FIGHT BACK? Wedding Blues - The New Superclass, Trends to Barbarism, Army Suicides Reach One a Day: Economic Recovery of the Few (Very Few) Poor Girls

I've been thinking for a long time now about the end of this blog's existence. This week I lost my last kind benefactor (probably due to economic or psychic pain - you choose), and see the endpoint much more clearly now. By the way, did you ever stop to realize that the dream of a strong American middle class died with those tax breaks for those at the top, the benefits of which were supposed to trickle down (gently, of course) on the rest of the country. Pretty silly country, eh?

Speaking of that most "wonderful" wedding for a poor little rich (only child) girl who actually had her parents' undivided attention throughout her life (well, as much as that were possible with two parents who worked in big-time, well-paid jobs), the thought that keeps reverberating through my head is how much more self-indulgent could this wedding event have been?

Let's look at the facts. Here are two people who came from modest means (Bill less than Hillary, of course), but both of whom were cosseted throughout their lives by powerful people around them who never faltered in their attentions, and their child of luxury who not only had the absolute best education possible, but was also gifted with plastic surgery to "correct" any minor physical deformities. Right. Like her club foot and harelip. I may seem a little bit bitter when I remember how her parents sold out our chances for real "change" during the 90's due to their own self indulgence (and all that free moolah), but really. A $5-million dollar wedding for these educated bumpkins? I'm guessing that just meeting David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger - let alone deciding to work towards their ultimate goals - does count for a little.

And the fact that they so kindly allowed you and me to give them a gift from the taxpayers amounting to $2 million dollars is just another bit of no-shame self indulgence from the crowd who has helped to bring you the future: your increasing pauperization. Enjoy that E- , Hollywood Tonight coverage! You helped pay for it. (Dr. Stuart Bramhall, a fantastic woman leader, has some well-chosen words (and her book is truly astounding about how the CIA chased her out of Seattle when she attempted to help some ex-Black Panthers start a museum) about the incredibly dark origins of our current President (and his subsequent acquisition by those CIA connections), and why it was so easy for him to break his campaign "promises." Yes. If it astounds me, who genuinely liked his persona (because you know how tough that's getting to be these days), you may also be interested in these facts.)

And, oh yes. It is definitely coming home to us from many other sources as well. From the horse's mouth (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

Coming Home

I would like to tell you that America, the nation you love and chose to serve, appreciates your sacrifices and honors your service. But in reality, those who oppose the war and occupation believe you are at best misguided, at worst, a murderer. For the rest, their gratitude and appreciation is all pretense, a charade choreographed by war criminals to further mislead an uninformed and apathetic citizenry of sheep in order to encourage their continued indifference and/or support for their agenda of killing and destruction. For most, members of the military are cannon fonder, an expendable commodity to be exploited when political leaders and corporate magnates believe it profitable and in their interest.

Henry Kissinger made this quite clear, “Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

In addition, when you are no longer useful and have served their purpose, they will abandon you to face the demons of war alone, no longer a "hero" but a nuisance, a burden on the economy, and a reminder of a war America would rather forget.

Professor and ex- Asst. Treasury Secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, under Raygun says "Let them eat cake?" (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Chelsea's Wedding

It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.

When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000. The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.

Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state

. . . Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding. The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them.

Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office? How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?

These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked. While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.

The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”

Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.

Does this strike you as funny? Rather odd priorities of someone supposedly from modest means himself?

The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US - one in six of the population - were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008. US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.

Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps.The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive. The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.

And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, How the Economy Was Lost, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com.

I think this next article will also curl your hair (whatever hair you've got left after this national hair-pulling decade). (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Trends to Barbarism and Prospects for Socialism

By James Petras

Western societies and states are moving inexorably toward conditions resembling barbarism; structural changes are reversing decades of social welfare and subjecting labor, natural resources and the wealth of nations to raw exploitation, pillage and plunder, driving living standards downward and provoking unprecedented levels of discontent.

We will proceed by outlining the economic, political, and military processes driving this process of decay and decomposition and follow with an account of the mass popular responses to their own deteriorating conditions. The deep structural changes accompanying the rise of barbarism become the basis for considering the prospects for socialism in the 21st century.

The Rising Tide of Barbarism

In ancient society ‘barbarism’ and its carriers ‘the barbarians’ were envisioned as threats by outside invaders from outlying regions descending on Rome or Athens. In contemporary Western societies, the barbarians came from within, among the elite of society, intent on imposing a new order which destroys the social fabric and productive base of society, converting stable livelihoods into insecure deteriorating conditions of daily life.

The key to contemporary barbarism is found in the deep structures of the imperial state and economy. These include:

The ascendancy of a financial-speculative elite which has pillaged trillions of dollars from savers, investors, mortgage carriers, consumers and the state, siphoning enormous resources from the productive economy into the hands of a parasitic elite embedded in the state and paper economy. The militaristic political elite overseeing a state of permanent warfare since the middle of the last century. Endless wars, cross border assassinations, state terror and the suspension of traditional constitutional guarantees have led to the
concentration of dictatorial powers, arbitrary jailing, torture and the denial of habeas corpus.

In the midst of a deep economic recession and stagnation, high levels of state spending on economic and military empire building at the expense of the domestic economy and living standards, reflects the subordination of the local economy to the activities of the imperial state. Corruption at the top in all aspects of state and business activity – from state procurement to privatization to subsidies for the super-rich – encourages the growth of international crime from top to bottom, the lumpenization of the capitalist class and a state where law and order have fallen into disrepute.

As a result of the high costs of empire building and the pillage by the financial oligarchy, the socio-economic burden has been placed directly on the shoulders of wage and salaried workers, pensioners and the self-employed resulting in long-term, large-scale downward mobility. With job losses and the disappearance of well paying jobs, home foreclosures skyrocket and the stable middle and working classes shrink and are forced to extend their hours of labor and years of work.

As imperial wars spread across the world targeting entire populations, via sustained bombings and clandestine terror operations, they generate opposing terrorist networks, which also target civilians in markets, transport and public spaces. The world resembles a Hobbesian world of ‘all against all’.

Please read on as it is quite specific about a whole host of events which no one among the sheeple of the U.S. cares to examine closely.

And, of course, the suicides rise - and that's just those suicides - I wonder if anyone's publicizing the number of suicides of those suffering from this economic catastrophe - like the MSM did with the fake numbers about the suicides of the bankers jumping out of Wall Street windows after 1929 (emphasis marks added - Ed.)?

Army Suicides Reach One a Day; Epidemic Spreads to National Guard and Reserves

Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky

Thursday, July 29, 2010

The U.S. Army, along with the National Guard and Army Reserves, averaged a suicide a day in June, making what already was a bad year even worse.

Thirty-two soldiers, including 11 in the Guard and Reserve, killed themselves last month, a rate of suicide not seen since the Vietnam War. Seven of the suicides took place (in) Iraq or Afghanistan.

During the first six months of 2010, 65 members of the Guard and Reserve took their own lives, compared with 42 for the same period in 2009.

Although the strain of multiple deployments is often cited as a major cause in the rise in military suicides, this is only occasionally a factor in National Guard and Reserves cases. Some observers feel that the military suffers from a drastic shortage of mental health professionals.

National Guard and Reserve Suicide Rates Climbing (by David Goldstein, McClatchy Newspapers)
Marine Corps Tries to Cope with Rising Suicide Rate (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
Pentagon Begins Massive Suicide Study (by Jamie Mei Cheng, AllGov)
More U.S. Soldiers This Year Have Died of Suicide than in Combat (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

And then we meet "The New Superclass!" Right. The people who totally outsmarted us (US). (And don't fear the source, kids, it's far more reliable than the MSM we've been paying attention to all our lives.)

The New Superclass

Video Report

Al Jazeera

A new breed has emerged; they set the global agenda, ride on Gulfstreams and manage the credit crunch in their spare time.

