America as the new land of media-centered scams

Time Magazine has chosen Ben Bernanke to be its "Man of the Year" this year. Frank Rich of the New York Times disagrees.. Rich is on to something, I think. Tiger is more representative of what America has become over the last half century than Ben Bernanke is. We live in a new, media-created America that has gotten out of control.

Here's Rich's argument, followed by what I think the Tiger Woods scandal tells us about America today:

If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).

America today is a creation of a mostly centralized and homogeneous media. This has been obvious since about 1960. That year was when TV first was blamed for influencing who was elected President. Since TV has become central to who we as Americans think we are. Regionalism is now a thing of the past. People who have become adults since 1960 will not understand just how central being from the South or from the Midwest or from New York or from Texas used to be. Go back and watch some WW II movies, and take note of how much the characters are dominated by where they came from. New York. Texas. The Midwest. Wyoming. The name of the regions was central to establishing the nature of the character and the regional accent built much of the rest. No more. TV, and especially color TV, changed that perception. Now we are all pretty much the same kinds of Americans. I emphasize TV because TV is the central media which sets the media agenda. All Americans are pretty much in the same media pool now. There is very little regionalism left, even less as the big city newspapers cease to be influential. Instead of regional Americans like we had in WW II, we now have a new media-created America.

This media-created America created room for Public Relations experts and Advertising experts to create what we think we are. Both our cultural and our political life are now dominated by media celebrities. These people - media celebrities - are the images after which we shape much of our lives and personal images. We as individuals are now influenced and manipulated en mass by a mixture of celebrity and sloganeering through this massive media-created American image. Think about the advertisements for Viagra by retired Senator Bob Dole. Before he was paid to go on TV with those advertisements most Americans did not discuss sex the same way. Today we get advertisements for K-Y Jelly on TV. This really is not what America used to be like. And who benefits? Obviously, the people paying to manipulate the attitudes of the new, modern media-created America.

Our personal reality is shaped by those images and by the experts who manipulate those images. Public relations - Advertising - Propaganda - those are all different names for the body of techniques used to manipulate the media-created reality.

It doesn't seem to be recognized how much we are systematically manipulated by the media, though the constant influence is certainly obvious. One of the propaganda memes that is threaded through the media onslaught is that we are each individuals making our own individual decisions and that we are not members of a manipulated group. The selling of this meme makes much of the rest of the manipulation more effective. It's an easy meme to buy because if we can believe that these techniques do not work on each of us then we do not have to feel helpless before the onslaught. It's much easier to believe what we want to believe instead of fighting to find the real truth behind the media propaganda.
Rich points out that Enron was a media-created scam inflicted on America. It was not caught by the media. " That energy company convinced financial titans, the press and countless investors that it was a business deity. It did so even though very few of its worshipers knew what its business was. Enron is the template for the decade of successful ruses that followed, Tiger’s included.
[…]
Fortune magazine named Enron as America’s 'most innovative company” 'six years in a row."

Tiger Woods is another media-created scam on America. He has become the first ever billion dollar athlete by creation of an image in that media-created America.

The War in Iraq was a creation of that propaganda effort in politics through the TV-created America. But Bush, Cheney and the Neocons used that new, media-created America to start a war for their own purposes. Tiger Woods has used that same media-crated America to build his fortune out of chasing a tiny white ball with a stick. The celebrity-creation propaganda techniques are different only in the end goals, power or personal wealth.

That's my argument, based on what Frank Rich wrote. M. J. Rosenberg disagrees with Rich. He states that the problem isn't Tiger Woods. Rosenberg writes that although Tiger is another fraud, he isn't to blame for America's current mess. This far I agree with Rosenberg. But I disagree when he goes on to say

"The kid has pretty broad shoulders for a golfer, but they won't carry the weight of America's current mess. Nor should they. Not even as metaphor."

Tiger does work as a metaphor, I think, because the only way to look at the new media-created America with its pantheon of celebrities and its constant behavior-changing slogans is through metaphors like Tiger Woods, Enron, Bernie Maddox, and the many representatives of evangelical religion like Pat Roberts and Mark Sanford.

This is the new form America has taken. It is only about 50 years old and it is a wild and woolly frontier, mostly unexplored and inhabited by heroes and villains. Perhaps World of Warcraft or the movie The Matrix might be more accurate metaphors but they are not constantly inflicted on us all through every form of media the way the image of Tiger Woods has been.

