called for. On one side, Republicans oppose just about everything that might reduce structural deficits: they demand that the Bush tax cuts be made permanent while demagoguing efforts to limit the rise in Medicare costs, which are essential to any attempts to get the budget under control. On the other, the G.O.P. opposes anything that might help sustain demand in a depressed economy — even aid to small businesses, which the party claims to love.

Right now, in particular, Republicans are blocking an extension of unemployment benefits — an action that will both cause immense hardship and drain purchasing power from an already sputtering economy. But there’s no point appealing to the better angels of their nature; America just doesn’t work that way anymore.

And opposition for the sake of opposition isn’t limited to economic policy. Politics, they used to tell us, stops at the water’s edge — but that was then.

These days, national security experts are tearing their hair out over the decision of Senate Republicans to block a desperately needed new strategic arms treaty. And everyone knows that these Republicans oppose the treaty, not because of legitimate objections, but simply because it’s an Obama administration initiative; if sabotaging the president endangers the nation, so be it.

How does this end? Mr. Obama is still talking about bipartisan outreach, and maybe if he caves in sufficiently he can avoid a federal shutdown this spring. But any respite would be only temporary; again, the G.O.P. is just not interested in helping a Democrat govern.

My sense is that most Americans still don’t understand this reality. They still imagine that when push comes to shove, our politicians will come together to do what’s necessary. But that was another country.

There is no hope left for achieving significant reform or restoring our democracy through established mechanisms of power. The electoral process has been hijacked by corporations. The judiciary has been corrupted and bought. The press shuts out the most important voices in the country and feeds us the banal and the absurd. Universities prostitute themselves for corporate dollars. Labor unions are marginal and ineffectual forces. The economy is in the hands of corporate swindlers and speculators. And the public, enchanted by electronic hallucinations, remains passive and supine. We have no tools left within the power structure in our fight to halt unchecked corporate pillage.

The liberal class, which Barack Obama represents, was never endowed with much vision or courage, but it did occasionally respond when pressured by popular democratic movements. This was how we got the New Deal, civil rights legislation and the array of consumer legislation pushed through by Ralph Nader and his allies in the Democratic Party. The complete surrendering of power, however, to corporate interests means that those of us who seek nonviolent yet profound change have no one within the power elite we can trust for support. The corporate coup has ossified the structures of power. It has obliterated all checks on corporate malfeasance. It has left us stripped of the tools of mass organization that once nudged the system forward toward justice.

Obama knows where power lies and serves these centers of power. The tragedy—if tragedy is the right word—is that Obama, after selling his soul to corporations, has been discarded. Corporate power doesn’t need brand Obama anymore. They have found new brands in the tea party, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Obama has been abandoned by those who once bundled contributions for him by the millions of dollars. Obama and the Democratic Party will, I expect, spend the next two years being even more obsequious to corporate power. Obama clearly loves the pomp and privilege of statecraft that much. But I am not sure it will work.

Reformers on the outside, while they remain militant and faithful to issues of justice, nevertheless depend on the liberal establishment to respond to public pressure. If these reformers cannot pressure the liberal class and the power elite to evoke real change, they become ineffectual. Our fate is intimately tied to the liberals who have betrayed us. We speak in the language of policies and issues. We will find it harder and harder, given our impotence, to compete with the impassioned calls for new glory, revenge and moral purity that resonate with a public beset by foreclosures, long-term unemployment, bankruptcies and a medical system that abandons them. Once any political system ossifies, once all mechanisms for reform close, the lunatic fringe of a society, as I saw in Yugoslavia, rises out of the moral swamp to take control. The reformers, however well meaning and honest, finally have nothing to offer. They are disarmed.

We have reached a point where stunted and deformed individuals, whose rapacious greed fuels the plunge of tens of millions of Americans into abject poverty and misery, determine the moral fiber of the nation. It is no more morally justifiable to kill someone for profit than it is to kill that person for religious fanaticism. And yet, from health companies to the oil and natural gas industry to private weapons contractors, individual death and the wholesale death of the ecosystem have become acceptable corporate business. The mounting human misery in the United States, which could lead to the sporadic bursts of anger we have seen on the streets of France, will be met with severe repression from the security and surveillance state, which always accompanies the rise of the corporate state. The one method left open by which we can respond—massive street protests, the destruction of corporate property and violence—will become the excuse to impose total tyranny. The intrusive pat-downs at airports may soon become a fond memory of what it was like when we still had a little freedom left.