They are anything but elected; they are entrepreneurs and entertainers, media moguls and former politicians - the self-made super rich who are using their money to lay down a new set of global rules.

They have more in common with each other than with their countrymen, set apart by their ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people around the globe.

So where did this new global aristocracy come from and who is keeping them in check?

Why should Oprah Winfrey have the ear of President Obama, and who gave Shakira the right to dictate education policy?

But then again, when you have as much money as Bill Gates and you are prepared to give it over to a good cause who is going to stop you?

It is all well and good until the revolving door spins in the wrong direction. Empire talks to Christopher Hitchens about Henry Kissinger and his life beyond elected power - it does not seem to have changed that much.

Is the world suffering from a global governance gap? Should we be worried that the superclass seems to have an ever-expanding reach that bypasses governments and remains unchecked?

Gee whiz. I certainly am. Be sure to read the comments below the article linked above, friends. They are pricelsss.

And did I already mention "recovery" for the few - very few - yet? Keep reading for the ever-present, upcoming New Deal (and not from the progressives this time).

Economic Recovery for the Few

Where is this elusive recovery? The banks, some say, have "recovered." Yet they remain dependent on Washington, they do not make the loans needed for a general recovery, and many medium and small banks keep collapsing. The stock market shows no recovery. The Dow index was 14,000 in late 2007 when capitalism hit the fan, and it is around 10,000 now. The Nasdaq market index was 2800 then and is 2300 now. Everywhere else - unemployment, foreclosures, bankruptcies, depressed housing market, and so on - no recovery in sight. Yet, my search finally found genuine recovery for one group, and its recovery offers a better policy to treat this crisis.

Every year, two major companies catering to rich investors co-author a survey of their clients. Capgemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management's World Wealth Report covers the two groups that interest them: High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) and Ultra-High Net Worth Individuals (Ultra-HNWIs).

The first group counts all individuals with at least $1 million of "investible assets" in addition to the values of their primary residence, art works, collectibles, etc. The second group includes individuals with at least $30 million of such investible assets.

Their latest Report, covering the year 2009, finds 10 million HNWIs in the world that year: 3.1 million in North America, while Europe and Asia-Pacific each had 3.0 million. The rest of the world had a mere 0.9 million of the rich and richer.

The 10 million HNWIs -- in a global population of 6.8 billion in 2009 -- amounted to 0.14 per cent of the earth's people. Together, they owned a total of $39 trillion in "investible assets."

To see what this means: in 2009, the US GDP (total output of goods and services) was $14.6 trillion. The combined GDPs of the world's 9 richest countries (US, Japan, China, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Russia, and Spain) totaled less in 2009 than the investible assets of the world's HNWIs.

During 2009, as tens of millions lost their jobs, the number of HNWIs rose by 17.1 per cent and their combined wealth rose by 18.9 per cent.

They had a genuine "recovery."

HNWIs regained in wealth most of what they lost in 2008. No wonder they celebrate "recovery" while the rest of the world wonders (or rages at) what they are talking about.

In the US, for example, the HNWI population grew by 16.6 per cent in 2009 while the US GDP fell by 2.4 per cent.

Only 1 per cent of all HNWIs were Ultra-HNWIs, but what a group that was and is.

Ultra-HNWIs alone owned 35.5 per cent of the $39 trillion owned by all 10 million HNWIs. And they recovered more during 2009 than their fellow HNWIs.

Does this tell you anything? Read on for the rest of the sickening news. Here are a few more revolting tidbits:

. . . What notions of fairness, decency, ethics, or democracy could justify such economic performance, especially in a time of global economic crisis? Recall as well that these same rich and richer people contributed so significantly (as industrial employers, bankers, and investors) to generating that global economic crisis.

Let's now concentrate on the HNWIs in just the US (including its Ultra-HNWIs). They numbered 2.9 million in 2009: well under 1 per cent of US citizens. Their investible assets totaled $12.09 trillion. For 2009, the total US budgetary deficit was $1.7 trillion. Had the US government levied an economic emergency tax of a modest 15 per cent on only the HNWI's investible assets, it could have erased its entire 2009 deficit. Over 99 per cent of US citizens would have been exempted from that tax.

The European, Japanese, and other governments could have treated the crisis likewise in their countries. Then governments would not have had to borrow trillions. They would instead have taxed the super rich tiny minority a small portion of its immense wealth. Those governments would not then have had to turn to lenders (often those same super rich).

There would be no current "sovereign debt crisis" in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, etc., and no need for the resulting austerities to satisfy those lenders. Republicans would have no "deficit, deficit" drum to beat hoping for election-day gains.

Taxing the HNWIs and Ultra-HNWIs would be the policy of governments responsive to the needs of their working-class majorities instead of their rich and super-rich patrons. Austerity is not the only policy. Modestly taxing the wealth of HNWIs is the far better policy choice.

The two wealth management companies that cater to HNWIs have kindly provided us all with the facts and figures needed to support the better policy.

. . . The business and political leaders generated by the last 30 years of neoliberal capitalism simply assumed that they could impose the costs of their crisis on their countries' people. That assumption is now being contested. The European people are beginning to fight back. And here, in the US?

Not so much.

Really.

And Just for Laughs (of course!):

Is this our Ken Starr?

Could someone, please, appoint a special prosecutor for these crimes? I hate Pete Peterson and those he represents more than almost anyone today (or anything/one I have ever hated). Cause I'm a lover, not a hater - usually. (Yes, emphasis marks added for your viewing convenience (and increase in levity) - Ed.)

In Retrospect, There Were A Bunch Of Things Accused Ponzi Schemer Kenneth Starr Didn’t See Coming

Say what you will about alleged Ponzi schemer Ken Starr, but the guy wasn’t stupid. He knew how to leverage his “friendship” with Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson into big name clients for his scam operation and he kept them going for quite some time. Still, he apparently wasn’t the most perceptive guy in the bunch. As previously mentioned, he didn’t realize that obscenely flashy purchases and a high-profile, rather than laying low and not sticking out, might make people go, “hey wait a second…” and he apparently also didn’t realize that when you marry a stripper, known for her “pole-dancing prowess,” she might be proud of/want to publicly pat herself on the back over said skills.

Two days before his arrest for allegedly cheating clients out of $59 million, financial adviser Kenneth Starr presided at one of Harry Cipriani’s coveted front-room tables, with a view of the Plaza and Central Park, and grinned when his wife, Diane, protested, not very seriously, that she’d thought their third-anniversary dinner would be a private affair. Diane Passage, 34, was wearing a black Gucci dress with a scoop neck that kept slipping to expose more of her Brobdingnagian breasts than the designer had intended — only when she got home would she realize she had it on backward — but Starr, 66, was proud of his fourth wife’s provocative figure. He liked to brag about her pole-dancing prowess. Only when she brought up her past employment as a dancer at Scores strip club did he wince. Why, though? she would ask him. She had nothing to hide.

Yeah, and she’s probably pretty damn pleased with the fact that those moves were what landed her her big-shot husband in the first place. Think, Starr, think!

Diane and another dancer were approached at Scores, in Midtown Manhattan, one night in late 2004, she recounts, by a middle-aged couple enjoying a racy night out. Next thing they knew, Ken and Marisa Starr invited them to dinner. The dancers agreed — for $1,000 each — as long as dinner was the only thing on the menu. Soon thereafter the Starrs took them to the Four Seasons, Diane recalls, then to Bouley, then to Per Se: $1,000 for each dancer, each evening. (Marisa says she played no part in any such financial arrangements, and merely allowed Ken to take Diane to social events because her own declining health kept her increasingly housebound.)

For nearly a year, Diane relates, the $1,000 inner dates continued, though now just à deux: Ken and Diane. Oddly, says Diane, Marisa set up almost all the dates; she was in control. But Diane exercised a control of her own.