One last point to consider. This takeover of the American image by a single media-created America and the submerging of regional American identities is very likely a source of the distress that has created the modern American conservative movement. That is a problem for a lot of people as their old regional identities are down graded and considered less important. But that's not the big problem. The big problem is that there seems to be little understanding of this new media-created America, and so we are subject to a series of scams and frauds by various tricksters who gain control of parts of it and use it against the rest of us for their own personal gain.

For a man like Tiger Woods to somehow convert chasing a tiny white ball with a stick into a billion dollar media image that is bit of a problem. For men like Bush, Cheney and the Neocons to use that same ability to manipulate the media and drive America into a senseless war in Iraq, then run that war as a form of media manipulation to build their party power while ignoring the real problems in Afghanistan and letting them fester to be solved by someone else is a real problem. But it does come back to the fact that we do not yet understand or have control of this new wild frontier that is America in the media.

Gore Vidal - America is becoming a dictatorship

Gore Vidal has fought through WW II, written hit movies and written great books. He also grew up with John F. Kennedy and traveled in those social circles. He's got the background to know America. So he says:

"Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How's Obama doing? "Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we've had in that position for a long time. But he's inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He's acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism." America should leave Afghanistan, he says. "We've failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it." The "War on Terror" was "made up", Vidal says. "The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction'. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He'd be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you're both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination."

His voice strengthens. "One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don't demand honour, that can be lies too. I don't say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media." The media is too supine? "Would that it was. They're busy preparing us for an Iranian war." He retains some optimism about Obama "because he doesn't lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive."

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in "a black city" (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama's intelligence. "But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it's a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred - religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative' you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They're not, they're fascists."

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. "He f***ed it up. I don't know how because the country wanted it. We'll never see it happen." As for his wider vision: "Maybe he doesn't have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there's a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it'. That's what Obama needs - a bit of Lincoln's chill." Has he met Obama? "No," he says quietly, "I've had my time with presidents." Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: "Bang bang." He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. "Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital," he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. "Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they're good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to."The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. "Remember the coup d'etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush."

Vidal says forcefully that he wished he'd never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime's-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.

He observes presidential office-holders balefully. "The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn't impress me as a good president. It's like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?' It's complicated. I'd known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him - that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot."

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. "Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they'd say ‘They live well but they're all alcoholics'. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over." Instead, America has "no intellectual class" and is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn't realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush."

Vidal adds menacingly: "Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it."

Cynical? Or just able to see what is really happening quite clearly?

Let's hope he's missed something important. I wouldn't bet he is missing that much.

What's wrong with America? Ask Jon Taplin.

Reagan and the neoconservatives managed to convince their followers that the only thing the government knew how to do well was fight wars. All the rest--building the Interstate Highway System, running Social Security and Medicare--the government must be incompetent. But it is the financing of the National Security State that prevents us from providing a world class universal health care and K-College education system. Nothing else. And until the Democrats are willing to provide a counter-narrative to Glenn Beck's vision of what's wrong with America--one aimed at the working class and not Wall Street--the social contagion of the interregnum's morbid symptoms will continue to spread.

This is the conclusion that Jon Taplin has come to. It's very interesting how he gets there.

I had identified the problem of the culture clash myself, but I had not put the rest of it all together they way he has. His book should be very interesting.

America has adopted the idea of Americans being perpetually at war somewhere

When did America decide that it would always be at war somewhere? Because that's what today's generation is being told. David Bromwich, Professor of Literature at Yale, addresses this problem.

We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration, and "wars" in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war -- and no end of wars.

[...]

Couple the casualty-free air war that NATO conducted over Yugoslavia with the Powell doctrine of multiple wars and safe exits, and you arrive somewhere close to the terrain of the Af-Pak war of the present moment. A war in one country may now cross the border into a second with hardly a pause for public discussion or a missed step in appropriations. When wars were regarded as, at best, a necessary evil, one asked about a given war whether it was strictly necessary. Now that wars are a way of life, one asks rather how strong a foothold a war plants in its region as we prepare for the war to follow.

A new-modeled usage has been brought into English to ease the change of view. In the language of think-tank papers and journalistic profiles over the past two years, one finds a strange conceit beginning to be presented as matter-of-fact: namely the plausibility of the U.S. mapping with forethought a string of wars. Robert Gates put the latest thinking into conventional form, once again, on 60 Minutes in May. Speaking of the Pentagon's need to focus on the war in Afghanistan, Gates said: "I wanted a department that frankly could walk and chew gum at the same time, that could wage war as we are doing now, at the same time we plan and prepare for tomorrow's wars."

