Kurt Vonnegut ...in Memoriam

"Only one person on the entire planet benefited from the (Dresden) raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn't shorten the war by half a second ... only one person benefited - not two or five or ten. Just one. ... Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that." Kurt Vonnegut

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The Guardian ran this extract from Kurt Vonnegut's last book, "A Man Without a Country". Joni Mitchell expressed what I feel about him best, "you don't know what you got till it's gone". DS

Custodians of chaos - Guardian
"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show

But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favourite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana.

Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.

"As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.

"As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn't you like to say. "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the US Constitution.

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale".

George W Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he's against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilise the reserves! Privatise the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.

The title of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury's great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury's novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what's really going on.

I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published in early 2004, that humiliating, shameful, blood-soaked year.

In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.

In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as Nazis once were.

And with good reason.

In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanised millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanised our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O'Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the first world war. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the first world war so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second world war and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?

Let's make a deal! - In homage to Kurt Vonnegut

In Iraq, rules for evaluating claims have changed. Before President Bush declared major combat operations over, in May 2003, commanders considered most checkpoint shootings to be combat-related. Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the former commander of day-to-day operations in Iraq, stiffened rules at checkpoints. In late 2003, as more Iraqis were accidentally injured or killed, the Army began offering condolence payments. It has not always worked as planned, said Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, a nonprofit group in Washington. “Sometimes families would get paid and sometimes their neighbors wouldn’t,” she said. “It caused a lot of resentments among the Iraqis, which is ironic because it was a program specifically meant to foster good will.” NYT - READ IT ALL

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Here is a photo from the New York Times of an Iraqi lady getting paid $2000 for her dead husband. Cheap, huh? DS

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night... blogging

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism". British Ministry of Defence Report on the future

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After reading the quote from the British MOD report, read Harold Meyerson's well documented article from the Washington Post and then ask yourself how long it will be before the service workers, whose work makes life possible organize and strike and how long before the middle classes, whose only capital is their knowledge of information systems rebel and join them too.

Knowledge workers are today's true, world-proletariat, without whose labor nothing functions. The post-industrial knowledge worker is truly within the contemporary system in the same way that the industrial worker was within his or her system. It could be called the "vanguard" or "aristocracy"of the service sector whose problems Meyerson outlines. When the knowledge workers and the service workers join forces the world will change like a nuclear chain reaction. Therefore we can expect that the system as it is will make a herculean effort to keep this from happening. Traditionally the tools for preventing unions of such revolutionary potential from forming have been xenophobia, nationalism, religious manias and war. All of them are on today's menu.

Only organization at the grass roots level: unions, workers, students, Internet, micro-financing and NGOs and constant dialog and sharing of information can keep those sinister forces from derailing or co-opting this movement. DS

Harold Meyerson: A Dream Short-Circuited - Washington Post
Abstract: An analysis of Internal Revenue Service data from 2005 that became available showed that the bottom 90 percent of Americans made less money that year than they had in 2004. According to a study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, total reported income in the United States increased by 9 percent in 2005 over its level in 2004. All of that increase, however, came from the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, and the wealthiest 1 percent experienced an increase of 14 percent. Among the remaining 90 percent, income actually decreased by 0.6 percent. And 2005, let us remember, wasn't a year of economic downturn. The American economy was humming along. It was only the American people who weren't doing very well. What all this amounts to is a triumph of corporate and financial power, and of the conservative economics that shores it up. Once upon a time, American prosperity actually benefited Americans. From 1947 through 1973, productivity in the U.S. rose by 104 percent, and median family income rose by an identical 104 percent. Those were also the only years of real union power in the United States, years in which one-quarter of the workforce, and in some years one-third, was unionized. Apparently, this level of worker power and mass prosperity proved intolerable to our financial elite and their political flunkies. Since the '70s, American business has generally done its damnedest to keep its workers down. Employers routinely opted to pay the negligible penalties for violating the National Labor Relations Act rather than permit its employees to join unions. In 1969, according the National Labor Relations Board, the number of employees who'd suffered illegal retaliation for exercising their right to join or maintain a union was just over 6,000; by 2005, that number had risen to 31,358. According to a study out this January from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, fully one in five activists on unionization campaigns are illegally fired. And as worker power declines, so do living standards. Secure retirement pensions are history; employer-provided health benefits are going fast. To all of this, conservatives offer no remedy whatever save to make things worse. Employer-provided pensions collapsing? Let's gut Social Security, too. Health insurance tottering? By all means, let's preserve our private, for-profit system, which currently fails to cover 47 million of our fellow Americans. All income increases going only to the rich? Let's switch to a flat tax (Rudy Giuliani's most recent brainstorm), which further shifts the tax burden from the upwardly mobile rich to the downwardly-mobile everyone else. READ IT ALL

Rutgers, race, history... heavy stuff

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Right away, I have to say that Don Imus should be fired because he's an idiot. Did he think he was being "down"? Nobody could be so stupid as not to realize that the young women's feelings would be hurt by being called "nappy headed hos". Publicly calling a young lady a "whore" can get you (and your network) sued for defamation.

In a purely American context, however, "nappy headed" caused equal pain and was considered equally offensive, and that's what I'd like to talk about. I'd just like to use the incident as starting point for some personal observations made from having lived so many years away from the States.

I come from the suburbs of Chicago, which were, and probably still are at heart, as racist as Alabama, but in my family of liberal Democrats, the "N" word was never, ever pronounced, even by the Saint Louis Missouri branch. African-Americans who worked with my stepfather (a musician) came to dinner with the same regularity as his white fellow workers did... although there were neighbors of ours that didn't like that. I went to integrated public schools in a university town with a large, old, African-American community with no overt, or vulgar redneck type racism. Still the tension was always there and flavored all areas of life. There were so many things you couldn't say, gestures of friendship that were frowned upon (by both races) etc, etc. Until I went to school abroad I thought that this was universal and something intrinsic to relations between races, I found out, in fact that it was really about history.

Over here I went to school with dozens of Cubans. Most of them had some African blood somewhere, "la gotita" or "little drop", what Cuban author Gulliermo Cabrera Infante called, referring to a parisian Cuban intellectual, "the Congo was a tributary of his Seine". Some were white as the driven snow... I was blown away by how little that meant and really blown away how they talked to each other. Everybody, white and brown alike called each other, "Negro" (pronounced "naygrow") and "Negra" and mulato and mulata. I had a drop dead beautiful, Cuban girlfriend who insisted that I call her mi Negra... she said it made her feel sexy... she liked to call me her "chinito" ("little Chinaman" and I was redheaded little mick). Racial terms, were terms of affection!

Then I went to art school in England with several African-Africans and again discovered that relations between people of different colors could be perfectly natural. Even with fellow students of British Caribbean origin you didn't have to walk on eggshells like with African-Americans.