“During that whole year and into early the next year,” she says, “I never had sex with Ken.”

Only when Starr moved to the Regency Hotel did Diane begin staying overnight with him, she says, while the Starrs negotiated their separation. She would have been happy, she says, to have Starr merely support her and her son. According to Diane, it was he who insisted on giving her a huge engagement ring, the Las Vegas wedding, the jewels and designer clothes. And it was he, she says, who pushed to buy a large, new apartment. “I had never owned anything in my life,” Diane says quietly, “so Ken said, ‘Let’s buy a condo.’ It was my dream place. Now it’s become a nightmare.”

Poor little rich girls.

Suzan

______________

"Once-Unthinkable Level of Economic Distress in the Process of Becoming the New Norm" - NeoCons RULE!!! Obamaniacs Exposed!! (Aren't We Happy NOW?)

And yes, of course, I'd much rather be talking about "Sarah Sightings," the "Clinton Wedding," my puppies and creating cutesy photoshoppies. Who wouldn't? I mean, can't we all just be friends?

a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal

Sad to say (almost) but one of the most low-key, laid-back of all progressive economists (this means actually knowledgeable) finally sees the light on what the aristocracy (who proudly stole it!) has in store for the rest of us. And he's one of the minor elites, so don't minimize this realization on his part, and, please pardon me for running the entire article, but it's so important to read it NOW. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Defining Prosperity Down

By PAUL KRUGMAN

August 1, 2010

I’m starting to have a sick feeling about prospects for American workers — but not, or not entirely, for the reasons you might think.

Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.

And I worry that those in power, rather than taking responsibility for job creation, will soon declare that high unemployment is “structural,” a permanent part of the economic landscape — and that by condemning large numbers of Americans to long-term joblessness, they’ll turn that excuse into dismal reality.

Not long ago, anyone predicting that one in six American workers would soon be unemployed or underemployed, and that the average unemployed worker would have been jobless for 35 weeks, would have been dismissed as outlandishly pessimistic — in part because if anything like that happened, policy makers would surely be pulling out all the stops on behalf of job creation.

But now it has happened, and what do we see?

First, we see Congress sitting on its hands, with Republicans and conservative Democrats refusing to spend anything to create jobs, and unwilling even to mitigate the suffering of the jobless.

We’re told that we can’t afford to help the unemployed — that we must get budget deficits down immediately or the “bond vigilantes” will send U.S. borrowing costs sky-high. Some of us have tried to point out that those bond vigilantes are, as far as anyone can tell, figments of the deficit hawks’ imagination — far from fleeing U.S. debt, investors have been buying it eagerly, driving interest rates to historic lows. But the fearmongers are unmoved: fighting deficits, they insist, must take priority over everything else — everything else, that is, except tax cuts for the rich, which must be extended, no matter how much red ink they create.

The point is that a large part of Congress — large enough to block any action on jobs — cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can’t find work.

Well, if Congress won’t act, what about the Federal Reserve? The Fed, after all, is supposed to pursue two goals: full employment and price stability, usually defined in practice as an inflation rate of about 2 percent. Since unemployment is very high and inflation well below target, you might expect the Fed to be taking aggressive action to boost the economy. But it isn’t.

It’s true that the Fed has already pushed one pedal to the metal: short-term interest rates, its usual policy tool, are near zero. Still, Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has assured us that he has other options, like holding more mortgage-backed securities and promising to keep short-term rates low. And a large body of research suggests that the Fed could boost the economy by committing to an inflation target higher than 2 percent.

But the Fed hasn’t done any of these things. Instead, some officials are defining success down.

For example, last week Richard Fisher, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, argued that the Fed bears no responsibility for the economy’s weakness, which he attributed to business uncertainty about future regulations — a view that’s popular in conservative circles, but completely at odds with all the actual evidence. In effect, he responded to the Fed’s failure to achieve one of its two main goals by taking down the goalpost.

He then moved the other goalpost, defining the Fed’s aim not as roughly 2 percent inflation, but rather as that of “keeping inflation extremely low and stable.”

In short, it’s all good. And I predict — having seen this movie before, in Japan — that if and when prices start falling, when below-target inflation becomes deflation, some Fed officials will explain that that’s O.K., too.

What lies down this path? Here’s what I consider all too likely: Two years from now unemployment will still be extremely high, quite possibly higher than it is now. But instead of taking responsibility for fixing the situation, politicians and Fed officials alike will declare that high unemployment is structural, beyond their control. And as I said, over time these excuses may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the long-term unemployed lose their skills and their connections with the work force, and become unemployable.

I’d like to imagine that public outrage will prevent this outcome. But while Americans are indeed angry, their anger is unfocused. And so I worry that our governing elite, which just isn’t all that into the unemployed, will allow the jobs slump to go on and on and on.

Robert Redford sounds the alarm along the same lines about the artistocracy's view of their environment. We at last understand that they don't care about anyone except themselves (and even then . . . ?), and he's not happy to have to finally comment by pointing out that the other elites act like they own it now - solely. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

A small minority of Senators robbed America of a cleaner, more prosperous future last week. In the middle of the biggest oil disaster in American history, the hottest summer on record, and a war with an oil-rich nation, this group of cynics blocked efforts to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation. This was the moment brimming with potential for new jobs, a more robust economy and cleaner environment - this bill would have guided America down a profoundly safer and more productive path.

So therefore, the Senate is left to vote on an anemic energy bill of such remarkably limited scope that it could have been passed during the Bush era.

The elected officials who steered this turnaround have abdicated their responsibility to uphold our nation's best interests, and have shown us, and the world, an America woefully deficient in both leadership and ingenuity.

This was our moment to create two million clean energy jobs here in the United States. This was our moment to outpace China in the clean energy market that will dominate the 21st century. This was our time to slash our oil imports in half. This was our time to confront the perils of climate change, which despite head-in-the sand-denial, is in fact happening.

The American people wanted a home run, not a bunt. A recent CNN poll found that nearly 80 percent of voters believe that reducing oil use and shifting to cleaner energy would make life better for Americans, while a Wall Street Journal poll in June found that an overwhelming majority of people specifically support passing legislation to limit global warming pollution.

Yet a handful of politicians decided they didn't want to represent the will of the people. Given the chance to invest in American jobs and reduce dangerous pollution, they chose instead, to focus on their own interest and self-preservation.

Look Closely Now - These Are Not People Who Are Gifted or Smart - They Have Just Proven that They Will Follow Orders Without a Qualm

From the ever-reliable Sibel Edmonds at Boiling Frogs: Home of the Irate Minority we get the real inside info on exactly what has been happening since we elected our "change" candidate. Aren't you glad you knew these facts before you voted at the last election? (And did you ever wonder how the Clintons got so wealthy around the time that the PNAC became the all-powerful inside player?)

What I really enjoy at this point in my overeducated, unemployed existence is finally understanding (after all of my misbegotten, misspent time gaining the proper educational/employment background) how just being born correctly is the real credential for our now-present-with-worse-upcoming Brave New American World - who'd a thunk that royalty-envy would be the ultimate enabler in the good ole U.S. of A? (And speaking of famous weddings, don't you wish you had had enough monied connections to be at that wedding - although they surely know a lot more about the ins-and-outs of Azerbaijani politics (like exactly how to extract those resources) than most of us do; please read about all of the new ambassador's credentials as you really need the full flavor before you start digesting this poisonous aperitif.) (Also, you may now need to rethink your apologist attitude for why no trials or even serious commissions have been invoked about the Cheney/Bush years - they are terrifed they will include the Clinton years therein!) (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Obama Appoints a Not-Too-Long-Ago-Hatched Neocon Larva

Matthew Bryza: Azerbaijan Ambassadorship & a Tangled Web of Conflicts

Tuesday, 27. July 2010

President Obama appears to have run out of Non-Neocon candidates to appoint for crucial positions. After one year with no ambassador to fill the position in Azerbaijan, the President reached out to and appointed a young neocon with a tangled web of conflicts.