All reform movements, from the battle for universal health care to the struggle for alternative energy and sane environmental controls to financial regulation to an end to our permanent war economy, have run into this new, terrifying configuration of power. They have confronted an awful truth. We do not count. And they have been helpless to respond as those who are most skilled in the manipulation of hate lead a confused populace to call for their own enslavement.

Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician from Maryland who volunteers for Physicians for a National Health Program, knows what it is like to challenge the corporate leviathan. She was blacklisted by the corporate media. She was locked out of the debate on health care reform by the Democratic Party and liberal organizations such as MoveOn. She was abandoned by those in Congress who had once backed calls for a rational health care policy. And when she and seven other activists demanded that the argument for universal health care be considered at the hearings held by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, they were forcibly removed from the hearing room.

“The reform process exposed how broken our system is,” Flowers said when we spoke a few days ago. “The health reform debate was never an actual debate. Those in power were very reluctant to have single-payer advocates testify or come to the table. They would not seriously consider our proposal because it was based on evidence of what works. And they did not want this evidence placed before the public. They needed the reform to be based on what they thought was politically feasible and acceptable to the industries that fund their campaigns.”

“There was nobody in the House or the Senate who held fast on universal health care,” she lamented. “Sen. [Bernie] Sanders from Vermont introduced a single-payer bill, S 703. He introduced an amendment that would have substituted S 703 for what the Senate was putting together. We had to push pretty hard to get that to the Senate floor, but in the end he was forced by the leadership to withdraw it. He was our strongest person. In the House we saw Chairman John Conyers, who is the lead sponsor for the House single-payer bill, give up pushing for single-payer very early in the process in 2009. Dennis Kucinich pushed to get an amendment that would help give states the ability to pass single-payer. He was not successful in getting that kept in the final House bill. He held out for the longest, but in the end he caved.”

“You can’t effect change from the inside,” she has concluded. “We have a huge imbalance of power. Until we have a shift in power we won’t get effective change in any area, whether financial, climate, you name it. With the wealth inequalities, with the road we are headed down, we face serious problems. Those who work and advocate for social and economic justice have to now join together. We have to be independent of political parties and the major funders. The revolution will not be funded. This is very true.”

“Those who are working for effective change are not going to get foundation dollars,” she stated. “Once a foundation or a wealthy individual agrees to give money they control how that money is used. You have to report to them how you spend that money. They control what you can and cannot do. Robert Wood Johnson [the foundation], for example, funds many public health departments. They fund groups that advocate for health care reform, but those groups are not allowed to pursue or talk about single-payer. Robert Wood Johnson only supports work that is done to create what they call public/private partnership. And we know this is totally ineffective. We tried this before. It is allowing private insurers to exist but developing programs to fill the gaps. Robert Wood Johnson actually works against a single-payer health care system. The Health Care for America Now coalition was another example. It only supported what the Democrats supported. There are a lot of activist groups controlled by the Democratic Party, including Families USA and MoveOn. MoveOn is a very good example. If you look at polls of Democrats on single-payer, about 80 percent support it. But at MoveOn meetings, which is made up mostly of Democrats, when people raised the idea of working for single-payer they were told by MoveOn leaders that the organization was not doing that. And this took place while the Democrats were busy selling out women’s rights, immigrant rights to health care and abandoning the public option. Yet all these groups continued to work for the bill. They argued, in the end, that the health care bill had to be supported because it was not really about health care. It was about the viability of President Obama and the Democratic Party. This is why, in the end, we had to pass it.”

“The Democrats and the Republicans give the illusion that there are differences between them,” said Dr. Flowers. “This keeps the public divided. It weakens opposition. We fight over whether a Democrat will get elected or a Republican will get elected. We vote for the lesser evil, but meanwhile the policies the two parties enact are not significantly different. There were no Democrats willing to hold the line on single-payer. Not one. I don’t see this changing until we radically shift the balance of power by creating a larger and broader social movement.”

The corporate control of every aspect of American life is mirrored in the corporate control of health care. And there are no barriers to prevent corporate domination of every sector of our lives.

“We are at a crisis,” Flowers said. “Health care providers, particularly those in primary care, are finding it very difficult to sustain an independent practice. We are seeing greater and greater corporatization of our health care. Practices are being taken over by these large corporations. You have absolutely no voice when it comes to dealing with the insurance company. They tell you what your reimbursements will be. They make it incredibly difficult and complex to get reimbursed. The rules are arbitrary and change frequently.”