Funnily enough it was the war in the Balkans and the hatred between the Serbs and the Bosnians that suddenly made it all fall into to place for me. Serbs and Bosnians are both Slavs, they both speak the same language, but history has made them enemies.

Color in the United States is just a "warning signal" that history has walked into the room. America is millions of little Bosnias. That history of slavery is pretty horrible, but slavery was horrible in Cuba too. I think it has something to do with America's puritanical steak, with its hatred of vulnerability and slavery is total vulnerability. Anyway, I would really like it if the scandal was about calling a nice group of young ladies "whores" and not about mentioning their "nappy" heads. DS

Iraqi end game in the making

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If you study a map of southern Iraq you will see that all the roads leading from Kuwait and the Persian Gulf port of Basra to Baghdad and points north run through the Shiite areas where Moktada al-Sadr is able to call up tens of thousands of disciplined demonstrators who shout "death to America" in chorus. Moktada al-Sadr is said to be in Iran under the protection of the Ayatollahs.

As most of the supplies of the American forces in Iraq are brought in though those roads by trucks driven by civilian contractors, it is not difficult to imagine how easy it would be for al-Sadr and/or Iran to severely interrupt that flow of supplies. It would be impossible to make up the massive shortfall by airlift. The entire American presence in Iraq has been made possible by the acquiesence of the Shiite community. Monday's demonstrations show that such acquiescence is at an end. Certainly such acquiescence wouldn't survive an American attack on Iran. Monday's demonstrations thus mark the beginning of the end game. DS

Huge Protest in Iraq Demands U.S. Withdraw - New York Times
Abstract: Tens of thousands of protesters loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric, took to the streets of the holy city of Najaf on Monday in an extraordinarily disciplined rally to demand an end to the American military presence in Iraq, burning American flags and chanting “Death to America!” Residents said that the angry, boisterous demonstration was the largest in Najaf, the heart of Shiite religious power, since the American-led invasion in 2003. It took place on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, and it was an obvious effort by Mr. Sadr to show the extent of his influence here in Iraq, even though he did not appear at the rally.(...) During the protest in Najaf, Sadr followers draped themselves in Iraqi flags and waved them to symbolize national unity, and a small number of conservative Sunni Arabs took part in the march. “We have 30 people who came,” said Ayad Abdul Wahab, an agriculture professor in Basra and an official in the Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading fundamentalist Sunni Arab group. “We support Moktada in this demonstration, and we stress our rejection of foreign occupation.”(....) The protest was in some ways another challenge to the Shiite clerical hierarchy, showing that in the new Iraq, a violent young upstart like Mr. Sadr can command the masses right in the backyard of venerable clerics like Ayatollah Sistani. Mr. Sadr has increasingly tapped into a powerful desire among Shiites to stand up forcefully to both the American presence and militant Sunnis, and to ignore calls for moderation from older clerics.(...) Estimates of the crowd’s size varied wildly. A police commander in Najaf, Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim al-Mayahi, said there were at least half a million people. Colonel Garver said that military reports had estimates of 5,000 to 7,000. Residents and other Iraqi officials said there were tens of thousands, and television images of the rally seemed to support their estimates. The colonel declined to give any information on the whereabouts of Mr. Sadr, though American military officials said weeks ago that they believed he is in Iran. Mr. Sadr’s aides declined to say where he is, but previously they have said he remained in Iraq. READ IT ALL

"Self-help" books... the loser's world

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The real "Secret" of the huge, American self-help industry is this: America's cult of competition, of dividing people from childhood into "winners" and "losers", has created an entire nation of losers. an enormous mass of people who feel terrible about themselves.

To top off the loser's misery by taking their money from them is something that the Winner ethos encourages. After all losers are in the "Atlas Shrugging" world only to serve the Winners.

Probably the most subversive idea that we could spread around today is that life must simply be enjoyed for itself, moment by moment. A human incarnation of any sort is the universe's greatest prize. Just the smell of fresh bread has more life enhancing properties than all the self-help books ever published. DS

Self-Help's Slimy 'Secret'- Washington Post Abstract: It's the publishing phenomenon of the year so far, a small book with a parchment-brown cover engraved with the image of a red wax seal. "The Secret," its title proclaims matter-of-factly, as if the slim volume held the answer to life's deepest mysteries. Which is precisely what it purports to do. Written by an Australian television producer, this latest contribution to the bursting shelves of New Age self-helpiana has come out of nowhere to sell more than 1.3 million copies in the United States alone.(...) Byrne asserts that this secret is a natural law as "precise" as gravity. It was the power, she argues, behind geniuses such as Plato, Newton, Beethoven and Einstein. Of course, none of these gents is alive to vouch for the accuracy of her claims, so Byrne has rallied support from a Who's Who of the self-help industry, including John Gray, author of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus," and Jack Canfield, who wrote "Chicken Soup for the Soul." Oprah Winfrey had Byrne on her show and raved about "The Secret." They all endorse a book, with its clever "Da Vinci Code"-like cover, that presents the law of attraction as the ultimate shortcut to success and the American dream. Anyone who wants it badly enough can be a millionaire, the president, even an American Idol. What's missing from this recycling of an old egalitarian ideal is the Protestant ethic and Enlightenment beliefs. Hard work, talent, education, even luck go unmentioned. As "The Secret" puts it, all you have to do is "put in your order with the universe." Ask. Believe. Receive. That's the mantra. In the book, investment trainer David Schirmer describes his own experience. He used to receive bills every day. "So I got a bank statement, I whited out the total, and I put a new total in there," he says. "I thought, 'What if I just visualized a bunch of checks coming in the mail'? Within just one month, things started to change. It is amazing; today I just get checks in the mail. I get a few bills, but I get more checks than bills." You'd think an investment expert might be wary of sharing a secret like that. It's all so laughably nutty. And it would be harmless but for the millions buying the book and DVD and the exposure that "The Secret" is getting from the likes of Winfrey and Larry King. And for the danger lurking in its philosophy. (...) In February, Los Angeles Times editorial writer Karin Klein reported that local therapists were seeing "clients who are headed for real trouble, immersing themselves in a dream world in which good things just come." Klein told me in an e-mail that she had heard from readers who were worried about friends who "suddenly start buying things, certain that the money to pay for them will just show up." Still worse is the insidious flip side of Byrne's philosophy: If bad things happen to you, it's all your fault. As surely as your thoughts bring health, wealth and love, they are also responsible for any illness, poverty or misery that comes your way. That isn't just implied, it's spelled out: "The only reason why people do not have what they want is because they are thinking more about what they don't want than what they do want." By this logic, Holocaust victims brought it on themselves, as did those who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. Come on, New Orleans, get over it! Think positive! For a few weeks, I joked with customers about this nonsense. One evening, I was talking to a regular who said she had come in to buy "The Secret" to "see what the fuss is about." A problem with the book, we agreed, is that it says nothing about old-fashioned luck. We hit on the word at the same time and laughed. But after she left, I took a closer look, and all at once the book's blame-the-victim philosophy didn't seem so funny.(...) I watched Bob Proctor, author of "You Were Born Rich" and one of the "gurus" Byrne quotes most often, being asked on "Nightline" whether the starving children of Darfur had "manifested" -- that is, visualized -- their own misery. In utter seriousness, he replied, "I think the country probably has." The book is not nearly so equivocal. "Imperfect thoughts are the cause of humanity's ills," Byrne asserts, in a stunning sentence that had me pondering how to perfect my thoughts, pronto. Poverty? "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts."llness? "You cannot 'catch' anything unless you think you can. . . . You are also inviting illness if you are listening to people talking about their illness." So . . . got any sick friends who need a shoulder to cry on? Tell 'em to bug off! As for Elizabeth Edwards -- how selfish is she? By making people think about her cancer, she's basically giving them the disease. What at first glance looks like the world according to Disney -- wish on a star, and it will all come true -- turns out to be a pretty ugly little secret indeed. READ IT ALL

