Citizen G'kar: Musings on Earth

May 24, 2010

Israel Past Nuclear Alliance with South Africa

Map showing the territorial four main races/et...

Who do you believe? A respected historian or the Israeli government?

T he Guardian reports on findings of historian Sasha Polakow-Suransky in the South African archives demonstrating that Israel offered Praetoria nuclear weapons in 1975. The documents are detailed in Polakow-Suransky’s book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. The relevant memos and minutes are reproduced by The Guardian here.

The White South African government appears to have wanted to buy Israeli nuclear-tipped missiles for potential use against Black African neighbors such as Angola, Botswana, Zambia and (at certain points) Mozambique– countries against which the rogue regime often launched cross-border raids.

It is worth remembering what kind of pariah, racist and repressive regime Apartheid South Africa really was. Non-binding UN Security Council resolutions starting in the 1960s discouraged conventional arms sales to the regime, much less nuclear weapons! (The UN-imposed arms sale ban became mandatory on member states in 1977, shortly after the Israeli offer had been made).

April 23, 2010

Israel Continues to Colonize East Jerusalem and Steal Land

Are Israeli's like Nazi's? No, they are like South Africans of British descent practicing Apartheid. Once the South Africans became world pariahs, the finally gave up the abhorrent practice of separation of the races.

The new Israeli policy of deporting Palestinians from the West Bank on arbitrary grounds has kicked in with Ahmad Sabah, who has just been deported to Gaza and separated from his family in the West Bank. The measure contravenes the Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of occupied populations, and it also goes contrary to the undertakings Israel made toward the Palestine Authority in the course of the Oslo peace negotiations.

The episode underlines the ways in which their forced statelessness leaves Palestinians (almost uniquely among major world nationalities) completely vulnerable to loss of the most basic human rights. That he was forcibly moved to Gaza by the Israelis suggests that many of those singled out for potential deportation from the West Bank may be moved to the small slum along the Mediterranean, which the Israelis have cut off from its traditional markets and which they keep under a blockade of the civilian population (a war crime). The Israeli establishment has decided not to try to colonize Gaza, and its isolation and hopelessness make it an attractive place for them to begin exiling West Bank residents, thus making more room for Israeli colonists.

The new policy, which is illegal six ways to Sunday in international law, is the brainchild of the government of far rightwing Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu.

April 14, 2010

Jordan condemns Israel over West Bank deportation order

Ethnic cleansing is alive and well in Israel.

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Jordan condemned Israel on Wednesday over an Israel Defense Forces order facilitating the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinian from the West Bank.

The order, though in existence since 1969, was recently discussed in a Haaretz article.

According to the report, a military order aimed at preventing infiltration was to come into force, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years. Under the order, tens of thousands of Palestinians will automatically become criminal offenders liable to be severely punished.

March 30, 2010

Character Test and Healthcare Reform

The Republican lie machine goes on and on, exploiting short memories, fear, and racism. What is the real opposition to healthcare reform? It's all about their long standing policy against Social Security and any other form of social insurance.

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One of the side benefits of health reform is that it has acted as a character test. If, for example, you thought of Mitt Romney as a person of character, his desperate attempts to disavow what is essentially his own policy proposal have cured you of that affliction. And as Menzie Chinn points out, Robert Samuelson’s hysterical reaction to what is, when all is said and done, a fairly modest — and paid for! — expansion of social insurance tells what what really lies behind his constant harping on the long-run fiscal issue.

Menzie has a nice chart comparing four policies and their impact on the budget: the two big Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war, and the health reform:

It’s curious, then, that Samuelson and others are driven wild only by the last of these. But Dan Gross explained it all a while back:
it’s about a strain of intellectual Toryism bedeviled by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be getting social insurance.
All that high-minded talk about fiscal responsibility is just a cover for this deeper-seated concern.

March 25, 2010

A Grassroots Effort for Clean ElectionsTaking Money Out of Politics

There is a way to roll back the damage done by the Supreme Court that has opened the flood gates for corporate money in campaigns. Grassroots citizen financial support in limited amounts, leveraging public funds for campaigns. It's working so well there is REAL bipartisan support in Maine for making it national.