“This new legislation [passed earlier this year] does not change any of that,” she said. “It does not make it easier for doctors. It adds more administrative complexity. We are going to continue to have a shortage of doctors. As the new law rolls out they are giving waivers as the provisions kick in because corporations like McDonald’s say they can’t comply. Insurance companies such as WellPoint, UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, Cigna and Humana that were mandated to sell new policies to children with pre-existing conditions announced they were not going to do it. They said they were going to stop selling new policies to children. So they got waivers from the Obama administration allowing them to charge higher premiums. Health care costs are going to rise faster. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated that after the legislation passed, our health care costs would rise more steeply than if we had done nothing. The Census Bureau reports that the number of uninsured in the U.S. jumped 10 percent to 51 million people in 2009. About 5.8 million were able to go on public programs, but a third of our population under the age of 65 was uninsured for some portion of 2009. The National Health Insurance Survey estimates that we now have 58 or 59 million uninsured. And the trend is toward underinsurance. These faulty insurance products leave people financially vulnerable if they have a serious accident or illness. They also have financial barriers to care. Co-pays and deductibles cause people to delay or avoid getting the care they need. And all these trends will worsen.”

In Manuel de Lope’s novel “The Wrong Blood,” set during the first rumblings that led to the Spanish Civil War, he writes “... nobody knew this at the time and those who had premonitions wouldn’t go so far as to believe them, because fear rejects what intuition accepts.”

But the signs are now so palpable that even fear is not working. Our worst premonitions are becoming reality. Our intuition has proved correct. We are reaching the breaking point. An explosion, unless we halt the increased pressure, seems inevitable. And what is left for those of us who cannot embrace the contaminants of violence? If the system shuts us out how can we influence it through nonviolent mechanisms of popular protest? How can we restore a civil society? How can we battle back against those who will mobilize hatred to cement into place an American fascism?

I do not know if we can win this battle. I suspect we cannot. But I do know that if we stop resisting, if we stop rebelling, something fundamental will die within us. As the corporate vise tightens, as the vast corporate system begins to break down with fossil fuel decline, extreme climate change and the expansion of global poverty, even mundane and ordinary acts to assert our common humanity and justice will be condemned as subversive.

Next to genocide and war, human trafficking is about the most disgusting thing I can think of.

For those unfamiliar with the term, human trafficking refers to what is essentially slavery (and I think those who oppose such atrocities would be smart, from a marketing perspective, just to call it that), whether that refers to people trafficked as sexual objects, unpaid labor, or whatever other form of exploitation is involved.

Here we are in the twenty-first century, and this is what Wikipedia says about the extent of the problem:

Trafficking is a lucrative industry. It is now the fastest growing criminal industry in the world. Globally, it is tied with the illegal arms trade, as the second largest criminal activity, following the drug trade. Human trafficking usually affects women and children. The total annual revenue for trafficking in persons is estimated to be between USD$5 billion and $9 billion. The Council of Europe states, ‘People trafficking has reached epidemic proportions over the past decade, with a global annual market of about $42.5 billion.’ The United Nations estimates nearly 2.5 million people from 127 different countries are being trafficked around the world.

How grim is that?

I’d be happy to write a column opposing the evils of human trafficking, except that it would be an awfully short piece. It’s like arguing against, well, war or genocide. Who in their right mind hasn’t already figured out the horrors of slavery? And for those who have not (and it’s sickening to contemplate the number of people who must be involved – both as buyers and sellers – in order to support a $5-9 billion ‘industry’ in slavery), what could one possibly say to change their minds (that is, to make them human), anyhow?

I trust everyone reading this has already figured out that slavery is not okay. But what most Americans do not understand today is the extent to which human trafficking is a metaphor for the American system of political economy these last decades.

And, worse, the degree to which the concept is becoming less metaphorical every day, and more directly representative of our current condition.

Exploitation is what is at the core of slavery. It is an economic relationship that represents the very height of twisted human relations conducted by predatory sociopaths, in which an arrogant few see the rest of us as mere tools for their enrichment and gratification. In their minds, we exist to be exploited no less than does the oil in the ground or the rivers into which they dump pollutants. All of us are there to serve, and we are theirs to serve. Our function is their benefit and their pleasure. Such psychologically unwell individuals find it unfathomable that others might want a life for their own purposes rather to fulfill someone else’s extravagant cravings, and find it maximally irritating when any of the rest of us are rude enough to demand being treated accordingly. Free and independent human beings seeking their own modest happiness in life? What an annoyance.