The weird prospect that this usage -- "tomorrow's wars" -- renders routine is that we anticipate a good many wars in the near future. We are the ascendant democracy, the exceptional nation in the world of nations. To fight wars is our destiny and our duty. Thus the word "wars" -- increasingly in the plural -- is becoming the common way we identify not just the wars we are fighting now but all the wars we expect to fight.

A striking instance of journalistic adaptation to the new language appeared in Elisabeth Bumiller's recent New York Times profile of a key policymaker in the Obama administration, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. Unlike her best-known predecessor in that position, Douglas Feith -- a neoconservative evangelist for war who defined out of existence the rights of prisoners-of-war -- Flournoy is not an ideologue. The article celebrates that fact. But how much comfort should we take from the knowledge that a calm careerist today naturally inclines to a plural acceptance of "our wars"? Flournoy's job, writes Bumiller,

"boils down to this: assess the threats against the United States, propose the strategy to counter them, then put it into effect by allocating resources within the four branches of the armed services. A major question for the Q.D.R. [Quadrennial Defense Review], as it is called within the Pentagon, is how to balance preparations for future counterinsurgency wars, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, with plans for conventional conflicts against well-equipped potential adversaries, like North Korea, China or Iran.

"Another quandary, given that the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted far longer than the American involvement in World War II, is how to prepare for conflicts that could tie up American forces for decades."

Notice the progression of the nouns in this passage: threats, wars, conflicts, decades. Our choice of wars for a century may be varied with as much cunning as our choice of cars once was. The article goes on to admire the coolness of Flournoy's manner in an idiom of aesthetic appreciation:

"Already Ms. Flournoy is a driving force behind a new military strategy that will be a central premise of the Q.D.R., the concept of 'hybrid' war, which envisions the conflicts of tomorrow as a complex mix of conventional battles, insurgencies and cyber threats. 'We're trying to recognize that warfare may come in a lot of different flavors in the future,' Ms. Flournoy said."

Bromowich provides a great deal of recent history explaining why we have become desensitized to the idea and practice of perpetual war. It's worth reading.

The Southern Baptists are declining in numbers, Paving the way for a Culturally better America

The social conservatives consist largely of members of the evangelical churches - including the Mega-Churches. The grandfather of the evangelicals is the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC.) Those churches have been a key element of the conservative political alliance over the last thirty years, and their continued expansion is a part of the myth that the conservative movement is growing.

Well, the SBC is not part of the movement that is growing in numbers. The Reuters article entitled "Southern Baptists (and Republicans): old, white and in decline?">Southern Baptists (and Republicans): old, white and in decline?" reports that the SBC is declining in membership just as has been the case for the mainstream and much more liberal religious denominations they oppose.

The reason why most people that I know join a religious denomination other than the one they grew up in is that they have children and are looking for some way to connect to society in a society that is super commercial and frankly, anti-child. But Christianity does not do a very good job of providing a cultural connection for members, either. That explains the decline in the mainstream religions. It appears that the SBC, the source of some of the greatest wackinesses in the last few years, does no better that the Episcopalian or Presbyterian or other mainstream denominations. It is a common symptom in all three of the major desert religions out of the Middle East (Judaism,Christianity and Islam.)

When the various forms of idolatry (including declaring the Bible Holy and worshiping it as the evangelicals do) cease to satisfy the need for connection to the culture ("cultural roots") there is nothing else to hold the members besides the demand that they not lose their Faith under the threat of becoming ostracized by the rest of the membership. Acceding to those demands mean that you are abandoning all true religious curiosity.

The evangelical attempt to enter politics and take sufficient control of the government to use it as an evangelical tool that started with the televangelist Pat Roberts and with Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition early in the Reagan regime had essentially failed by the late 1990's when Ralph Reed abandoned the Christian Coalition and went off the do well for himself in politics. Roves mobilization of the evangelicals behind George W. Bush together with a new band-wagon effect gave a temporary rejuvenation to that effort, but the returns from being Republican foot soldiers was never worth it. It's effectively over now, and the only real draw for the evangelical churches remains a being a home and culture for families with young children. The decline of the SBC shows that. The actual membership of the mega-churches is generally far below the membership numbers they announce in public.