While Alison Smith was raising her kids in a rural Connecticut town, a developer arrived one Thanksgiving weekend, when no one was around, and cut a canal to drain the water from a large marsh that adjoined her backyard. “He was slimy and greedy,” she says, “doing things on the sly. He filled in the land and built new houses. Gradually it dawned on me that we had wetland regulations, that he’d broken the rules, and that no one was doing anything about it. So I went to a town meeting of a couple hundred people, and waited for someone to say something. Nobody did. So even though I didn’t know that much about the issues, I voiced my opinions as best I could, red-faced, hesitant, and embarrassed. And I found that all these other people were thinking the same thing. They’d say it to each other, but not in public. It was really hard for me to speak out, but it was also really neat.”

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Shortly afterward, a neighbor suggested that she join the League of Women Voters. “I told her I wasn’t much of a joiner, but she kept asking me to different meetings and said I could bring my three-year-old daughter.” Gradually Alison got involved, working mostly on wetland problems and recycling programs. “I was hesitant at first. I don’t have a college degree. I’m more of a behind-the-scenes person. But I’ve always felt like someone who cares, even if I didn’t always know what to do about it.”

When Alison moved to Maine, she joined the League’s Portland affiliate, focusing on clean-air issues and transportation alternatives. She helped organize a diverse group of stakeholders to pass a new state law on waste-oil recycling. “The more I did, the more confident I became. The more I felt I had something to contribute.” By the fall of 1995, when she was asked to collect signatures to get a new campaign reform measure on the ballot, Alison jumped at the chance.

“We’ve become so used to being disgusted with elections and politicians,” she said. “We assume that almost anyone who gets in will be corrupt. But the decisions they make in our name matter hugely, often leaving us with even less power. I didn’t know whether the initiative would pass, but I didn’t want cynicism to rule my life. I’d like to see politics bring out the best in us, not the worst. I get tired when people complain all the time but never do anything to change things.”

Maine’s Clean Elections Act offered candidates for state office an alternative to the degrading and often corrupting process of financing their campaigns. Under its provisions, they could choose a Clean Election Option, pledging not to take private funding or spend their own money (apart from modest initial seed funds), and raising a designated number of five-dollar contributions in their district to demonstrate their grassroots support. In return, they would receive enough public money to mount a full-scale campaign; if privately funded opponents or outside political committees out-spent them, they’d get enough additional money to stay competitive. The initiative also included other reforms, including tightened limits on individual and corporate spending.

In a single day, 1,100 volunteers qualified the measure by staffing tables outside polling stations. “I just sat at a table with a sign saying ‘Do you want to take big money out of politics?’” recalls Alison. “Almost everyone who came over responded and signed.”

The campaign worked closely with members of an allied research project that publicized in-state contributions from such sources as the tobacco and trucking industries. It was especially effective to invite the press to film a $100-a-plate event that industry lobbyists held for the chair of the banking and insurance committee in the state legislature. These stories, says Alison, “helped us talk about the issue not only in speculative terms, but in terms of how wealthy interests were buying and selling our government. People felt they didn’t have to accept this as the way things always had to be.”

As she got more deeply involved, Alison met with newspaper editorial boards and spoke wherever anyone would have her. “I felt nervous when the League asked me to do new things like speak at press conferences. ‘Why on earth would they want me to do it,’ I asked, ‘instead of some expert?’ But I also found that as an ordinary person I had more credibility than the political professionals. The more I talked with people, the more I began to understand the issues. When people asked why I was involved, I’d tell them about the cynicism that seems to be destroying the very core of our democracy. I’d repeat over and over how if we could just break the links between money and politics, we’d begin to have a solution.”