Such people have always existed, of course, but the last two centuries or so have witnessed remarkable changes in human consciousness on this question. Once fixed relationships of exploitation that had lasted for millennia have yielded to historically astonishing claims of equality and to equally unprecedented demands for respect and dignity. In the nineteenth century, slaves and non-slaves alike rose up and demanded an end to that most abhorrent practice. Over the subsequent century, industrial workers forced plutocrats to carve off enough of their riches so that the masses could work reasonable hours, under reasonable conditions, for reasonable amounts of pay. In our time, women and gays and various minority ethnic groups have forced society to treat them with far a greater respect and equality than was ever the case before.

As basic as these notions seem to the conscience of any moderately progressive (or even moderately moderate) soul today, it is well worth remembering how historically unique they are. We live in a moment unlike 99 percent of human history with regard to these concepts of equality and human rights.

But it is slipping away now, and fast.

I find it telling that over the course of the last generation ‘personnel’ departments of corporations have instead been relabeled ‘human resources’. I doubt that’s an accident. It speaks to a changed relationship between haves and have-nots. We are resources in their minds, commodities, production inputs, expense lines. The only difference between us and a bundle of ball-bearings or a bag of bauxite is that we resources that are human sometimes get a bit pesky. We require so much more handling and care than non-human resources.

But why dwell on nomenclature and symbolism, though, when we can point directly to statistical evidence, to policies and to outcomes?

It’s easily done (for now), and yet the most astonishing and frustrating thing about our time in history is that the most significant political development of the era has been completely hidden in plain sight.

What is it? The most salient political fact about the present moment is that a massive transfer of wealth is well under way, undoubtedly the greatest in all of human history. Middle class – or, increasingly now, formerly middle class – working class and poor Americans are being savaged by oligarchs and their hired-hand kleptocrats running the government on their behalf. The wealthy are vastly richer today than they were thirty years ago, and the rest of us are lucky just to have held our ground, not having improved our condition one bit from what it was in 1980. Actually, those really are the fortunate ones. Many are less lucky, and have been losing jobs and houses – and, what usually follows: marriages and health and life itself – because of this plundering.

Bill Quigley recently summarized the damage:

We now have the highest number of poor people in 51 years. One in five children in the US is poor; one in ten senior citizens is poor. Fifty million people in the US lack health insurance. Women in the US have a greater lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy-related conditions than women in 40 other countries. About 3.5 million people, about one-third of which are children, are homeless at some point in the year in the US. There are 49 million people in the US who live in households which eat only because they receive food stamps, visit food pantries or soup kitchens for help. Sixteen million are so poor they have skipped meals or foregone food at some point in the last year. This is the highest level since statistics have been kept. Wages have not kept up with inflation; adjusted for inflation they have lost ground over the past ten years. The cost of housing, education and health care have all increased at a much higher rate than wages and salaries. In 1967, the middle 60 percent of households received over 52% of all income. In 1998, it was down to 47%. The share going to the poor has also fallen, with the top 20% seeing their share rise. A record 2.8 million homes received a foreclosure notice in 2009, higher than both 2008 and 2007. In 2010, the rate is expected to be rise to 3 million homes. For the first time since the 1940s, the real incomes of middle-class families are lower at the end of the business cycle of the 2000s than they were at the beginning. Despite the fact that the American workforce is working harder and smarter than ever, they are sharing less and less in the benefits they are creating. The wealth of the richest 400 people in the US grew by 8% in the last year to $1.37 trillion. Income disparity in the US is now as bad as it was right before the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s. From 1979 to 2006, the richest 1% more than doubled their share of the total US income, from 10% to 23%. For the last 25 years, over 90% of the total growth in income in the US went to the top 10% earners – leaving 9% of all income to be shared by the bottom 90%. In 1973, the average US CEO was paid $27 for every dollar paid to a typical worker; by 2007 that ratio had grown to $275 to $1. Since 1992, the average tax rate on the richest 400 taxpayers in the US dropped from 26.8% to 16.62%. The US has the greatest inequality between rich and poor among all Western industrialized nations and it has been getting worse for 40 years. The US ranking of 45 in 2007 is the same as Argentina, Cameroon, and Cote d’Ivoire.

And so on. The disparities are so bad that “Rich people live an average of about five years longer than poor people in the US.” Meanwhile, Time Magazine is publishing a story on massively declining marriage rates in America, and one of their conclusions is that only the well-off can afford to get married anymore. How ‘bout them conservative family values in action, eh buddy?