I am talking about a neocon and his wife, a duo who for the last decade and a half have been attached to figures such as Michael Rubin, Barry Rubin, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, Robert Novak . . .

We have here a fairly young to-be-ambassador neocon, whose lavish wedding in Turkey could not have been possible without the generosity of those involved in the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline projects, and corrupt figureheads in Azerbaijan politics…

This is about a shady neocon figure with a shadier role in the almost-forgotten Georgia-Russia incident a couple of years ago…We are talking about neocon Matt Bryza and his more-of-a-neocon think-tank damsel Zeyno Baran; President Obama’s choice for the ambassadorship in Azerbaijan.

Last Thursday Mr. Bryza was on the defensive when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. While the general MSM coverage placed its main focus on Bryza’s questionable actions, actually lack of actions, on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflicts and incidents involving the desecration of ancient Armenian gravesites in the town of Julfa in the Azerbaijani exclave of Naxcivan, very little coverage was given to his even greater baggage and background.

Here is one of those cursory coverages I’m talking about:

Bryza also pledged to not let his personal life affect his work. His wife, Zeyno Baran, is of Turkish origin, which some Armenian critics say leads to an anti-Armenian bias. Baran, who was present at the hearing, has also been cited as a source of potential conflict of interest for Bryza in terms of energy politics. She works for the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think-tank which receives funding from ExxonMobile and other energy companies. Azerbaijan is a key “southern corridor” country for planned increases in gas shipment from the Caspian region to Europe.
…
Bryza’s neocon damsel’s past and present, and her various business and close associations are only the tip of a gigantic iceberg. But rest assured, our media and Congress will not go ‘there’, of course, without being forced to do so, that is.

So who is this quietly conceived hatched Neocon Larva, Matt Bryza?

As before I am going to start with the common pedigree chosen by our shallow MSM journalist friends and the like; the type that doesn’t raise many (if any) flags, at first glance: Matthew J. Bryza is a diplomat who became Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in June 2005. Two months ago President Obama appointed him as the US Ambassador to Azerbaijan. Here is a canned description of his job as a ‘diplomat’:

In this capacity, he is responsible for policy oversight and management of U.S. relations with countries in the Caucasus and Southern Europe. He also leads U.S. efforts to advance peaceful settlements of the separatist conflicts of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and works with the Special Negotiator for Eurasian Conflicts to advance a settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Additionally, Bryza coordinates U.S. energy policy in the regions surrounding the Black and Caspian Seas. He also works with European countries on issues of tolerance, social integration, and Islam.

In April 2001, Bryza joined the National Security Council as Director for Europe and Eurasia, with responsibility for coordinating U.S. policy on Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Caspian energy.

Bryza served as the deputy to the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy from July 1998 to March 2001. In this capacity, Bryza coordinated the U.S. Government’s inter-agency effort to develop a network of oil and gas pipelines in the Caspian region.

During 1997-1998, Bryza was special advisor to Ambassador Richard Morningstar, coordinating U.S. Government assistance programs on economic reform in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Bryza served at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during 1995-1997, first as special assistant to Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, then as a political officer covering the Russian Duma, the Communist Party, and the Republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus. He worked on European and Russian affairs at the State Department during 1991-1995.

Bryza served in Poland in 1989-1991 at the U.S. Consulate in Poznań and the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, where he covered the Solidarity movement, reform of Poland’s security services, and regional politics.

At first glance the above description is about a good ole boring tie-wearing State Department bureaucrat who was docile and boring enough to last through four administrations: Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and now, Obama; that and the fact that the guy has been climbing the ladder steadily and rather quickly. Taking a closer look, if we have enough interest and if we are paying attention, our man’s operational file stands out a bit:

Caucasus, Central Asia, Eurasia, Caspian Sea, Turkey, Russia, Dagestan, Georgia…

Look just a little bit closer and you’ll notice even more important key works associated with key operations falling within the real interest of the key people: Caspian Basin, Caspian Energy, Energy Diplomacy, Islam, Oil & Gas Pipelines…

You and I know that ‘they’ don’t put just any good ole boring bureaucrat in positions dealing with the above key regions and dealing with the above key operations and issues. Right? Right. So back to the real question: who is this Matt Bryza? How did he get his start? Whose protégé was he to make it this far this fast? Who are his buddies? The answers to some of these questions take time and real effort to discover, since you won’t find them by browsing through MSM news archives or biographical synapses posted here and there…

Let’s start with the key person leading to Bryza’s acceptance and entry as a larva into the nest of the major neocon players, and his speedy ascent thereafter:

Richard Morningstar & His Closeted Neocon Status

From Morningstar’s commonly cited pedigree sheet we know that he and Bryza collected degrees from Stanford University, which later led to their mentor-protégé relationship. In 1997 Bryza became special advisor to Ambassador Richard Morningstar, coordinating U.S. Government assistance programs on economic reform in the Caucasus and Central Asia during 1997-1998.

Digging a little bit more: In 1998 Bryza was Morningstar’s chief lieutenant in managing U.S. Caspian Sea energy interests as Deputy to the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy, where he remained until March of 2001, and he worked on developing what are now U.S. and Western plans to circumvent Russia and Iran and achieve dominance over the delivery of energy supplies to Europe.

Interestingly, last year, one year before Obama appointed Bryza as an Ambassador to Azerbaijan, on April 20, 2009, Morningstar was appointed to the role of supporting U.S. energy goals in the Eurasian region. Morningstar was special advisor to the Clinton administration on Caspian energy; time to reunite the old mentor and his protégé for the next attempt on the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline.

Morningstar’s status as one of the power player neocons has been long closeted.. During the 90s he was working with and serving one of the main agendas of Neocon players such as Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, Frank Gaffney, Paul Wolfowitz … People tend to pay attention only to the top 25 signatories and contributors of Project for the New American Century-PNAC. Yes, that infamous list also includes the Neocons shining star for Central Asia & the Caucasus, Mr. Richard L. Morningstar.

Conn Halinan’s Counterpunch article in 2004 aptly highlights an important fact when it comes to the Halliburtons, Perles and Wumsers and their Project for the New American Century (PNAC) as it relates to Central Asia:

The recent move of oil companies and the U.S. military into Central Asia is a case in point. It was President Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, who crafted that strategy. It was not the Republicans who brought Halliburton and Cheney into the Caspian region, but Clinton advisor Richard Morningstar, now a John Kerry point man. Halinan is right on target:

Clinton appointee Morningstar paved the way for Dick Cheney’s Halliburton’s positioning in Central Asia, and did darn many other good deeds for the main signatories of the Neocon Wet Dream in that region. Morningstar is also known as one of those who take their allegiances to Israel above anything else. You may remember the questions surrounding Douglas Feith’s and Rahm Emanuel’s Israel citizenship status. I haven’t seen anyone questioning Mr. Morningstar’s status in Israel; at least not on the record, but Morningstar and his family are known as staunch supporters of Israel with close ties over there. Morningstar’s mother’s, the late Jane Morningstar, obituary in the Boston Globe provides only a little initial glimpse; others with far deeper knowledge of Morningstar’s real Israel connections would currently rather whisper…Time may raise the volume on these closeted facts, or may not.

The latest articles regarding Matt Bryza’s connection to the Neocons are limited to his connection through his wife, Zeyno Baran. Either intentional censorship or ignorance glosses over his close neocon ties which started long before his marriage, going back to his early years under his mentor Morningstar, and accelerating steadily, assisting his speedy career ascent. Just check out his event calendar to see how his name pairs up with neocon brand names when it comes to functions, speeches, think-tank gatherings…

Matt Bryza & His Neocon Damsel - In 2007 Matt Bryza married Zeyno Baran, a Turkish-American neocon who’s been working for the Hudson Institute and before that for the Nixon Center. Here are a few of her titles and areas of expertise highly valued and marketed by her current neocon mentors and bosses such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Conrad Black, Abram Shulsky . . . Director of the Center for Eurasian Policy, Director of International Security and Energy Programs, Director of the Caucasus Project.