The initiative passed with 56 percent of the vote, and it changed Maine’s politics. One Republican legislator said that before the Act’s passage, he always had to listen to his donors first; now he was finally free to vote on his and his constituents’ beliefs. By 2008, three quarters of the candidates in the state were participating. It made it easier for the legislature to pass bills like one that sharply dropped the price of prescription drugs. Although the Clean Elections Act couldn’t legally affect federal races, its popularity helped persuade Maine’s two Republican U.S. senators to buck party leadership and back national campaign finance reform efforts. Citizen efforts have since led to public financing of major state offices in Arizona, Connecticut, and Vermont, as well as public financing of selected offices in New Mexico and North Carolina, and a legislative pilot project in New Jersey. An Arizona state legislator I met had been a high school teacher whose students urged him to run; since he knew no one with money, he said, he wouldn’t have even tried in the absence of the clean election system.

Since the Maine initiative’s success, Alison has chaired the League’s national committee on campaign finance reform and continues to advise other states and national efforts on the value of the Clean Elections model. The impact she helped make also changed Alison personally. “It gave me a sense that I really can do something just by showing up to further a cause — this fundamental cause of democracy that affects everything I care about, so my kids won’t grow up in a cynical world.”

Paul Loeb Taking Money Out of Politics: A Grassroots Effort for Clean ElectionsTaking Money Out of Politics: A Grassroots Effort for Clean Elections

Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, publication date April 5, 2010, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, Soul has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”

Paul Rogat Loeb

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, whose wholly updated new edition will be released March 30, of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and of Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus. See www.soulofacitizen.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.groundwire.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles.

March 24, 2010

Netanyahu Humiliates Obama with another E. Jerusalem Housing Expansion

Netanyahu clearly intends to embarrass Obama for taking a confrontation strategy with Israeli policy. Yet clearly, it is LONG over due that the big bully in the Middle East needs to be slapped down hard.

Informed Comment

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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sets the tone for Israeli policy-- one that is earning him few friends in the West. Three embarrassments broke for him on Tuesday. First, yet another housing expansion in East Jerusalem was announced while he was meeting President Obama. Then, the cover story of Israeli troops accused of firing live ammunition at Palestinian protesters began to unravel. Then British Foreign Minister David Miliband unceremoniously tossed the Mossad London station chief out of the country for counterfeiting British passports, to be used in an Israeli assassination of a Palestinian in Dubai recently. Netanyahu personally ordered that hit, and is responsible for the forging of real peoples' passports and their use to commit a murder. Netanyahu is the one behind these acts of arrogance, and they are emblematic of his mean brand of politics.

The far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu humiliates American officials every time it meets with them. Netanyahu met Obama in Washington on Tuesday, and like clockwork Israel embarrassed Obama by announcing that same day it was going ahead with a building project (funded by an American millionaire) in East Jerusalem that the Obama administration had strictly told the Israelis to halt. What I don't understand is why the Palestinians cannot sue over this issue in American courts. If the administration's stance is that East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel, and the US is signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention, then why couldn't Palestinians with standing sue in the US when their property is usurped by an American millionaire?

Israel will investigate the shooting deaths of two Palestinian youth who were protesting (not rioting as AP puts it) against Israeli theft of water from the village well. Israeli troops claimed they were using rubber bullets, but Palestinians charge it was actually live ammunition.

Aljazeera English has the scoop, with live video of Israeli troops firing on the Palestinian youths, with what certainly sounds like live ammunition.

March 19, 2010

New Packaging for Imprisonment Without Trial?

Obama has been little different from Herr Bush, changing his tune after he's been elected.

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The bill is only 12 pages long, but that is plenty of room to grant the president the power to order the arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment of anyone -- including a U.S. citizen -- indefinitely, on the sole suspicion that he or she is affiliated with terrorism, and on the president's sole authority as commander in chief.

The Act begins with the following (convoluted) requirement:

Whenever within the United States, its territories, and possessions, or outside the territorial limits of the United States, an individual is captured or otherwise comes into the custody or under the effective control of the United States who is suspected of engaging in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners through an act of terrorism, or by other means in violation of the laws of war, or of purposely and materially supporting such hostilities, and who may be an unprivileged enemy belligerent, the individual shall be placed in military custody for purposes of initial interrogation and determination of status in accordance with the provisions of this Act.

...Now, however, as president, Obama has helped pave the way for such radical legislative efforts as the one introduced by McCain and Lieberman, by embracing -- and re-branding -- the military commissions he once opposed.