It’s said that the perfect crime is one that is never even noticed. Well, that’s certainly the case here. This economic rape of 300 million people and the consequences it is having for their increasingly short, nasty and brutish lives is about as big a political phenomenon as they come, and yet hardly anyone is talking about it. But I think we can go even one better than perfect in this case. If the perfect crime is one that isn’t noticed, then the perfecter crime is one in which the victim begs for more.

Look at us. Most of us are either broken or breaking under the weight of the biggest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. Both of these disasters were brought to us by the very same people, doing the very same things, for the very same motivations. It’s bad enough that we’re such fools that we’ve condemned ourselves to repeat Gilded Age history (this time as farce) during these last thirty years of Reaganism/Bushism. But three weeks ago we came back for a third helping, electing the exact same people we had just got done throwing out of office for felonious economic depredation only two years ago. How sick is that?

Admittedly, the fact that the pathetic excuse of an alternative to the Grand Old (Bend Over ‘Cause We’re Gonna Use You For A) Party is so absolutely anemic and determinedly ineffectual didn’t help in this election. Nor did the fact that you effectively only get two choices in American politics. But, I mean, come on, man! Can American voters really be so certifiably certifiable as to have returned the Corporate Cons back to power in 2010? Already? Promising to do the very same things they did before, only more so?

Evidently they can. As we speak, the right in Washington (meaning all Republicans and nearly all Democrats, including the president and his team of Goldman Sachs scam artists running an economy of the rich, by the rich, and mos def for the rich – who pretend opposition even while already staging their cave-in) is now fulminating about the absolute necessity of maintaining full Bush era tax ‘cuts’ to the income of people after their first quarter million bucks, while demanding that the pathetic pittance of unemployment insurance payments be shut off in the middle of the economic holocaust these people created, to make sure we don’t encourage laziness amongst the indolent worker bees, doncha know. Never mind that the latter is an excellent economic stimulus and the former is lousy. Never mind that the right is supposedly outraged by deficits and their tax plan would blow another $700 billion dollar hole in the national debt. And never mind that when you are borrowing money to finance tax ‘cuts’, they aren’t tax cuts at all – they are tax burden transfers, from the rich to the rest of us, and from the old to the young. With added interest, of course.

But these are not only the policies of the old American government, they are the policies of the existing American government, and they are especially the policies of the new American government (where’s Pete Townshend when you need him?). If the perfect crime is the one that is unnoticed, and the perfecter crime is the one where victims ask for more, I guess then that the perfectest crime is one in which the victims cannot even recognize the perpetrators for what they are – enemies seeking to do them harm. If you think about it, we live in a truly breathtaking moment in American history. People have lost even the capacity to recognize friend from foe. Rapacious corporate bloodsuckers impoverish us at every turn, and we don’t even seem to notice, let alone act in our defense. Yet we increasingly hate our government, the only actor out there – short of our own revolution – that can protect us from this enemy. It is as if, on December 8, 1941, we declared war on the United States Navy rather than the Empire of Japan. Brilliant.

The story of the last three decades in America is the story of predation. It is the tale of wealthy people who demanded to be made super-wealthy instead, and decided that it was a crime against nature for nine-tenths of the population to have anything at all. It is a true crime yarn in which these aristocrats hired first Republicans and then Democrats to do their bidding in Washington, with predictable results.

And its been a huge success. On every key economic front, regressives have won the policy battles of these last thirty years.

They said tax cuts for the wealthy would bring the government increased revenues and would produce jobs for the rest of us. Progressives called these trickle-down lies nonsense, but lost the fight. Now look at our surpluses. Look at our prosperity.

They said that ‘free-trade’ treaties would be good for America and make us better off. Progressives said that NAFTA, WTO and the rest would lead to American jobs being exported abroad. Now, when an American president goes to India and China, late-night comics tell jokes about how he’s over there visiting our jobs.

They said that the economy was being hamstrung by excessive governmental regulation. Progressives tried to remind people of what had happened last time the country lacked legislation like Glass-Steagall and lacked regulation of dangerous industry. You know, stuff like Wall Street going crazy in a fit of greed, knowing that the government would back their bad bets, and crashing the global economy in the process. Stuff like BP recklessly and repeatedly endangering our lives and livelihoods in order to squeeze every penny of profit they could out of dangerous oil drilling projects.