Baran and her colleagues and mentors are closely associated with the Turkish Ultra-Nationalist (Ulusalcis) movement and figures, including the military figures involved in the Ergenekon scandal:

The think tanks actively engaging the Turkish Ulusalcıs are AEI, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Hudson Institute.

So, I'm guessing this is where the "Iran Has Nuclear Weapons (And If Not Now, Then Soon!)" furor emanates.

And talk about Shock and Awe! Thanks, Tee! We may not like the idea that the "aristocracy" (self-proclaimed, of course) doesn't care about the rest of the population's welfare, but when you consider this type history, it gets a lot easier to understand.

(I actually was already aware of the broad strokes here, but how does it make all those still-loyal Bush voters feel, I wonder (because it all comes out eventually, doesn't it?)? (Emphasis marks and some editing added - Ed.))

Bush Family Nazi Fortune Confirmed

I came across this article a few years ago while doing research for my book titled Shock and Awe on America. I was intrigued by the hard hitting article and today I present it to you, so the chain of Truth, Justice and "Payback is a Bitch" will not be broken...

John Loftus, is a former U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor, the President of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the highly respected author of numerous books on the CIA-Nazi connection including The Belarus Secret and The Secret War Against the Jews, both of which have extensive material on the Bush-Rockefeller-Nazi connection.

For the Bush family, it is a lingering nightmare. For their Nazi clients, the Dutch connection was the mother of all money laundering schemes. From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen - the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine - talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation team. For four long years, successive teams of inquisitors tried to break Thyssen's simple claim to possess neither foreign bank accounts nor interests in foreign corporations, no assets that might lead to the missing billions in assets of the Third Reich. The inquisitors failed utterly.

Why? Because what the wily Thyssen deposed was, in a sense, true. What the Allied investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks.

He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents - stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts - from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker.

Thyssen's partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States.The allied investigators underestimated Thyssen's reach, his connections, his motives, and his means. The web of financial entities Thyssen helped create in the 1920's remained a mystery for the rest of the twentieth century, an almost perfectly hidden underground sewer pipeline for moving dirty money, money that bankrolled the post-war fortunes not only of the Thyssen industrial empire...but the Bush family as well.

It was a secret Fritz Thyssen would take to his grave.

It was a secret that would lead former US intelligence agent William Gowen, now pushing 80, to the very doorstep of the Dutch royal family. The Gowens are no strangers to controversy or nobility. His father was one of President Roosevelt's diplomatic emissaries to Pope Pius XII, leading a futile attempt to persuade the Vatican to denounce Hitler's treatment of Jews. It was his son, William Gowen, who served in Rome after World War II as a Nazi hunter and investigator with the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. It was Agent Gowen who first discovered the secret Vatican Ratline for smuggling Nazis in 1949.

It was also the same William Gowen who began to uncover the secret Dutch pipeline for smuggling Nazi money in 1999.

A half-century earlier, Fritz Thyssen was telling the allied investigators that he had no interest in foreign companies, that Hitler had turned on him and seized most of his property. His remaining assets were mostly in the Russian Occupied Zone of Germany (which he knew were a write-off anyway). His distant (and disliked) relatives in neutral nations like Holland were the actual owners of a substantial percentage of the remaining German industrial base.

As innocent victims of the Third Reich, they were lobbying the allied occupation governments in Germany, demanding restitution of the property that had been seized from them by the Nazis.

Under the rules of the Allied occupation of Germany, all property owned by citizens of a neutral nation which had been seized by the Nazis had to be returned to the neutral citizens upon proper presentation of documents showing proof of ownership. Suddenly, all sorts of neutral parties, particularly in Holland, were claiming ownership of various pieces of the Thyssen empire.

In his cell, Fritz Thyssen just smiled and waited to be released from prison while members of the Dutch royal family and the Dutch intelligence service reassembled his pre-war holdings for him.

The British and American interrogators may have gravely underestimated Thyssen but they nonetheless knew they were being lied to. Their suspicions focused on one Dutch Bank in particular, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, in Rotterdam.

This bank did a lot of business with the Thyssens over the years. In 1923, as a favor to him, the Rotterdam bank loaned the money to build the very first Nazi party headquarters in Munich. But somehow the allied investigations kept going nowhere, the intelligence leads all seemed to dry up.

If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank's lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles' client as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles's other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch.

The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles' cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously.

Several decades after the war, investigative reporter Paul Manning, Edward R. Murrow's colleague, stumbled across the Thyssen interrogations in the US National Archives. Manning intended to write a book about Nazi money laundering. Manning's manuscript was a dagger at Allen Dulles' throat: his book specifically mentioned the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart by name, albeit in passing.

Dulles volunteered to help the unsuspecting Manning with his manuscript, and sent him on a wild goose chase, searching for Martin Bormann in South America.

Without knowing that he had been deliberately sidetracked, Manning wrote a forward to his book personally thanking Allen Dulles for his "assurance that I was "on the right track, and should keep going.'"

Dulles sent Manning and his manuscript off into the swamps of obscurity. The same "search for Martin Bormann"scam was also used to successfully discredit Ladislas Farago, another American journalist probing too far into the laundering of Nazi money. American investigators had to be sent anywhere but Holland.

And so the Dutch connection remained unexplored until 1994 when I published the book "The Secret War Against the Jews."As a matter of historical curiosity, I mentioned that Fritz Thyssen (and indirectly, the Nazi Party) had obtained their early financing from Brown Brothers Harriman, and its affiliate, the Union Banking Corporation.

Union Bank, in turn, was the Bush family's holding company for a number of other entities, including the "Holland American Trading Company."

It was a matter of public record that the Bush holdings were seized by the US government after the Nazis overran Holland. In 1951, the Bush's reclaimed Union Bank from the US Alien Property Custodian, along with their "neutral" Dutch assets.

I did not realize it, but I had stumbled across a very large piece of the missing Dutch connection. Bush's ownership of the Holland-American investment company was the missing link to Manning's earlier research in the Thyssen investigative files.

In 1981, Manning had written: "Thyssen's first step in a long dance of tax and currency frauds began [in the late 1930's] when he disposed of his shares in the Dutch Hollandische-Amerikanische Investment Corporation to be credited to the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N.V., Rotterdam, the bank founded in 1916 by August Thyssen Senior."

In this one obscure paragraph, in a little known book, Manning had unwittingly documented two intriguing points: 1) The Bush's Union Bank had apparently bought the same corporate stock that the Thyssens were selling as part of their Nazi money laundering, and 2) the Rotterdam Bank, far from being a neutral Dutch institution, was founded by Fritz Thyssen's father.

In hindsight, Manning and I had uncovered different ends of the Dutch connection.This is just part of the original article, to read the full article use th(is) link: http://www.rense.com/general26/dutch.htm

Teeluck's Note . . . Allen Dulles went on to become the Chief Advisor to Republican Nominee Thomas E. Dewey and later under President Eisenhower he was appointed the Director of the CIA.

Under Dulles's direction, the CIA created MK-Ultra, a top secret mind control research project which was managed by Sidney Gottlieb. Dulles also personally oversaw Operation Mockingbird, a program which influenced American media companies as part of the "New Look".

This other link is a news story run by The Guardian, a reputable and sound News Media Giant, whose story parallels the above article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

Their opening salvo is thus...How Bush's Grandfather Helped Hitler's Rise To Power.

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

Please click on the links above to read the whole article.