Bacevich's questions for candidates

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Professor Andrew Bacevich is one of the clearest thinking political analysts working in the United States. As a graduate of West Point he knows that strategic thinking begins with asking the right questions.

Answers to those questions themselves may change with the circumstances, but woe to the strategist that asks the wrong questions.

Obviously to ask the right questions you have to have a realistic idea of who you are, where you are and what you hope to achieve. For example, if you are in Paris and ask a passerby directions to "Times Square", you will probably find that unproductive.

As Professor Bacevich points out, all serious discussion of Iraq and post-Iraq revolves around recognizing that the United States has failed in Iraq. All presidential candidates should then ask themselves, "who we are, where we are and what we hope achieve". If they don't have plausible answers to those questions they have no business asking Americans for their votes. DS

Bacevich: 'Your Iraq plan?' is a pointless question - Los Angeles Times

Abstract: For today's presidential candidates, the question is unavoidable: What is your plan for Iraq?(...) However sincere, such questions are also pointless. To pose them is to invite dissembling. The truth is that next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there. Iraqis will decide their own fate. We are spectators, witnesses, bystanders caught in a conflagration that we ourselves, in an act of monumental folly, touched off. The questions that ought to be asked now — but so far have not been — are of a different order.(...) Recall that Bush saw Baghdad not as the final destination of his global war on terror but as a point of departure. He imagined that liberating Iraq might trigger a flowering of Arab democracy.(...) None of that has come to pass. Baghdad has become a cul-de-sac. Having plunged into a war he cannot win, Bush will not relent. Iraq consumes his presidency because the president wills that it should. He has become Captain Ahab: His identification with his war is absolute. As a consequence, the "global" effort aimed at eliminating Islamic terror, launched back in September 2001, has narrowed in scope. Today the global war is global in name only. In reality, it has become a war for Mesopotamia.(...) Ritualistic allusions to freedom as the antidote to terrorism still occasionally crop up in presidential speeches, but rhetoric no longer translates into action. An administration that once touted its expansive and principled approach to preventing another 9/11 has abandoned principle. Now there is only Iraq and the effort to ensure that today's news out of Baghdad isn't any worse than yesterday's. Our political attention, then, needs to turn to whether the president's would-be successors can do what Bush cannot: acknowledge our failure in Iraq and look beyond it. Candidates who still find merit in an open-ended global war on terror should explain how we prevail in such an enterprise. Given the lessons of Iraq, what exactly does it mean to wage such a global war? Where can we expect to fight next, and against whom? What will victory look like? Candidates who, in light of Iraq, have become skeptical of open-ended global war as a response to violent Islamic radicalism should be pressed to describe their alternative. How do they define the threat? How do they propose to deal with it? Will they isolate it? Contain it? Subvert it? Relying on what means and at what costs? "What's your plan for Iraq?" was the right question back in 2002 and 2003 — although it went largely unasked and almost completely unanswered then. But as we approach the 2008 presidential election, though the tragedy of Iraq continues to unfold, that question is moot. The one that matters is this: As President Bush departs and leaves the United States bereft of a coherent strategy, what should fill that void? READ IT ALL

Sign 'ere Gunga Din

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It is amazing how quickly things deteriorate once they start. Certainly Rudyard Kipling would have a hard time making any sense of all this. Bush's idol, Winston Churchill must be getting up quite a torque in his grave.

Iran has truly taken the "West's" measure. This is useful information for all of us if studied quietly.

The bright side is that it is hard to imagine a war breaking out in such a low comedy atmosphere, but of course it could. Maybe that is the real tragedy of our times. DS

Anger over Iran hostages' media deals - Guardian
Abstract: The Ministry of Defence and the Royal Navy were accused of undermining the reputation of Britain's armed forces last night over the decision to allow the 15 sailors and marines held by Iran to sell their stories to the media. The navy's move to suspend its usual rules - taken "as a result of exceptional media interest" and with the agreement of the defence secretary, Des Browne - was condemned by opposition politicians, former officers and the families of dead service personnel. Faye Turney, the only woman in the crew, has agreed a joint deal with the Sun newspaper and ITV's Tonight With Trevor McDonald for close to £100,000. But amid the complaints about the decision, fears were voiced that it has devalued the work of other serving forces and handed Iran a propaganda victory.(...) Colonel Tim Collins, who commanded the 1st Battalion the Royal Irish Regiment in Iraq, said: "This episode has brought disgrace on the British armed forces and it comes from complete ineptitude at the top." He contrasted this case with the capture of 11 members of the Royal Irish Regiment in Sierra Leone. "They were held hostage and there was a real chance that they would be killed before they were eventually rescued by the SAS. There was not so much as a peep out of any of them afterwards, no talk and certainly no mention of money." Mike Aston, whose 30-year-old son, Corporal Russell Aston, was one of six military policemen killed by a mob in Majar al-Kabir, Iraq, in June 2003, said he was "absolutely amazed" by the MoD's stance. "I think to actually sell [my] story it would besmirch my son's memory." Ms Turney, whose salary as a leading seaman is recorded as being between £23,535 and £29,576, was interviewed by Sir Trevor McDonald ahead of a screening tonight. She gave a separate interview to the Sun, telling the paper she had been kept on her own in a small cell for five days and had at times feared for her life. Ms Turney was one of the personnel absent from a joint press conference held by six of the crew on Friday and agreed a deal with the Sun and ITV that day. William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, told Sky News's Sunday Live: "If, whenever people have been in a difficult situation, they are going to be allowed to sell their story quickly after that, then I think we are going to lose steadily that dignity and respect for our armed forces." READ IT ALL

Easter Sunday film for Newslinkers

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"ChristopherWrites" on YouTube has done a very good summing up and pocket explanation of "Darwin's Nightmare", Hubert Sauper's magnificant and heartbreaking allegory of the suffering caused by globalization. Sooooooooo... Listen to it and...