"Belligerents" are the new "Combatants"

Three years after Obama eloquently opposed the Military Commissions Act, the now-president signed a Military Commissions Act of his own, as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill. The law, which sought to overhaul the discredited Bush-era military commissions for "alien enemy combatants," introduced what is apparently turning out to be an important new term to the counterterror lexicon: Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent, defined as "an individual who: 1) has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or 2) has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."

Months before, in March of 2009, the Obama administration announced that it was phasing out the term "alien enemy combatant," even as it held on to the authority to hold terror suspects indefinitely. "Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent," then, was its replacement.

As Human Rights Watch attorney Joanne Mariner wrote last fall, "this is a cosmetic change, not a real improvement, which mirrors the administration's decision to drop the enemy combatant formula in habeas litigation at Guantanamo Bay."

March 11, 2010

The New Jim Crow

The truth about racism in America is hidden in poverty, drug laws, and behind bars. Yes, Jim Crow is alive and well in America.

The Nation

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Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its forty-fourth president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation's "triumph over race." Obama's election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama's mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that "the land of the free" has finally made good on its promise of equality. There's an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the 'era of colorblindness' there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have 'moved beyond' race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

• There are more African-Americans under correctional control today--in prison or jail, on probation or parole--than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

• As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African-American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African-American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80 percent.) These men are part of a growing undercaste--not class, caste--permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era."

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We're told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African-Americans during the past thirty years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades--they are currently at historical lows--but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal--complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers and sweeps of entire neighborhoods--but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African-Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African-American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African-Americans comprise 80 percent-90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That's why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it's all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House chief of staff: "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes--sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton's boastful words, "I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I'm soft on crime." The facts bear him out. Clinton's "tough on crime" policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the "New Democrats" championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic and social life is now perfectly legal, if you've been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts

But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn't the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that's where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80 percent of the cash, cars and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s--the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war--nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time--a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers--not to mention president of the United States--causes us all to marvel at what a long way we've come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African-Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African-Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that's with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our "colorblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure--the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

February 23, 2010

Death of U.S. capitalism: The final 10 scenes

Death of U.S. capitalism: The final 10 scenes - MarketWatch

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Good news, Americans are "downbeat about today. Upbeat about tomorrow," says the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll. "Americans feel battered by hard times, record home foreclosures, stubbornly high unemployment rates and war."

And yes, we are "fed up with Washington and convinced more than 3 to 1 that the nation is heading in the wrong direction," yet there's "confidence that there will be better times ahead, that the classic American dream endures and hasn't been extinguished. It's not even at its low ebb." Why? Because we're in denial!
Bull market for bonds is ending

Bond investors enjoyed stellar gains for several years but that's about to end, says Kurt Brouwer, chairman of Brouwer & Janachowski and editor of MarketWatch's Fundmastery blog. He talks with Money & Investing Editor Jonathan Burton.

Do Main Street's 95 million investors know something Warren Buffett's long-time partner, Charlie Munger, doesn't know? Munger is warning us "It's Over" for America. Yes, "o-v-e-r," America's in decline, at the end-of-days, coming to "financial ruin," says Munger.

Optimism has always been the enduring spirit that made us a great nation, brought us back from overwhelming challenges and impossible odds -- WW II, the Civil War, the 1776 Revolution. Yes, that spirit still burns in our soul, says the poll.

But we also know, as we said earlier in "The Death of the Soul of Capitalism," that over the long-term, through many centuries, historians give nations an average of about 200 years before they burn out. Why? Because the "blind optimism" that makes a nation great in the early years of its rise to power and glory becomes, paradoxically, its worst enemy in the end-days.

Their arrogance traps them in a self-sabotaging cycle that weakens their resolve, makes them vulnerable to new, unpredictable challenges, ultimately destroying them from within. That happens over and over throughout history, even as their optimistic brains tell them they're still the greatest.