P.S. I was shown some of these files back in the 80's by a librarian at the National Archives who knew of my perverse interest in exactly how Bush, who was the CIA Director before Reagan chose him as his Vice President (after Bush had had no support - waaah! - to run for President himself), became entrenched in power through the influence of his father, Prescott, former U.S. Senator, and bankers such as J.P. Morgan and his own grandfather Herbert Walker (and many, many other wealthy players).

Just sayin'!

And in much more recent news (cause I just love to be current or au courant for my international readers), we learn that (as if we had no idea before . . . ) (and, yes, there are emphasis marks added by yours truly):

Mainstream Media Helps BP Pretend There's No Oil

With BP's broken well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone's lips is: where is all the oil?"

NEW ORLEANS (Mother Jones) – I don't know who the fuck these everyones are, but I'm happy to help out them, and ABC, and this AFP reporter writing that due to BP's stunningly successful skimming and burning efforts, "the real difficulty now is finding any oil to clean up."

I sent one text message to Bloomberg's Lizzie O'Leary, who's standing on Grand Isle, Louisiana, right now, asking how the beach looks. "Lower part past the barrier untouched with globs of oil that washed up last night," she said.

By "untouched," she means by cleanup crews, and that "barrier" she's talking about is the one the press isn't allowed past. I sent another text to Drew Wheelan, who's also in Southwestern Louisiana, doing bird surveys for the American Birding Association, asking him how big the biggest tar mat on Grand Terre — the scene of those now famous horrifying oiled-bird photos — is. "20 feet by 15," he said. "But bigger ones submerged slightly."

If I managed to find that much oil with my BlackBerry without getting dressed or leaving the house, let's hope Thad Allen, who is quoted in the article as saying, "What we're trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it," can locate some more with the staff and craft of the United States Coast Guard at his disposal.

As for the reporter's alarmingly unsubstantiated claim that "The beaches should be relatively painless to mop up," I can't even count the number of correspondents down here who've pointed out that digging a finger under the surface of supposedly clean sand turns up crude, or the number of cleanup workers who've said cleanup efforts are strictly cosmetic, or that no matter what they do the contamination just keeps bubbling up.

It's BP's job to whitewash this story and make it easier to indulge the desire to forget about the scope of the devastation, guys. Not the media's.

What media? Is there any unbought media there left?

Suzan
_____________

What Is Wrong With Conservatism? Why Obama Never Explained Why We HAD To Stay in Afghanistan, Who Cooked the Planet? & Beck's Bile Spreads Nationwide

I found this little morsel at Americablog (where a commenter had thought it tasty for that crowd) in answer to Paul Krugman's puzzlement over why the G-20 seems to have become Pete Peterson fans (Madmen in Authority), with a "crazy" argument that the US must "reduce the debt at all costs" no matter if it strangles the already-limping recovery and causes massive suffering in its wake. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Recall that his title is "Madmen In Authority." The question he asks is: Why is the G20 demanding immediate fiscal austerity? His answer? Because they've gone crazy.

Really? That can't possibly be right — can it? Let's do what Krugman won't do — assume these people are rational, with understandable goals. After all, these are the G20 finance ministers and central bank chiefs — the economic slice through the little handful of people who . . . well, run the whole world. Really. The whole world. So what are their goals? Well, what are the goals of any aristocracy? What would most people's goals be, if they had made it into the aristocracy. Simply put, to remain the aristocracy.

Yum. And not because I think anyone else should partake of this "Conservative" madness. This essay exposes many of the reasons we are subjected without respite to so-called mainstream writers like multimillionaires Michael Bloomberg, Thomas Friedbrain and even David F. Brooks with their special pleadings for the rightful place of their aristocracy in the U.S., and in kind the whole contraption of some definition of "American Conservatism" being supported by people barely able to make a living but dreaming of winning the lottery so they can join the rulers of this land in being able to then take further advantage of people who used to be their bottom-level equals. Please read the whole article if you can as its reasoning is worth taking more than a few moments with as I've just served up an hors d'oeuvre here.

(EXTRA: I hate to continue posting this message, but the need is great (and I know that everyone is in need in this economy, truly I do), but if anyone could make a contribution to my PayPal account (or otherwise - contact me for further info), it will be really, really, really appreciated as my financial situation is increasingly desperate right now due to continued long-term unemployment. Please know that I sincerely appreciate everything that you, my kind readers, have done for me in the past financially and otherwise. Especially, otherwise, as the support group for this blog is beyond belief. My belief anyway. Again, my heartfelt thanks. . . and now . . . back to your irregular viewing.)

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It?

Philip E. Agre

August 2004

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

Q: What is conservatism?

A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?

A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

//1 The Main Arguments of Conservatism

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke.

Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth. Although one of the goals of every aristocracy is to make its preferred social order seem permanent and timeless, in reality conservatism must be reinvented in every generation. This is true for many reasons, including internal conflicts among the aristocrats; institutional shifts due to climate, markets, or warfare; and ideological gains and losses in the perpetual struggle against democracy. In some societies the aristocracy is rigid, closed, and stratified, while in others it is more of an aspiration among various fluid and factionalized groups. The situation in the United States right now is toward the latter end of the spectrum. A main goal in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions of privilege to their children, and many of the aspiring aristocrats of the United States are appointing their children to positions in government and in the archipelago of think tanks that promote conservative theories.

Conservatism in every place and time is founded on deception. The deceptions of conservatism today are especially sophisticated, simply because culture today is sufficiently democratic that the myths of earlier times will no longer suffice.

Before analyzing current-day conservatism's machinery of deception, let us outline the main arguments of conservatism. Although these arguments have changed little through history, they might seem unfamiliar to many people today, indeed even to people who claim to be conservatives. That unfamiliarity is a very recent phenomenon. Yet it is only through the classical arguments and their fallacies that we can begin to analyze how conservatism operates now.

1. Institutions

According to the first type of argument, found for example in Burke, social institutions are a kind of capital. A properly ordered society will be blessed with large quantities of this capital. This capital has very particular properties. It is a sprawling tangle of social arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down through generations as part of the culture. It is generally tacit in nature and cannot be rationally analyzed. It is fragile and must be conserved, because a society that lacks it will collapse into anarchy and tyranny. Innovation is bad, therefore, and prejudice is good. Although the institutions can tolerate incremental reforms around the edges, systematic questioning is a threat to social order. In particular, rational thought is evil. Nothing can be worse for the conservative than rational thought, because people who think rationally might decide to try replacing inherited institutions with new ones, something that a conservative regards as impossible. This is where the word "conservative" comes from: the supposed importance of conserving established institutions.

This argument is not wholly false. Institutions are in fact sprawling tangles of social arrangements and patterns of thought, passed down through generations as part of the culture. And people who think they can reengineer the whole of human society overnight are generally mistaken. The people of ancien regime France were oppressed by the conservative order of their time, but indeed their revolution did not work, and would probably not have worked even if conservatives from elsewhere were not militarily attacking them. After all, the conservative order had gone to insane lengths to deprive them of the education, practical experience, and patterns of thought that would be required to operate a democracy. They could not invent those things overnight.

Even so, the argument about conserving institutions is mostly untrue. Most institutions are less fragile and more dynamic than conservatives claim. Large amounts of institutional innovation happen in every generation. If people lack a rational analysis of institutions, that is mostly a product of conservatism rather than an argument for it. And although conservatism has historically claimed to conserve institutions, history makes clear that conservatism is only interested in conserving particular kinds of institutions: the institutions that reinforce conservative power. Conservatism rarely tries to conserve institutions such as Social Security and welfare that decrease the common people's dependency on the aristocracy and the social authorities that serve it. To the contrary, they represent those institutions in various twisted ways as dangerous to to the social order generally or to their beneficiaries in particular.