Have a happy Easter!

Christ may have risen, but a lot of folks out there are still down and out. DS

Easter Parade - Ethanol Photo Show

The World Bank has estimated that in 2001, 2.7 billion people in the world were living on the equivalent of less than $2 a day; to them, even marginal increases in the cost of staple grains could be devastating. filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn -- which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year. - Foreign Affairs Magazine

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I thought the previous post on ethanol needed a bit more graphic support. With a little massaging, Google Images coughs up its wonders. DS

Ethanol... rough as a cob

Ailing leader Fidel Castro returned to the public debate — if not view — for the second time in less than a week with a column in the Communist Party newspaper denouncing U.S. promotion of using food crops for biofuels. Castro chided the Bush administration for its support of ethanol production for automobiles, a move that the 80-year-old leader said would leave the world's poor hungry. - International Herald Tribune

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The World Bank has estimated that in 2001, 2.7 billion people in the world were living on the equivalent of less than $2 a day; to them, even marginal increases in the cost of staple grains could be devastating. filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn -- which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year. - Foreign Affairs Magazine

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My question after reading this material is why, when some ayatollah calls Bush a "Great Satan" do people call the ayatollah an extremist, a radical or a nut? I have no idea who is keeping score on this, but what does a person have to do to be considered officially evil or a "Satan"? Starting a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people and may finally lead to the death of millions isn't enough? Now it turns out he wants to starve 2.7 billion desperately poor people living on less than two bucks a day, just so some shopaholic who looks like the back end of a sumo wrestler can fill the tank of his SUV.

The "Last Days" crowd are hunting all over for the "Anti-Christ"... Looks like they already voted for him. DS

How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor - Foreign Affairs
Abstract: The push for ethanol and other biofuels has spawned an industry that depends on billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies, and not only in the United States. In 2005, global ethanol production was 9.66 billion gallons, of which Brazil produced 45.2 percent (from sugar cane) and the United States 44.5 percent (from corn). Global production of biodiesel (most of it in Europe), made from oilseeds, was almost one billion gallons. The industry's growth has meant that a larger and larger share of corn production is being used to feed the huge mills that produce ethanol. According to some estimates, ethanol plants will burn up to half of U.S. domestic corn supplies within a few years. Ethanol demand will bring 2007 inventories of corn to their lowest levels since 1995 (a drought year), even though 2006 yielded the third-largest corn crop on record. Iowa may soon become a net corn importer. The enormous volume of corn required by the ethanol industry is sending shock waves through the food system. (The United States accounts for some 40 percent of the world's total corn production and over half of all corn exports.) In March 2007, corn futures rose to over $4.38 a bushel, the highest level in ten years. Wheat and rice prices have also surged to decade highs, because even as those grains are increasingly being used as substitutes for corn, farmers are planting more acres with corn and fewer acres with other crops. This might sound like nirvana to corn producers, but it is hardly that for consumers, especially in poor developing countries, who will be hit with a double shock if both food prices and oil prices stay high. The World Bank has estimated that in 2001, 2.7 billion people in the world were living on the equivalent of less than $2 a day; to them, even marginal increases in the cost of staple grains could be devastating. filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn -- which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year. By putting pressure on global supplies of edible crops, the surge in ethanol production will translate into higher prices for both processed and staple foods around the world. Biofuels have tied oil and food prices together in ways that could profoundly upset the relationships between food producers, consumers, and nations in the years ahead, with potentially devastating implications for both global poverty and food security. READ IT ALL

Where we stand... or are stood on

A much bigger story is unfolding: the epic collapse of the Bush Administration.(...) When Bush came to office--installed by the Supreme Court after receiving fewer votes than Al Gore--I speculated that the new President would have to govern in a bipartisan manner to be successful. He chose the opposite path, and his hyper-partisanship has proved to be a travesty of governance and a comprehensive failure. I've tried to be respectful of the man and the office, but the three defining sins of the Bush Administration--arrogance, incompetence, cynicism--are congenital: they're part of his personality. They're not likely to change. And it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead. Joe Klein - Time Magazine

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I was hunting around for an image to express the situation the United States finds itself in today, and I pulled up this surrealistic still from an ancient Laurel and Hardy masterwork. I think is speaks much more clearly than the Joe Klein clipping I've tacked underneath it.

America's situation, like the one Laurel and Hardy find themselves, is impossible. There is no way out. A gag writing genius came up with theirs, but one of the biggest jerks in the history of the United States has come up with ours. Truly a nightmare! Impeachment is out of the question... President Cheney? President Rice? President Pelosi? Who's on first? Like a mule in a hail storm we just have to stand here and take it till its over.

Perhaps the most painful part is that this wound is self inflicted. Knowing full well who they had as president the American people re-elected him.

I lived through the Spanish "transition" from Franco's dictatorial, fascist regime to a democracy. Most Spanish people were voting for the first time in their lives. It was beautiful... They were very careful with their votes. Franco had taken control by way of a coup d'etat followed by a bloody civil war. Franco was supported by a powerful minority: Church, army, landowners. A Spanish version of Bush's "base". The majority of Spaniards opposed Franco and fought him tooth and nail until they were overpowered. They gave it their best shot, lost and then they were put in front of firing squads, imprisoned, tortured, humiliated and oppressed for nearly forty years... But at least they had the satisfaction of knowing that they had never actually voted for Franco. DS

Hearing the message from Tehran

In dealing with Iran, support for possible military action is in the single digits (8 percent).
Public Agenda's Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index, conducted in association with Foreign Affairs Magazine

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Depending on what they want to see, commentators are speculating on the possible meaning of the resolution of the captive British sailor crisis. Complex theories about conflict among the "hardliners" and "moderates" in Tehran abound.

People are reading the tea leaves on this too closely, I believe. It is all really very simple. What you see is what you get.

Iran has proved several things. They have proved that they could do something militarily and politically significant anytime they wanted to, they proved they could do it for as long as they wanted to and they could stop doing it at the moment of their choosing. With this simple expedient Iran dominated the world headlines and television news day after day. Plainly put, Iran changed the subject of the conversation. The question stopped being, "what will be done to Iran?" and became, "what will Iran do?". And all this was done very cheaply, if you compare it with passing UN resolutions (and enforcing them) and maintaining a huge naval force in the area. And of course:

"There's been a $5 or $6 premium that's been built into the price of oil over this," said Phil Flynn, vice president and energy analyst at Alaron Trading. "Even though this crisis has ended, the oil market is still on guard that the tensions in the Middle East are going to continue." ABC - NEWS

Another thing Iran did was to test the reaction of Western public opinion to possible armed conflict with Iran... It was extremely tepid. As we can see from the poll quoted at the top less than 10% of the American public is behind military action. Among the allies 0.0%. The only people still hot to trot are some right wing Israelis... who knows, that might be enough to get a war started, but not to finish it.