So for a moment, please set aside your "optimism," listen to our translation of Munger's drama as a 10-scene crime-thriller about America on the "road to ruin."
Plot notes: Warning, America is on a 'road to financial ruin'

Turns out that like Buffett, whose tales we detailed earlier, Munger's a good storyteller. His parable, "Basically It's Over: A parable about how one nation came to financial ruin," appeared in Slate magazine. Clearly he's warning about the end of capitalism, the end of democracy, the coming end of America.

In his parable Munger calls America "Basicland ... rich in all nature's bounty." In our recasting it as a drama, we'll use "America" rather than "Basicland" in the narrative to drive home the full impact of Munger's powerful message.

Scene 1: Power and wealth create false sense of invincibility

Significantly, Munger says 2012 is the turning point, a signal, the moment setting up the final crisis scene. We've often made a similar timing prediction, one tied to the 2012 election, and a reminder of the warning made by Jared Diamond in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." In the late stages of a nation's cycle: A crisis hits. Everyone, leaders and citizens, act surprised. But it's too late: "Civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power." Just 20 short years to ruin?

Munger warns: "Even a country as cautious, sound, and generous as America could come to ruin if it failed to address the dangers that can be caused by the ordinary accidents of life. These dangers were significant by 2012, when the extreme prosperity of America had created a peculiar outcome: As their affluence and leisure time grew, America's citizens more and more whiled away their time in the excitement of casino gambling." Yes, Main Street "feels battered" while Wall Street gambling casinos generate billions.

Scene 2: Greed consumes America: Gambling replaces real work

In Munger's brilliant parable "the winnings of the casinos eventually amounted to 25% of America's GDP, while 22% of all employee earnings in America were paid to persons employed by the casinos" and "many of the gamblers were highly talented engineers attracted partly by casino poker but mostly by bets available in the bucket shop systems, with the bets now called financial derivatives." Yes, the same derivative bets Buffett targeted when he warned against "financial weapons of mass destruction."

Scene 3: Wall Street's casinos prosper as Main Street suffers

Munger's also not talking about just the million or so gamblers working in Wall Street's "too political to fail" casino-banks. No, "gamblers" are also among Main Street America's 95 million average investors, though most of the high rollers are the slick pros on casino payrolls where "most casino revenue now came from bets on security prices under a system used in the 1920s." Think of Goldman's trading operation that often makes $100 million profits daily, while America has close to 20% underemployed.

Scene 4: America's side-bet debt to foreign casinos skyrockets

Now comes the crucial turning point in Munger's crime-thriller: "Many people, particularly foreigners with savings to invest, regarded this situation as disgraceful. After all, they reasoned, it was just common sense for lenders to avoid gambling addicts ... They feared big trouble if the gambling-addicted citizens of America were suddenly faced with hardship." They were right.

Scene 5: Nations in denial rarely prepare for disasters in advance

"Then came the twin shocks," a plot twist borrowed from "Avatar," "Wall-E" and Al Gore, the kind of shocks that most "optimists" (especially those hell-bent on voting Obama and the liberals out of office by 2012) always deny. So, "hydrocarbon prices rose to new highs." Munger must mean a twist like oil hitting a scene-stealing $1,000 a barrel.

Scene 6: In the later stages, get-rich-quick beats real work

America seeks the advice of the "Good Father," a tall ex-Fed chairman who suggests "America change its laws. It should strongly discourage casino gambling, partly through a complete ban on the trading in financial derivatives, and it should encourage former casino employees -- and former casino patrons -- to produce and sell items that foreigners were willing to buy." Never happen: Not as long as Wall Street's gamblers can make more in a year trading derivatives than most Americans make in a lifetime. Why "work?"

Scene 7: Wall Street CEOs, economists, lobbyists love gambling

Sounds great, many approved, "but others, including many of America's prominent economists, had strong objections. These economists had intense faith that any outcome at all in a free market -- even wild growth in casino gambling -- is constructive. Indeed, these economists were so committed to their basic faith that they looked forward to the day when America would expand real securities trading, as a percentage of securities outstanding, by a factor of 100, so that it could match the speculation level present in the United States just before onslaught of the Great Recession that began in 2008."