They said that we had to slash government spending on real people because we couldn’t afford it anymore. Progressives argued that this would result in folks being thrown into abject poverty with no social safety net even to keep them barely alive. Now Bill Clinton admits that killing welfare in order to buy himself a second term as president (which he used to do precisely nothing whatsoever, above his desk or under it) may not have been the best idea, after all, whilst the country today competes with the likes of Argentina, Cameroon and Cote d’Ivoire to see who can produce the ugliest wealth inequalities.

They said that labor unions were hampering American competitiveness, even though the US had absolutely dominated the global economy for decades. Progressives responded that the existing laws governing labor relations were fair to both sides, and gave working people a chance for the first time ever to secure a moderate slice of economic justice. But they lost, and unions have been clobbered ever since. The share of the US workforce protected by organized labor has shrunk from about one-third to less than ten percent, and people’s incomes not surprisingly reflect that. This week, the New York Times reports that it is getting worse still:

Organized labor appears to be losing an important battle in the Great Recession. Even at manufacturing companies that are profitable, union workers are reluctantly agreeing to tiered contracts that create two levels of pay. In years past, two-tiered systems were used to drive down costs in hard times, but mainly at companies already in trouble. And those arrangements, at the insistence of the unions, were designed, in most cases, to expire in a few years. Now, the managers of some marquee companies are aiming to make this concession permanent. If they are successful, their contracts could become blueprints for other companies in other cities, extending a wage system that would be a startling retreat for labor.

Jesus Christ, we have to stop kidding ourselves about what we’re looking at here. Just as traffickers see their slaves as pure commodities that just happen to have attached arms and legs and tongues and brains, so too do the wealthy in America see the rest of us.

And, increasingly, this is no metaphor. The grand political story of our time is the story of legalized robbery, human exploitation and economic injustice. The rest of it – the Overseas Wars for Dummies, the electorally convenient coded racism, the homophobia manufactured by closeted gay GOP operatives, the whole culture wars shtick – all of it is total bullshit, intended to keep people from noticing the exquisitely manicured fingers inserting industrial grade vacuum cleaners into their every pocket.

I don’t have too much doubt that people are going to figure this out eventually and demand some meaningful change in an attempt to redress these crimes, although of course nobody ever went broke betting against the intelligence of the American public. Moreover, regressives have become so expert at framing conventional wisdom, at fear-mongering, history-erasing, outright lying and dumbing down the public that I wonder if people will be able to even imagine an alternative vision for our society. Despite the fact that they actually don’t have to imagine it at all. Not so many years ago, we lived it.

In any case, what concerns me more than the question of whether this happens is when it happens, and at what cost it comes to reclaim a stolen country.

Greedy thieves and their political puppets are unlikely to give up their booty lightly, especially when they may have to give up more than that, as did, in the end, Mussolini and Ceausescu.

What’s truly distressing, however, is the degree to which we’re not even talking about this most significant of political phenomena, even as its vortex sucks us down and drowns us dead.

It’s as if the slaves of the pre-Civil War South were actually as happy as their white masters liked to claim they were.

A year-and-a-half later, "prolonged detention" is exactly that which he vowed it should not be; his official policy is that no charges are needed, and no trials or even military tribunals required, in order to imprison someone forever. Few things are less meaningful in our current political culture than the words and commitments that come out of Barack Obama's mouth. In writing my book, I re-visited the gory details of how Obama emphatically vowed in October, 2007 (when he was seeking the Democratic nomination) that -- as his spokesman put it -- he "will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies," only to turn around eight months later (once he had secured the nomination) and not only vote against the Dodd/Feingold filibuster of the FISA bill that vested retroactive telecom immunity, but also then voted for the underlying bill itself. Also: when he issued his statement "justifying" his breaking of his pledge, he vowed that once in office, he would use the power of the Presidency to fix the abuses and flaws in the eavesdropping bill he was supporting:

I do so with the firm intention -- once I'm sworn in as president -- to have my Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.

Don't worry: it's only been two years. I'm sure he's getting to that. In retrospect, this was the pre-election event that proved to be most revealing about the type of "leader" he would be.