And as we can see we can see from the "Condi and Nancy Show", American diplomacy in the Middle East, like the US Army is a broken toy. Iran is playing with the disintegration of America's position in the Middle East. "Hard" is really not the same as "complicated". DS

Rebuilding the left - 3 - back to basics

When we see politics permeate every sector of life, we call it totalitarianism. When religion rules all, we call it theocracy. But when commerce dominates everything, we call it liberty. Benjamin R. Barber - Los Angeles Times

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One of the most interesting things that Howard Dean has been pushing of late is the idea of the Democrats campaigning on "values": Not abandoning that field to the Republicans without a fight. That there could be some common ground between conservatives and liberals on what constitutes an optimum, human experience: A 'decent' life. I think that this is a powerful idea whose time has come.

In a previous post I had a clipping about a grade school in Louisiana where the dear little 5th graders fornicate on the classroom floor when teacher is absent. Here, for example is something people of both conservative and liberal views might find equally troubling and have a common, human, "catcher in the rye" impulse to do something to change. The welfare of children is a theme that unites and where there isn't a huge amount of daylight between parents of the entire political spectrum. Let's develop that theme in more detail:

Here is an interesting "values-driven" piece by Benjamin R. Barber from the Los Angeles Times, which gives a concentrated critique of today's capitalism.

The crises in subprime mortgages betrays a deeper predicament facing consumer capitalism triumphant: The "Protestant ethos" of hard work and deferred gratification has been replaced by an infantilist ethos of easy credit and impulsive consumption that puts democracy and the market system at risk.(...) Capitalism's success, however, has meant that core wants in the developed world are now mostly met and that too many goods are now chasing too few needs. Yet capitalism requires us to "need" all that it produces in order to survive. So it busies itself manufacturing needs for the wealthy while ignoring the wants of the truly needy. Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few needs, the needy have too little wealth. Capitalism is stymied, courting long-term disaster. We still work hard, but only so that we can pay and play. In order to turn reluctant consumers with few unsatisfied core needs into permanent shoppers, producers must dumb down consumers, shape their wants, take over their life worlds, encourage impulse buying, cultivate shopoholism and invent new needs. At the same time, they empower kids as shoppers by legitimizing their unformed tastes and mercurial wants and detaching them from their gatekeeper mothers and fathers and teachers and pastors. The kids include toddlers who recognize brand logos before they can talk and commodity-minded baby Einsteins who learn to shop before they can walk. Consumerism needs this infantilist ethos because it favors laxity and leisure over discipline and denial, values childish impetuosity and juvenile narcissism over adult order and enlightened self-interest, and prefers consumption-directed play to spontaneous recreation. The ethos feeds a private-market logic ("What I want is what society needs!") and combats the public logic fashioned by democracy ("What society needs is what I want to want!").(...) Compare any traditional town square with a modern suburban mall. In the square, you'll find a school, town hall, library, general store, park, movie house, church, art gallery and homes — a true neighborhood exhibiting our human diversity as beings who do more than simply consume. But our new town malls are all shopping, all the time. When we see politics permeate every sector of life, we call it totalitarianism. When religion rules all, we call it theocracy. But when commerce dominates everything, we call it liberty. Can we redirect capitalism to its proper end: the satisfaction of real human needs? Well, why not? The world teems with elemental wants and is peopled by billions who are needy. They do not need iPods, but they do need potable water, not colas but inexpensive medicines, not MTV but their ABCs. They need mortgages they can afford, not funny-money easy credit. READ IT ALL

Barbour is basically saying that "all that is solid melts into air". The latest build of our economic system is destroying individuals, families, cultures, the environment and communities. We are living in a self-inflicted hell. In Barbour's article we can see that the issue of child welfare is linked to issues as diverse as public space and the Protestant ethos. He also points out the Achilles heel of our economic system, perhaps its principal contradiction: its over-productivity. The system just produces too much stuff and if it can't sell it all we suffer and if it does manage to sell it all we suffer even more. In producing so much useless stuff it destroys the environment too.

Howard Meyerson in the Washington Post writes about the great American multinational corporation's campaign to prevent the creation of labor unions in their Chinese workplaces. It is obvious that capitalism and political freedom are in no way connected and may well be arch antagonists.

Listen to the apostles of free trade, and you'll learn that once consumer choice comes to authoritarian regimes, democracy is sure to follow. Call it the Starbucks rule: Situate enough Starbucks around Shanghai, and the Communist Party's control will crumble like dunked biscotti. As a theory of revolution, the Starbucks rule leaves a lot to be desired. Shanghai is swimming in Starbucks, yet, as James Mann notes in "The China Fantasy," his new book on the non-democratization of China, the regime soldiers on. Conversely, the American farmers who made our revolution didn't have much in the way of consumer choice, yet they managed to free themselves from the British. In New England, however, they did have town meetings, which may be a surer guide to the coming of democratic change. It's a growing civil society -- a sphere where people can deliberate and decide on more than their coffee -- that more characteristically sounds the death knell of dictatorships. Which is why the conduct of America's corporate titans in China is so disquieting. There, since March of last year, the government has been considering a labor law that promises a smidgen of increase in workers' rights. And since March of last year, the American businesses so mightily invested in China have mightily fought it.(...) It's not as if Chinese unions would use these laws to run roughshod over employers. Chinese unions are not, strictly speaking, unions at all. They remain controlled by the Communist Party. Their locals can be and frequently are headed by plant managers, whether the workers want them or not. And yet, these changes proved too radical for America's leading corporations.(...) Andreas Lauff, a Hong Kong-based corporate attorney, wrote in the Jan. 30 Financial Times, "comments from the business community appear to have had an impact." The new draft "scaled back protections for employees and sharply curtailed the role of unions."(...) Admittedly, a few nettlesome issues remain. First, about one-fourth of the global labor force is in China. Opposing steps toward the formation of unions there suppresses the wages of so many workers that its effect is felt worldwide. Second, since authoritarian China remains an adversary of the United States and a backer of some genuinely dangerous authoritarian regimes, blocking even the most modest steps toward the development of a civil society and democratic rights there poses a threat to U.S. security interests. READ IT ALL

Some hoary old Marxist lounging on the ash heap of history might raise himself up on an elbow and be heard to croak something to the effect that the system had "entered into contradiction". Community, civil society, the family, the air and the water... and even or especially, independent thought are enemies of this version of "prosperity". Margaret Thatcher maintained that "society" doesn't "exist". Perhaps she was a prophetess. Certainly that is the direction we are taking.