2. Hierarchy

The opposite of conservatism is democracy, and contempt for democracy is a constant thread in the history of conservative argument. Instead, conservatism has argued that society ought to be organized in a hierarchy of orders and classes and controlled by its uppermost hierarchical stratum, the aristocracy. Many of these arguments against egalitarianism are ancient, and most of them are routinely heard on the radio. One tends to hear the arguments in bits and pieces, for example the emphatic if vague claim that people are different. Of course, most of these arguments, if considered rationally, actually argue for meritocracy rather than for aristocracy.

Meritocracy is a democratic principle. George Bush, however, was apparently scarred for life by having been one of the last students admitted to Yale under its old aristocratic admissions system, and having to attend classes with students admitted under the meritocratic system who considered themselves to be smarter than him. Although he has lately claimed to oppose the system of legacy admissions from which he benefitted, that is a tactic, part of a package deal to eliminate affirmative action, thereby allowing conservative social hierarchies to be reaffirmed in other ways.

So, how do we, the people, counter this artistocratic heresy?

. . . Build the Democratic Party.

Your model should be Pat Robertson. He is as extreme on the right as anybody in the United States is on the left. Yet his people took over large parts of the Republican Party.

They did this in three ways: laboriously designing a mainstream-sounding language, identifying large numbers of talented activists and training them in the day-to-day work of issue and party politics, and building their own communications systems. Liberals should do the same.

Now, many liberals argue that the Democratic Party would magically start winning again if it would only move to the left. This is lazy nonsense. The Democratic Party has moved to the right for the simple reason that liberals do not have a language that wins elections. To take over the Democratic Party, liberals need to replace the left-wing policies that do not work and, for the policies that do work, get a language that moves 51% of likely voters to vote Democratic.

Other liberals argue that the Democratic Party, and the "system" in general, are irretrievably broken, and that they must build a third party, such as the Green Party with its endorsement of Ralph Nader. The difficulties with this notion are hard to count. For one, splitting the left is a certain recipe for centuries of aristocratic domination. For another, building a party with only people who share your opinions to the nth degree is a certain recipe for factionalism and isolation. For another, the Green Party is a chaotic mess that has no serious chance of becoming a mass-based political party.

Life under aristocratic domination is horrible. The United States is blessed to have little notion of what this horror is like. Europe, for example, staggered under the weight of its aristocracies for thousands of years. European aristocracies are in decline, and Europe certainly has its democratic heroes and its own dawning varieties of civilized life, and yet the psychology and institutions that the aristocracies left behind continue to make European societies rigid and blunt Europeans' minds with layers of internalized oppression. People come to America to get away from all of that. Conservatism is as alien here as it could possibly be.

Only through the most comprehensive campaign of deception in human history has it managed to establish its very tentative control of the country's major political institutions. Conservatism until very recently was quite open about the fact that it is incompatible with the modern world. That is right. The modern world is a good place, and it will win.

And if we don't get our resistance act(s) in gear, ex-Assistant Secretary U.S. Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, fills us in on what is in store for such near-sighted citizens (and reemphasizes the reason for my moving away from the agenda of the Obamaniacs as I have no clue as to what it is). (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Down To The Last Trillion in Red Ink

US Treasury Running on Fumes

July 27, 2010

The White House is screaming like a stuck pig. WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan War Documents “puts the lives of our soldiers and our coalition partners at risk.”

What nonsense. Obama’s war puts the lives of American soldiers at risk, and the craven puppet state behavior of “our partners” in serving as US mercenaries is what puts their troops at risk.

Keep in mind that it was someone in the US military that leaked the documents to WikiLeaks. This means that there is a spark of rebellion within the Empire itself.

And rightly so. The leaked documents show that the US has committed numerous war crimes and that the US government and military have lied through their teeth in order to cover up the failure of their policies. These are the revelations that Washington wants to keep secret.

If Obama cared about the lives of our soldiers, he would not have sent them to a war, the purpose of which he cannot identify. Earlier in his regime, Obama admitted that he did not know what the mission was in Afghanistan. He vowed to find out what the mission was and to tell us, but he never did. After being read the riot act by the military/security complex, which recycles war profits into political campaign contributions, Obama simply declared the war to be “necessary.” No one has ever explained why the war is necessary.

The government cannot explain why the war is necessary, because it is not necessary to the American people. Any necessary reason for the war has to do with the enrichment of narrow private interests and with undeclared agendas. If the agendas were declared and the private interests being served identified, even the American sheeple might revolt.

The Obama regime has made war the business of America. Escalation in Afghanistan has gone hand in hand with drone attacks on Pakistan and the use of proxy forces to conduct wars in Pakistan and North Africa. Currently, the US is conducting provocative naval exercises off the coasts of China and North Korea and instigating war between Columbia and Venezuela in South America.

Former CIA director Michael Hayden declared on July 25 that an attack on Iran seems unavoidable. With the print and TV media captive, why doesn’t Washington simply tell us that the country is at war without going to the trouble of war?

That way the munitions industry can lay off its workers and put the military appropriations directly into profits. We could avoid the war crimes and wasted lives of our soldiers.

The US economy and the well-being of Americans are being sacrificed to the regime’s wars. The states are broke and laying off teachers. Even “rich” California, formerly touted as “the seventh largest economy in the world,” is reduced to issuing script and cutting its state workers’ pay to the minimum wage. Supplemental war appropriations have become routine affairs, but the budget deficit is invoked to block any aid to Americans - but not to Israel.

On July 25 the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported that the US and Israel had signed a multi-billion dollar deal for Boeing to provide Israel with a missile system.

Americans can get no help out of Washington, but the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, declared that Washington’s commitment to Israel’s security is “not negotiable.” Washington’s commitment to California and to the security of the rest of us is negotiable. War spending has run up the budget deficit, and the deficit precludes any help for Americans.

With the US bankrupting itself in wars, America’s largest creditor, China, has taken issue with America’s credit rating. The head of China’s largest credit rating agency declared:

“The US is insolvent and faces bankruptcy as a pure debtor nation.”

On July 12, Niall Ferguson, an historian of empire, warned that the American empire could collapse suddenly from weakness brought on by its massive debts and that such a collapse could be closer than we think. Deaf, dumb, and blind, Washington policymakers prattle on about “thirty more years of war.”

(Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary U.S. Treasury, Associate Editor Wall Street Journal, Columnist for Business Week, Senior Research Fellow Hoover Institution Stanford University, and William E. Simon Chair of Political Economy in the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C. )

And the latest on the state of our biological existence from Paul Krugman (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

Who Cooked the Planet?

July 25, 2010

Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 — the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died — the hottest such stretch on record. Of course, you can’t infer trends in global temperatures from one year’s experience.

But ignoring that fact has long been one of the favorite tricks of climate-change deniers: they point to an unusually warm year in the past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!” Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date — but the point is that the record-breaking temperatures we’re currently experiencing have made a nonsense argument even more nonsensical; at this point it doesn’t work even on its own terms.

But will any of the deniers say “O.K., I guess I was wrong,” and support climate action? No. And the planet will continue to cook. So why didn’t climate-change legislation get through the Senate? Let’s talk first about what didn’t cause the failure, because there have been many attempts to blame the wrong people.

First of all, we didn’t fail to act because of legitimate doubts about the science. Every piece of valid evidence — long-term temperature averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume, melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows — points to a continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.

Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior. You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers — allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media. You don’t believe such things can happen? Think Shirley Sherrod.

Did reasonable concerns about the economic impact of climate legislation block action? No. It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s growth rate.

So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it?

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the aid of cowardice — above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted their posts at the crucial moment.

There are a number of such climate cowards, but let me single out one in particular: Senator John McCain.

There was a time when Mr. McCain was considered a friend of the environment. Back in 2003 he burnished his maverick image by co-sponsoring legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. He reaffirmed support for such a system during his presidential campaign, and things might look very different now if he had continued to back climate action once his opponent was in the White House. But he didn’t — and it’s hard to see his switch as anything other than the act of a man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his political career.