Scene 8: Wall Street gamblers love Reaganomics, hate change

Though Munger and his partner got rich in this bizarre parable, his plot turns dark as America's "investment and commercial bankers were hostile to change. Like the objecting economists, the bankers wanted change exactly opposite to change wanted by the Good Father." Wall Street "came to believe that the Good Father lacked any understanding of important and eternal causes of human progress that the bankers were trying to serve" by leaving today's free market gambling casino operations untouched, so it could quickly return to pre-2008 "greed is very good" reality.

Scene 9: Main Street investors join Wall Street's 'Happy Conspiracy'

The endgame now unfolds rapidly. Munger warns that America's investors, workers and citizens have become so jaded they merge with Wall Street's self-sabotaging conspiracy: "Of course, the most effective political opposition to change came from the gambling casinos themselves. This was not surprising, as at least one casino was located in each legislative district." They "saw themselves as part of a long-established industry that provided harmless pleasure while improving the thinking skills of its customers."

Scene 10: Politicians love Wall Street's derivative casino: Game over!

The 86-year-old Munger is himself a metaphor for America's version of the classic historical cycle: He was an optimist as he and Warren built their $267 billion company over four decades. But sadly, his parable, his vision of America's future, has no optimistic finale. Rather it's reminiscent of Diamond's "Collapse," Bogle's "Battle for the Soul of Capitalism," and so many other recent reminders about how America just went over a cliff and how Wall Street's casino-banks will soon drive us off a bigger cliff into the Great Depression II by 2012.

Munger's parable is more than a Hollywood suspense-thriller, it's another example of the classic historical life-cycle of a nation.

In the final scenes "politicians ignored the Good Father one more time," the casino-banks returned to gambling in derivative "securities with extreme financial leverage. A couple of economic messes followed, during which every constituency tried to avoid hardship by deflecting it to others. Much counterproductive governmental action was taken, and the country's credit was reduced to tatters. America is now under new management, using a new governmental system. It also has a new nickname: Sorrowland."
Epilogue: Your moral dilemma: a no-win scenario or historical destiny?

Do we really have a choice? Ask yourself, what's ahead after 2012? Can you see beyond a destructive campaign: Obama at war with Palin and the "Tea Party of No?" What are the long-term prospects of our "civilization." Do you share Munger's dark vision?

Or does the USA Today/Gallup Poll tell you guys like Munger, Buffett and Volker do "lack any understanding of important and eternal causes of human progress that the bankers are trying to serve" with their gambling casinos. "Optimists" in those polls are just politicians, bankers and citizens like you, in denial, can't hear the warnings. So we get no changes, no action, no preparations because at this stage in the long-term historical cycle, optimism has turned into our worse enemy, wishful-thinking.

Solution? Get into action, let's launch the "Second American Revolution." Got any constructive, optimistic strategies? Share them. Add your comments.

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February 13, 2010

TED Blog: Jonathan Haidt on how our moral roots skew our reasoning

It doesn't happen often that I am stunned by a new insight. This one dinged me goo. Well worth watching the 20 minute video.

TED Blog:Jonathan Haidt on how our moral roots skew our reasoning

Our Righteous Minds were designed to unite us into teams, divide us against others, & blind us to the truth -Jon Haidt http://bit.ly/9N7TyU

February 12, 2010

Republican Medicare Cuts

Even without Dubya, the Republicans are still into Doublethink. It is, even when it isn't, no means yes, and "No to Medicare Cuts!" means bigger Medicare cuts.

Republican Medicare Cuts - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com:

"So, Newt Gingrich and John Goodman say,

Image via Wikipedia
Don’t cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong.

Leave aside the mind-killing irony of Newt Gingrich — New Gingrich! — denouncing Medicare cuts. What are Republicans themselves proposing?

Well, Rep. Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future calls for the eventual elimination of Medicare as we know it, replacing it with a system of vouchers that would, eventually, account for a steadily declining share of GDP. But what about the next decade? Mr. Ryan’s release says that it

Strengthens the current program with changes such as income-relating drug benefit premiums to ensure long-term sustainability.