(4) If anyone possesses any lingering doubt that Michael Goldfarb -- aide to John McCain and Bill Kristol, among others -- is one of the most deranged individuals in our political culture, please review this message he sent out on Twitter two days ago:

Goldfarb has a long history of spouting purely authoritarian, morally repellent statements, but this one sinks just a bit lower than the rest. Murdering detainees in cold blood is the hallmark of the most monstrous regimes and deranged psychopaths in history. If one endorses that, one has sunk to the lowest levels of sociopathic sickness. But the real issue is that this will not prevent Goldfarb from being hired by some GOP presidential campaign; it likely will even enhance his prospects. That says all one needs to know about the complete collapse of norms and mores in American political culture, driven largely -- though not exclusively -- by fear-mongering over (and the malicious conflating of) Muslims and Terrorists.

(5) The Obama administration is apparently planning to lavish Israel with extremely expensive subsidies to purchase billions of dollars worth of F-35 stealth aircraft simply in exchange for a 9o-day settlement freeze. Obama officials apparently believe that this massive bribe is necessary to induce Netanyahu's cabinet to agree to the freeze. Why isn't the $30 billion aid package we give them -- and what ought to be the threat of its diminution or cessation along with termination of the countless other means of support we provide -- sufficient to induce this extremely minor concession, one which we insist is vital for our own security? And just in case you were wondering: yes, it is still true that if you question American policy toward Israel or criticize "pro-Israel advocates" in America, you will be immediately smeared as an Israel-hating anti-Semite by right-wing polemicists who strangely still appear to believe that these sad, discredited tactics will intimidate people and suppress such debate.

(6) Two relevant items about Afghanistan: first, this unsurprising survey about the perceptions of Afghans regarding our war there, and secondly, this grotesque glimpse into how some American military officials think about the side benefits of violence brought to Afghan civilians.

Not Enough Sycophants

When the NIE on Iran came out in late 2007, Bush may have pined for his sycophant-in-chief, former CIA Director George Tenet and his co-conspirator deputy, John McLaughlin, who had shepherded the bogus Iraq-WMD analysis through the process in 2002 but had resigned in 2004 when their role in the deceptions became so obvious that it shamed even them.

Tenet and his CIA cronies had been expert at preparing estimates-to-go - to go to war, that is. They had proved themselves worthy rivals of the other CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, in cooking intelligence to the White House menu.

On Iraq, they had distinguished themselves by their willingness to conjure up "intelligence" that Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller described as "uncorroborated, unconfirmed, and nonexistent," after a five-year review by his panel. (That finding was no news to any attentive observer, despite Herculean - and largely successful - efforts by the FCM to promote drinking the White House Kool-Aid.)

What is surprising in the case of Iran is the candor with which George W. Bush explains his chagrin at learning of the unanimous judgment of the intelligence community that Iran had not been working on a nuclear weapon since late 2003. [There is even new doubt about reports that the Iranians were working on a nuclear warhead before 2003.

The Estimate's findings were certainly not what the Israelis and their neoconservative allies in Washington had been telling the White House - and not what President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were dutifully proclaiming to the rest of us.

Shocked at Honesty

Bush lets it all hang out in Decision Points. He complains bitterly that the NIE "tied my hands on the military side." He notes that the Estimate opened with this "eye-popping" finding of the intelligence community:

"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

The former president adds, "The NIE's conclusion was so stunning that I felt it would immediately leak to the press." He writes that he authorized declassification of the key findings "so that we could shape the news stories with the facts." Facts?

How painful it was to watch the contortions the hapless Stephen Hadley, national security adviser at the time, went through in trying to square that circle. His task was the more difficult since, unlike the experience with the dishonestly edited/declassified version of what some refer to as the Whore of Babylon - the Oct. 1, 2002 NIE on WMD in Iraq, this time the managers of the Estimate made sure that the declassified version of the key judgments presented a faithful rendering of the main points in the classified Estimate.

A disappointed Bush writes, "The backlash was immediate. [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad hailed the NIE as a ‘great victory.'" Bush's apparent "logic" here is to use the widespread disdain for Ahmadinejad to discredit the NIE through association, i.e. whatever Ahmadinejad praises must be false.

But can you blame Bush for his chagrin? Alas, the NIE had knocked out the props from under the anti-Iran propaganda machine, imported duty-free from Israel and tuned up by neoconservatives here at home.

How embarrassing. Here before the world were the key judgments of an NIE, the most authoritative genre of intelligence analysis, unanimously approved "with high confidence" by 16 agencies and signed by the Director of National Intelligence, saying, in effect, that Bush and Cheney were lying about the "Iranian nuclear threat."

It is inconceivable that as the drafting of the Estimate on Iran proceeded during 2007, the intelligence community would have kept the White House in the dark about the emerging tenor of its conclusions. And yet, just a month before the Estimate was issued, Bush was claiming that the threat from Iran could lead to "World War III."