Alas, Mr. McCain wasn’t alone; and there will be no climate bill. Greed, aided by cowardice, has triumphed. And the whole world will pay the price.

And once again, Paul Craig Roberts gets the final rational word on our coming demise (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

The Year America Dissolved

July 27, 2010

It was 2017. Clans were governing America.The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives’ war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable.

As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.

The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.

With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base.

The government was forced to print money in order to pay its bills, causing domestic prices to rise rapidly. Faced with hyperinflation, Washington took recourse in terminating Social Security and Medicare and followed up by confiscating the remnants of private pensions. This provided a one-year respite, but with no more resources to confiscate, money creation and hyperinflation resumed.

Organized food deliveries broke down when the government fought hyperinflation with fixed prices and the mandate that all purchases and sales had to be in US paper currency. Unwilling to trade appreciating goods for depreciating paper, goods disappeared from stores.

Washington responded as Lenin had done during the “war communism” period of Soviet history. The government sent troops to confiscate goods for distribution in kind to the population. This was a temporary stop-gap until existing stocks were depleted, as future production was discouraged. Much of the confiscated stocks became the property of the troops who seized the goods.

Goods reappeared in markets under the protection of local warlords. Transactions were conducted in barter and in gold, silver, and copper coins.

Other clans organized around families and individuals who possessed stocks of food, bullion, guns and ammunition. Uneasy alliances formed to balance differences in clan strengths. Betrayals quickly made loyalty a necessary trait for survival.

Large-scale food and other production broke down as local militias taxed distribution as goods moved across local territories. Washington seized domestic oil production and refineries, but much of the government’s gasoline was paid for safe passage across clan territories.Most of the troops in Washington’s overseas bases were abandoned. As their resource stocks were drawn down, the abandoned soldiers were forced into alliances with those with whom they had been fighting.

Washington found it increasingly difficult to maintain itself. As it lost control over the country, Washington was less able to secure supplies from abroad as tribute from those Washington threatened with nuclear attack. Gradually other nuclear powers realized that the only target in America was Washington. The more astute saw the writing on the wall and slipped away from the former capital city.

When Rome began her empire, Rome’s currency consisted of gold and silver coinage. Rome was well organized with efficient institutions and the ability to supply troops in the field so that campaigns could continue indefinitely, a monopoly in the world of Rome’s time.

When hubris sent America in pursuit of overseas empire, the venture coincided with the offshoring of American manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs and the corresponding erosion of the government’s tax base, with the advent of massive budget and trade deficits, with the erosion of the fiat paper currency’s value, and with America’s dependence on foreign creditors and puppet rulers.

The Roman Empire lasted for centuries. The American one collapsed overnight.

Rome’s corruption became the strength of her enemies, and the Western Empire was overrun.

America’s collapse occurred when government ceased to represent the people and became the instrument of a private oligarchy.

Decisions were made in behalf of short-term profits for the few at the expense of unmanageable liabilities for the many. Overwhelmed by liabilities, the government collapsed.

Globalism had run its course. Life reformed on a local basis.

For the final irrational word~ (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Glenn Beck's Incendiary Angst Dangerously Close to Having a Body Count

The pundit's crusade against the Tides Foundation is the latest in a line of tirades that have led to violence

By Eric Boehlert

On his Monday radio show, Glenn Beck highlighted claims that before he started targeting a little-known, left-leaning organization called the Tides Foundation on his Fox News TV show, "nobody knew" what the non-profit was.

Indeed, for more than a year Beck has been portraying the progressive organization as a central player in a larger, nefarious cabal of marxist/socialist/Nazi Obama-loving outlets determined to destroy democracy in America. Beck has routinely smeared the low-profile entity for being staffed by "thugs" and "bullies" and involved in "the nasty of the nastiest," like indoctrinating schoolchildren and creating a "mass organization to seize power."

As Media Matters reported, the conspiratorial host had mentioned (read: attacked) the little-known progressive organization nearly 30 times on his Fox program alone since it premiered in 2009, including several mentions in the last month. (Beck's the only TV talker who regularly references the foundation, according to our Nexis searches.)

So yes, Beck has done all he can to scare the hell out of people about the Tides Foundation and "turn the light of day" onto an organization that actually facilitates non-profit giving. And guess what? Everybody in America would have found out about the Tides Foundation last week if Byron Williams had had his way. He's the right-wing, government-hating, gun-toting nut who strapped on his body armor, stocked a pickup truck with guns and ammo, and set off up the California coast to San Francisco in order to start killing employees at the previously obscure Tides Foundation in hopes of sparking a political revolution.

Thankfully, the planned domestic terrorist attack never came to pass because California Highway Patrol officers pulled Williams over for drunk driving on his way to his killing spree. Williams quickly opened fire, wounding two officers during a lengthy shootout. Luckily, Williams wasn't able to act out the ultimate goal of his dark anger - fueled by the TV news he watched - about how "Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items," as his mother put it.

Williams wasn't able to open fire inside the offices of the Tides Foundation, an organization "nobody knew" about until Glenn Beck started targeting it. And thankfully, Williams wasn't able to take his place alongside a growing list of domestic, anti-government terrorists, such as the recent Pentagon shooter, the Holocaust Museum gunman, the kamikaze pilot who flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, and the Pittsburgh cop-killer who set up an ambush because he was convinced Obama was going to take away his guns.

All the vigilante attacks appear to have been fueled by an almost pathological hatred for the U.S. government - the same open hatred that right-wing bloggers, AM talk radio hosts, and Fox News' lineup of anti-government prophets have been frantically fueling for the last year, pushing doomsday warnings of America's democratic demise under President Obama.

And the sad the sad truth is we're going to see more like Byron Williams. We're going to see more attempts at vigilante violence during the Age of Obama simply because the right-wing media, led by Beck, continue to gleefully (albeit irresponsibly) stoke dangerous fires with the kind of relentlessly incendiary rhetoric that has no match in terms of modern day, mainstream use in American politics or media.

Just listen to Glenn Beck:

Progressives "are sucking the blood out of the republic" and are "gonna start getting more and more violent."

"To the day I die, I am going to be a progressive hunter."

"[Y]ou will have to shoot me in the forehead before you take away my gun" and "before I acquiesce and be silent."

"This game is for keeps"; "[Y]ou can shoot me in the head ... but there will be 10 others that line up."

"There is a coup going on."

There is a stealing of America. God help us in an emergency.

And don't forget about the unhinged response when health care reform was passed in March: "Get down on your knees and pray. Pray. It's September 11th all over again, except that we didn't have the collapsing buildings." After financial reform passed last week, Beck told his audience, "Your republic is over."

Meanwhile, Andrew Breitbart's website recently tagged Obama as the "suicide-bomber-in-chief," while the conservative Washington Times just last week published an op-ed - by a former congressman, no less - asserting the President poses more of a threat to America than Al Qaeda.

Note that the radical right's media rhetoric is no longer even political in a partisan sense. Instead, it's purely revolutionary. It isn't, "We think taxes should be lower" or "Obama should be more hawkish overseas." It's, "There's an insidious and deadly plot afoot by Democrats and progressives to strip Americans of their freedom and this country of its greatness." Obama is now the incarnation of evil (the Antichrist?), and his driving hatred for America, as well as for democracy, runs so deep that he ran for president in order to destroy the United States from inside the Oval Office.

. . . Indeed, the relentless message that right-wing audiences hear is unequivocal and inescapable: Do something! Take action!

And last week, Byron Williams, likely inspired by Glenn Beck's Tides obsession, grabbed his guns and set out to do just that.

When will the voice of reason be heard again?

Obama needs to make a speech addressing these issues and putting the Deficit Commission out of work.

Suzan
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