What does that mean? The CBO, helpfully, translates (pdf):

People who are age 65 or older in 2020 and other existing enrollees at that time would continue to be covered by the current program, although some higher income enrollees would pay higher premiums, and some program payments would be reduced.

In other words, Medicare would face cuts. And the CBO’s detailed analysis provides an estimate of those cuts. I’ve taken the table comparing projected spending with baseline as a share of GDP (xls), and scaled it up using the CBO’s projections of GDP. What I get is an estimated cut in Medicare spending over the next decade of about … $650 billion.

So, cutting Medicare by $500 billion is wrong — support Republicans, who want to cut it by $650 billion!"

February 10, 2010

Torture with a Capital "T": Secret UK info on ex-Gitmo detainee's treatment

The Brits call it "cruel and inhuman treatment". Are people ready to call it "Torture"?

Image via Wikipedia

Here are the seven once-secret paragraphs [by SyS (Security Service)] that summarize the U.S. account of the treatment of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan in 2002.

-"It was reported that a new series of interviews was conducted by the United States authorities prior to 17 May 2002 as part of a new strategy designed by an expert interviewer.

-"It was reported that at some stage during that further interview process by the United States authorities, BM (Binyam Mohamed) had been intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation. The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed.

-"It was reported that combined with the sleep deprivation, threats and inducements were made to him. His fears of being removed from United States custody and "disappearing" were played upon.

-"It was reported that the stress brought about by these deliberate tactics was increased by him being shackled in his interviews;

-"It was clear not only from the reports of the content of the interviews but also from the report that he was being kept under self-harm observation, that the interviews were having a marked effect upon him and causing him significant mental stress and suffering.

-"We regret to have to conclude that the reports provide (sic) to the SyS (Security Service) made clear to anyone reading them that BM was being subjected to the treatment that we have described and the effect upon him of that intentional treatment.

-"The treatment reported, if had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom, would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom in 1972. Although it is not necessary for us to categorize the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities."

January 31, 2010

Losing Faith in Leadership

Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia
"Ezra Klein finds Rahm Emanuel’s apparent willingness to let health reform slide into the indefinite future very depressing. So do I. And it’s not just health reform that will die under this approach — it’s the road to a caretaker presidency....
What’s now in question isn’t [Obama's] his ability to talk, it’s his ability to lead."

January 26, 2010

Informed Comment: Oregon's rich getting richer and all others falling behind, wage study shows | But it's a National Trend and We are Becoming Florence

Informed Comment:

"Oregon's rich getting richer and all others falling behind, wage study shows | Oregon Business News - OregonLive.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife
' The free-market fervor that has gripped the country since the Ronald Reagan administration has allowed the country, for the most part, to remain competitive in a globalized economy. But some contend that the trickle-down economy has sent just that -- a trickle -- to the masses, while steering a torrent of riches to the wealthy."

"There's something going on at the very top, an explosion of the 'uber-rich,'" said Bryce Ward, a senior economist with Portland-based consulting firm ECONorthwest. "There's been no growth in a decade for the middle." '

Not just Oregon-- its the whole country. And if you project it out at current tax rates and loopholes, it looks like a permanent oligarchy.

US becoming late medieval Florence, with new Medicis:

'During a reign of 30 years, Cosimo [Medici] uses his fortune to maintain absolute control over the internal affairs of Florence. Opponents find themselves squeezed to financial extinction.

Within the city this control is discreet. Outside, in relations with other powers, it is generally acknowledged that Cosimo is the ruler of Florence - by now a city state of considerable significance.

The expansion of Florentine control over the surrounding region accelerates before and during Cosimo's lifetime. Arezzo falls to a Florentine army in 1384. Pisa, a great prize, is taken in 1406. Livorno, of immense value as a seaport, is purchased in 1421.'

Substitute Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley for Cosimo, Iraq and Afghanistan for Arezzo and Pisa.

Note that in 1527 republicans in Florence made a last attempt to eject the Medicis. Instead they get saddled with a Duke for succeeding centuries. We are in danger of becoming a grand duchy.

The unbridled wealth of a few financiers is as fatal to a republic as the unrivaled power of a few generals.