The Russians More Honest?

Ironically, Russian President Vladimir Putin, unencumbered by special pleading and faux intelligence, had come to the same conclusions as the NIE.

Putin told French President Nicolas Sarkozy in early October 2007:

"We don't have information showing that Iran is striving to produce nuclear weapons. That's why we're proceeding on the basis that Iran does not have such plans."

In a mocking tone, Putin asked what evidence the U.S. and France had for asserting that Iran intends to make nuclear weapons. And, adding insult to injury, during a visit to Tehran on Oct. 16, 2007, Putin warned: "Not only should we reject the use of force, but also the mention of force as a possibility."

This brought an interesting outburst by President Bush the next day at a press conference, a bizarre reaction complete with his famously tortured syntax:

Q. "Mr. President, I'd like to follow on Mr.--on President Putin's visit to Tehran ... about the words that Vladimir Putin said there. He issued a stern warning against potential U.S. military action against Tehran. ...Were you disappointed with [Putin's] message?"

Bush: "I -- as I say, I look forward to -- if those are, in fact, his comments, I look forward to having him clarify those ... And so I will visit with him about it."

Q. "But you definitively believe Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon?"

Bush: "I think so long -- until they suspend and/or make it clear that they -- that their statements aren't real, yes, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I know it's in the world's interest to prevent them from doing so. I believe that the Iranian -- if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace.

"But this is -- we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding world war III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously, and we'll continue to work with all nations about the seriousness of this threat."

In his memoir, Bush laments: "I don't know why the NIE was written the way it was. ... Whatever the explanation, the NIE had a big impact - and not a good one." Spelling out how the Estimate had tied his hands "on the military side," Bush included this (apparently unedited) kicker:

"But after the NIE, how could I possible explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?"

Thankfully, not even Dick Cheney could persuade Bush to repair the juggernaut and let it loose for war on Iran. The avuncular Vice President has made it clear that he was very disappointed in his protégé. On Aug. 30, 2009, he told "Fox News Sunday" that he was isolated among Bush advisers in his enthusiasm for war with Iran.

"I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues," Cheney said when asked whether the Bush administration should have launched a pre-emptive attack on Iran before leaving office.

Bush briefed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert before the NIE was released. Bush later said publicly that he did not agree with his own intelligence agencies.

And it is entirely possible that the Iran-war juggernaut would have been repaired and turned loose anyway, were it not for strong opposition by the top military brass who convinced Bush that Cheney, his neocon friends and Olmert had no idea of the chaos that war with Iran would unleash.

There's lots of evidence that this is precisely what Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and then-CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon told Bush, in no uncertain terms. And it is a safe bet that these two were among those hinting broadly to Bush that the NIE was likely to "leak," if he did not himself make its key judgments public.

Whew!

What About Now?

The good news is that Cheney is gone and that Adm. Mullen is still around.

The bad news is that Adm. Fallon was sacked for making it explicitly clear that, "We're not going to do Iran on my watch," and there are few flag officers with Fallon's guts and honesty. Moreover, President Barack Obama continues to show himself to be an invertebrate vis-à-vis Israel and its neocon disciples.

Meanwhile, a draft NIE update on Iran's nuclear program, completed earlier this year, is dead in its tracks, apparently because anti-Iran hawks inside the Obama administration are afraid it will leak. It is said to repeat pretty much the same conclusions as the NIE from 2007.

There are other ominous signs. The new Director of National Intelligence, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is a subscriber to the Tenet school of malleability. It was Clapper whom former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put in charge of imagery analysis to ensure that no one would cast serious doubt on all those neocon and Iraqi "defector" reports of WMD in Iraq.

And, when no WMD caches were found, it was Clapper who blithely suggested, without a shred of good evidence, that Saddam Hussein had sent them to Syria. This was a theory also being pushed by neocons both to deflect criticism of their false assurances about WMD in Iraq and to open a new military front against another Israeli nemesis, Syria.

In these circumstances, there may be some value in keeping the NIE update bottled up. At least that way, Clapper and other malleable managers won't have the chance to play chef to another "cooked-to-order" analysis.

On the other hand, the neocons and our invertebrate President may well decide to order Clapper to "fix" the updated Estimate to fit in better with a policy of confrontation toward Iran. In that case, the new Director of National Intelligence might want to think twice. For Clapper could come a cropper. How?