Returning to the opening idea of common ground between progressives and the devout Christians. Certainly both have more in common with each other than with the economic system that we have been discussing.

The left as it was explained to me by word and example (unfortunately more of the former than the latter) is about, equality, austerity and the value of work and most of all about the brotherhood of those who work. The Catholic, "Blessed" (official title) Mother Teresa of Calcutta spoke of "the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God" and so, using the exact same words, do the thoroughly un-Catholic Freemasons. Even Confucius say, "The man of human-heartedness is one who desiring to sustain himself, sustains others, and desiring to develop himself, develops others; that may be called the way to practice human-heartedness."

So we might begin by dividing up people between the "human-hearted" and those who, while belonging to the species and living from it, are unconcerned for its welfare. The Spanish writer Ramón María del Valle Inclán, had a character named the "Marqués de Bradomin", who divided everything and everyone in the universe into two major categories: the Marqués de Bradomin and everything else. How does this sort of personality develop? Richard Conniff writing in the New York Times has this to offer on the subject:

Let’s begin with what I call the “Cookie Monster Experiment,” devised to test the hypothesis that power makes people stupid and insensitive — or, as the scientists at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “disinhibited.” Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table. It reminded the researchers of powerful people they had known in real life. One of them, for instance, had attended meetings with a magazine mogul who ate raw onions and slugged vodka from the bottle, but failed to share these amuse-bouches with his guests. Another had been through an oral exam for his doctorate at which one faculty member not only picked his ear wax, but held it up to dandle lovingly in the light.(...) The researchers went on to theorize that getting power causes people to focus so keenly on the potential rewards, like money, sex, public acclaim or an extra chocolate-chip cookie — not necessarily in that order, or frankly, any order at all, but preferably all at once — that they become oblivious to the people around them. Indeed, the people around them may abet this process, since they are often subordinates intent on keeping the boss happy. So for the boss, it starts to look like a world in which the traffic lights are always green (and damn the pedestrians). Professor Keltner and his fellow researchers describe it as an instance of “approach/inhibition theory” in action: As power increases, it fires up the behavioral approach system and shuts down behavioral inhibition.(...) The bottom line: Without power, people tend to play it safe. Given power, even you and I would soon end up living large and acting like idiots. READ IT ALL

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity are the basic values.

Christians are given to asking themselves, "what would Jesus do?" and not even a hardened atheist would ever suggest that Jesus would act like any of the jerks described in Conniff's column. So it shouldn't be that difficult to get from "Am I my brother's keeper?", The Beatitudes, the parable of the Good Samaritan etc, etc to universal public health care plus decent public education.

So I think Howard Dean is really onto something of genuinely revolutionary potential. Something, that combined with political micro-financing and participatory democratic activism could reshape and humanize the face of America and American politics. DS

Rough notes on the empire death watch

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As I said in the previous post I am loafing a bit this week with no deadlines to meet. However, being a firm believer in the old boxer's adage, "train hard, fight easy", I am engaged, little beaver fashion, in my reading so that hopefully by next week I'll have something useful to say about the horrible mess in the Middle East for my Spanish readers.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd share with you some partially digested material I've been looking at today.

On the eve of more possible conflict, the first thing to do would be to look to the state of forces to be employed. In military affairs, wise men say that amateurs speak of strategy but professionals talk about logistics. If that were the gauge, here is a clipping from the Washington Times, from an extremely professional article by Retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, former commander of the US Army War College that is anything but encouraging.

If you haven't heard the news, I'm afraid your Army is broken, a victim of too many missions for too few soldiers for too long. Today we have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan all of our fighting brigades, both active and reserve. Every brigade save one in Korea has spent time in combat. Twenty have two tours there, nine have three and two have four. Some of these brigades' one-year deployments were extended by several months. To demonstrate the gravity of the problem, let's do the math. After the surge the nation will need to keep 33 brigades, each consisting of about 3,000 soldiers, in the field. Past experience tells us that three brigades are needed to keep one continuously in the fight (one recovering and one training up to support each deployed brigade). The Army could in theory maintain itself in combat indefinitely using such a scheme. From a human perspective, a three-for-one schedule would allow each soldier two years back for every year in combat. That is tough but sustainable. So, that means we need a total of 99 brigades to support 33 in the fight. Sorry to say, we only have about half that number available to the Army and Marine Corps.(...) Today, anecdotal evidence of collapse is all around. Past history makes some of us sensitive to anecdotes and distrustful of Pentagon statistics. The Army's collapse after Vietnam was presaged by a desertion of mid-grade officers (captains) and non-commissioned officers. Many were killed or wounded. Most left because they and their families were tired and didn't want to serve in units unprepared for war. If we lose our sergeants and captains, the Army breaks again. It's just that simple. That's why these soldiers are still the canaries in the readiness coal-mine. And, again, if you look closely, you will see that these canaries are fleeing their cages in frightening numbers. The lesson from this sad story is simple: When you fight a long war with a long-service professional Army, the force you begin with will not get any larger or better over the duration of the conflict. For that reason, today's conditions are pretty much irreversible. There's not much that money, goodwill or professed support for the troops can do. Another strange consequence is that the current political catfight over withdrawal dates is made moot by the above facts. We're running out of soldiers faster than we're running out of warfighting missions. The troops will be coming home soon. There simply are too few to sustain the surge for very much longer. READ IT ALL

After looking at the state of the forces, the next thing would be to look at the state of the alliances. America's diplomatic efforts led by Doctor Rice have been pointed toward creating an anti-Iran front among "moderate" Arab governments. Tony Karon of Time Magazine commented on the results in TomDispatch.

In reality, the Bush administration seems increasingly at odds with the consensus among the Arab moderates it claims to be leading. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, in particular, appears to have sent a signal of this in cancelling -- with little explanation -– a special state dinner that was to be hosted by President Bush on April 17th. Then, at Wednesday's Arab League Summit in Riyadh, the King followed up by demanding an end to the crippling financial siege of the Palestinian Authority imposed by the U.S. and denouncing the American military presence in Iraq as an "illegitimate foreign occupation." This is strong stuff from the Saudis. READ IT ALL

Strong stuff indeed, especially when you consider that the United States has been the sole guarantor of the the Saudi royal family survival since 1945... Some might consider the phrase, "illegitimate foreign occupation" coming from the King of Saudi Arabia as truly the "writing on the wall"... "You're dead son. get yourself buried".

As to European opinion, there is this snippet from Der Spiegel.

Forty-eight percent of Germans think the United States is more dangerous than Iran, a new survey shows, with only 31 percent believing the opposite.(...)(in) a Forsa opinion poll commissioned by Stern magazine. Young Germans in particular -- 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds, to be precise -- said they considered the United States more dangerous than the religious regime in Iran. READ IT ALL

In view of this state of European public opinion, I am not at all sure that the United States could have free use of its European bases in Germany, Italy or Spain or even the fly over use of their airspace in case of an American air attack on Iran.

Meanwhile, what is the word from America's most important ally, Israel? Here is an interesting clipping from Debka.

In his briefing to the Israeli cabinet Sunday, April 1, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, AMAN chief, reported that Iran, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas expect the United States to attack Iran in the summer and they are preparing to retaliate by going to war with Israel. In Yadlin’s view, a proliferation of players and the many imponderables could ignite a conflict, which none of the parties wants – as happened in the Six Day War of 1967.(...) His comments came one day after Iran’s chief of staff, Gen. Hassan Fayrouz Abadi, urged the Arabs to hurry up and join Iran in a defense treaty because, he claimed, Israel threatened a war offensive in summer, two months hence. According to the Iranian general, Israel was bent on a “suicide assault” against a number of Arab states to save the Americans from having to pull their troops out of Iraq (sic).(...) Iran, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas may be presumed to be acting on some piece of intelligence that point to a forthcoming US attack some time between April and early September 2007. Therefore, the Middle East faces at least five months of incendiary military instability during which everyone will be braced for the axe to fall.(...) A coordinated Iranian-Syrian-Hizballah-Hamas attack would lay Israel open to four war fronts and the common weapon to them all: missiles - anti-tank, short-range surface, medium range ballistic and surface-to-air.(...) Hamas threatens to launch the third Palestinian uprising (intifada) against Israel within three months unless the international blockade is lifted and funds are released to the Palestinian Authority. The cabinet was informed that the IDF would start operating behind Gazan lines against the massive Palestinian military build-up. READ IT ALL

What about South Asia and the rest of the Muslim world?

There is a wonderful saying in Spanish, "eramos pocos y parió la abuela", which translates literally, "there were only a few of us and grandmother had a baby". It usually translates weakly into English as, "that was the last straw", which gives none of the surreal nuances of intense exasperation in the Spanish original. As to the reactions to a US/Israeli attack on Iran in Pakistan and its possible effect on the war in Afghanistan, you would do well to read this United Press International article by Arnaud de Borchgrave, said to have unsurpassed access to western intelligence services.

The U.S. intelligence community recently acquired a Pakistani insider's look at what makes Musharraf tick these days. As much as he wanted U.S. victory in Iraq, he has long since concluded the United States has lost the hand to Iran. To recoup America's loss before he leaves the White House in January 2009, Musharraf believes Bush will strike Iran's nuclear facilities from air and sea. And this, in turn, will unite Sunnis and Shiites in Pakistan against all things American -- and provoke a gigantic upheaval throughout the Middle East. With the whole world turning against Israel and the United States, he could not afford to continue his policy of "constructive ambiguity" toward the Bush administration.(...) What ISI reports to him from the European capitals that sent troops to Afghanistan under the NATO flag, and from numerous ISI operatives in 34 Afghan provinces on the other side of the Hindu Kush mountain range, is that NATO is losing ground to a resurgent and rejuvenated Taliban. ISI's conclusion: the NATO consensus on Afghanistan will not long survive a U.S. defeat in Iraq and/or U.S. hostilities against Iran.(...) Creeping Talibanization is now a reality across the length and breadth of one of the world's eight nuclear-weapons powers. Two of Pakistan's four provinces are already under anti-U.S., pro-Taliban governments. Musharraf has convinced himself that unless he could obtain another five years in power -- he took over in a military coup in 1999 -- Pakistan's nuclear arsenal would be at risk of falling under the control of Islamist extremists. READ IT ALL

Truly, eramos pocos y parió la abuela. DS

Iran.... My true confession: yes, we have no bananas

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It's "Semana Santa" in Spain, Easter week. Thursday though Monday (Monday too in Barcelona) are holidays. Many people take the week off and travel and Good Friday is a total, everything shut down holiday, like Christmas, even Friday night... This means there are no newspapers published on Saturday. As my column appears on Saturdays, that means I don't have to write this week. Whew! What a relief.

If I did have to write, I would have to write about Iran and the Middle East and it is so confusing at the moment.

What my antenna are picking up, though, is that we are entering the most dangerous period that I can remember since the Cuban Missile Crisis. However that crisis was so stark, so clear, the players so few, the stakes so obvious, that the whole world sat on the edge of their seats, fingers crossed, "a pissin' and a prayin'"... a child could understand it.

But to analyze the situation in the Middle East at this moment is like standing at an open window trying analyze the flying contents of a pail of garbage that someone is dumping out of a higher window... it's all so mixed up, the coffee grounds with the banana peels.. and all moving so fast... better wait till it all hits the pavement and then pick through the mess at leisure... if that's to your taste.

I will give it a try in the next few days and am collecting material to that effect, but I confess to enjoying the lack of deadlines like a well fed pussycat curled up in the sunshine. DS

Rebuilding the left - 2: Necessity creates the organ

"Us workin' folkses, all get together,
'Cause we ain't got a chance anymore.
We ain't got a chance anymore."
Tom Joad - Woody Guthrie

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Paul Krugman has a very good piece in the NYT abstracted below. In it Krugman illustrates the nub of the class-politics question: you can't have a "class struggle" if working people don't believe that class exists and that if they do believe that classes exist, they are deluded into believing that they really belong "in pectore" to the upper-middle class or even to the upper classes themselves.

You obviously can't have a "class struggle" if only the richest are "struggling," using organizations like the "Club for Growth" and the "Cato Institute", which Krugman mentions or by massive donations to the Republican Party's war chest. The Democratic Party, should any pin too many hopes upon it, is also controlled by huge contributions from rich individuals and corporations; that is why Howard Dean's strategies of micro-financing have such a potential for changing US politics.

Most troubling of all is the Republican Party's deliberate effort to disenfranchise people of color. I cannot think of a clearer proof of the neo-fascism that the party of Abraham Lincoln has come to represent.

I'm a huge fan of Paul Krugman's, but if one thing is obvious to me (and probably to Paul Krugman too) it is that university professors, because of the guaranteed employment which comes with tenure, are not going to be the backbone of the reborn left... It has to be the victims who stand up for themselves and make their own FDR's speech to Congress of April 29th 1938,

"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe, if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

America's challenge is to rebuild democracy, literally from the ground up. DS

Paul Krugman: Distract and Disenfranchise - New York Times

Abstract: Median income has risen only 17 percent since 1980, while the income of the richest 0.1 percent of the population has quadrupled. The gap between the rich and the middle class is as wide now as it was in the 1920s, when the political coalition that would eventually become the New Deal was taking shape. And voters realize that society has changed. They may not pore over income distribution tables, but they do know that today’s rich are building themselves mansions bigger than those of the robber barons. They may not read labor statistics, but they know that wages aren’t going anywhere: according to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of workers believe that it’s harder to earn a decent living today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.(...) The Republican Party’s adherence to an outdated ideology leaves it with big problems. It can’t offer domestic policies that respond to the public’s real needs. So how can it win elections? The answer, for a while, was a combination of distraction and disenfranchisement. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were themselves a massive, providential distraction; until then the public, realizing that Mr. Bush wasn’t the moderate he played in the 2000 election, was growing increasingly unhappy with his administration. And they offered many opportunities for further distractions. Rather than debating Democrats on the issues, the G.O.P. could denounce them as soft on terror. And do you remember the terror alert, based on old and questionable information, that was declared right after the 2004 Democratic National Convention? But distraction can only go so far. So the other tool was disenfranchisement: finding ways to keep poor people, who tend to vote for the party that might actually do something about inequality, out of the voting booth. Remember that disenfranchisement in the form of the 2000 Florida “felon purge,” which struck many legitimate voters from the rolls, put Mr. Bush in the White House in the first place. And disenfranchisement seems to be what much of the politicization of the Justice Department was about. Several of the fired U.S. attorneys were under pressure to pursue allegations of voter fraud — a phrase that has become almost synonymous with “voting while black.” Former staff members of the Justice Department’s civil rights division say that they were repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia’s voter ID law to Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters. READ IT ALL (bootleg)

Rebuilding the left

Read the article from the Financial Times below.

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Today I'd like to be upbeat on the future of the left. Many say that the left is finished, "on the ash heap of history" Ronnie said, quoting Trotsky, of all people. Reagan, the first neocon?

Many commentators maintain that the fall of the USSR was the end of socialism as a movement and even as an idea. And the truth is that even the moderate left has been reeling since the Berlin Wall came down. The end?

I am slowly coming to quite the opposite conclusion. The consciousness of suffering created the "class struggle". Marx didn't invent it out thin air in a laboratory, he simply attempted to make a scientific analysis of what any contemporary reader of Charles Dickens was aware of, all around him every day, everywhere. With all of Dickens's genius he couldn't hope to spread the reality of poverty and injustice as today's media can. Inequality, poverty and exclusion certainly haven't gone away and Globalization, which is unchained capitalism is aggravating them. We have the evidence around us daily. There is no substitute for the left. Necessity creates the organ.

Instead of its destruction, the fall of the USSR and "really existing socialism" means the liberation of the left, rather like the death of an evil, neurotic, absorbent parent or the break up of a hate-filled, destructive marriage or even the loss of faith in a "jealous" god... it means liberation.

The path that Soviet, Marxist-Leninism took was that of the Party as the "vanguard of the proletariat", a select, elitist group called on by history to lead the "masses" toward socialism. Inevitably that led to an inbred, selfish, corrupt coterie of self righteous bureaucrats, a carnival mirror image of their capitalist opposite numbers. The Oscar winning film, "The Lives of Others" gives a clear portrait of what this "vanguard" wrought. If the left is to be "reborn" it must be democratic in the fullest sense. The first battle to be fought is to make societies that call themselves "democracies" into truly participatory democracies. The tools to do so are all around us. We are entering the era of the flowering of micro-financed, activist enriched, "mini-mass movements". The YouTube phenomenon, means we return to village democracy where rotten tomatoes can be thrown at frauds and phonies. No "vanguard" could lead this and if any rises to do so it should be "youtubed" to extinction.

The greatest enemy of this reborn, participatory, democratic left is "permanent war", martial law, the "permanent state of exception" and the "national security state" with its suspension of human or constitutional rights.

As the shape and power of this movement becomes clearer so will the use of this tactic of fear and suspension of liberty. There are some paranoiacs (and remember, even they have enemies) who think that the entire Al Qaeda phenomenon was allowed to flower as an answer to the panic that the anti-Globalization riots of Seattle in 1999 caused in our own "vanguard". DS

Mica Panic: Child poverty exposes the Anglo-American model - Financial Times Abstract: For more than 30 years neoliberals have held up the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK as examples that other countries must follow to achieve economic success and high levels of social well-being. Yet, according to a recent Unicef report on child welfare, these are the worst two industrial countries in which to grow up. Is the Anglo-American model really as successful as neoliberals claim? Two years ago another United Nations agency, the UN Development Programme, singled out the plight of many children in the US and the UK. Child poverty had doubled in the UK between 1979 and 1998, which it called "a legacy of the 1980s - a decade characterised by a distinctly pro-rich growth pattern that left poor people behind". A major cause was "the impact of [Thatcher] government policies that cut taxes for higher earners and lowered benefits for the poor.(...) In the US the consequences of similar policies and the lack of universal health care (unique among advanced countries) have been even more serious. According to the UNDP report: "A baby boy from a family in the top5 per cent of US income distribution will enjoy a lifespan 25 per cent longer than a baby boy from the bottom 5 per cent." Not surprisingly, when you consider the whole population, not just children, the two countries, especially the US, lag behind the nations of "old Europe", whatever indicators of well-being are used.(..) The importance of these comparisons is that they consistently show that countries with social democratic or corporatist models of capitalism have markedly higher levels of social well-being than those, such as the US and UK, with a liberal free-market model. Equally important, the reason for this is not that they have higher gross domestic product per head but that their social attitudes, objectives and policies are very different. Unlike the US and, since 1979, the UK, these countries attach great importance to social cohesion and, therefore, to equality of opportunity. As they believe that there is "such a thing as society" rather than "only" isolated, alienated individuals in ruthless pursuit of self-interest, the aim of their institutions and policies is to improve both social and individual welfare. In other words, the goal is to promote a harmony of national interests - not social Darwinism - by ensuring that the whole society shares the benefits of economic growth as well as the costs of the adjustment process that makes it possible. Consequently, social democracies in particular are committed to those institutions and policies that neoliberals want to change. Employers, employees and government co-operate to solve national problems. Taxes and social expenditure are comparatively high, making generous unemployment and other benefits possible. They spend much more than the US and the UK on retraining those who become unemployed. Inequalities of income are much lower; and so also poverty, economic insecurity, lack of trust in other people and levels of stress and crime. If these achievements are, as neo-liberals believe, a sign of failure, what constitutes success? Franklin Roosevelt's definition of socio-political success is as relevant now as in 1937 when he said: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." And what happens if we fail? Freedom and democracy were "not possible" in a country, he warned the US Congress, "if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living". Neither, as Europe was soon to show, was peace. READ IT ALL