The exception to the decline, if there is any, will be in relatively isolated rural communities which have few social resources besides the church. Sarah Palin is the product of such a rural location. But the authoritarian nature of such religious organizations is not likely to hold on to a mobile population that can easily get a job in the city down the road if they become dissatisfied at the current location.

As long as the evangelicals can't get control of government in order to use it to enforce a monopoly of religion and to evangelize, they will continue to decline.

As a society, though, we really need to do something to fill that great yearning need for a connection to the culture. It's not a commercial need, so private enterprise cannot make a profit by filling it. Thus, we need to develope non-commercial ways to fulfill that need for connection and to build a better and more inclusve community. Racists need not apply. With our highly mobile population, the solutions have to be color-blind, race blind, and very inclusive of a variety of cultures and backgrounds.

No large nation other than America has a historyof diversity that will make such solutions possible.

A new era for America begins

Today at 12:00 pm noon Eastern time, Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as President of the United States of America. Here is a video of the swearing in.



This is only symbolic. Obama earned the right to become President, and we as Americans have given him the office through the procedures set down in the U.S. Constitution. But for being "only" symbolic, it still is a powerful symbol of what America is.

We have given him the office in trying times. We can only wish him the very best in the ways each of us sends out such wishes and prayers.

Atrios asks "Why did we attack Iraq?"

There are two cultures at war with each other in the U.S., and there have been since the nation began. Digby has documented the Two Tribes of America, one of which dominates the American South and the other which tends to dominate the rest of America. The culture of the South includes the attitude of low taxes, small government, low government services, and prefers government solutions to problems that include a lot of police and military activity.

The other tribe has grown out of the U.S. Northeast and Midwest, and includes believing in universal public education and government support for the economy. Needless to say it included the belief in higher taxes as needed to support expanded government service. It should be no surprise that the American industrial revolution grew out of the culture of the northern tribe.

So what does this have to do with Atrios' question why we attacked Iraq? This was George Bush's explanation, offered in Baghdad:

BAGHDAD -- Arriving in Baghdad today for a farewell visit, President Bush staunchly defended a war that has taken far more time, money and lives than anticipated, saying the conflict "has not been easy" but was necessary for U.S. security, Iraqi stability and "world peace."

Atrios points out the Obvious. That statement is a lie. The invasion of Iraq was not required for U.S. security, Iraqi stability and "world peace" and in fact undermined each of those goals.

The real answer is that in 1994 the Southern American culture took over Congress under Newt Gingrich and in 2000 the Southern Tribe took over the White House under George Bush. Their solution to problems is to blow them up or send in the military.

The problem they perceives was the decline of world oil, the economic basis of American hegemony over much of the world, at the same time time that third world nations were actively resisting American hegemony. While the third world nations include more than just the Islamic culture, the Islamic nations sit on top of a large chunk of the world's oil supply and can make a lot of trouble for American economic and military hegemony.

Iraq was not the center of that resistance. It was simply the weakest of the Islamic oil states, and so was seen by the Southern American tribe as the perfect subject for a demonstration invasion by the American military.

The excuses were dreamed up to justify the previously made decision (published by the Project for the New American Century) to invade Iraq. 9/11 presented the perfect opportunity, even though the 9/11 attack was conducted by primarily Saudi Arabian individuals financed by Saudi Arabian and trained in Afghanistan under the auspices of the Taliban, a Sunni Muslim extremist organization supported by elements of the Pakistanian Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.

This was a cultural decision by the Southern U.S. cultural tribe, not a rational defense of America or an effort to ensure Peace. America attacked Iraq specifically to demonstrate that they would and could do so. Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld said so when he described the invasion of Iraq as an effort to apply "Shock and Awe."

See? That's not all that hard to understand. But the question that Atrios asks is a little different. It's not whether the true reasons can easily be discerned, it's whether the teachers in 80 or so years will dare to teach that truth in high school.

Probably not. I don't recall my high school teaching about Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears, and I was in high school at least 120 years after the Indian Removal.

As usual in 80 or more years American Exceptionalism will trump the truth.

The NY Times approves of the Obama win in glowing terms

Nicholas Kristof describes what he calls "The Obama Dividend." He is talking about the return of the idea of America as a land of hope and opportunity instead of greed. Kristof's final statement is quite memorable:

Considering that past, perhaps the most incisive comment on Mr. Obama’s election actually came long ago. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the Hawaii Legislature in 1959, two years before Mr. Obama was born in Honolulu, and declared that the civil rights movement aimed not just to free blacks but “to free the soul of America.”

Mr. King ended his Hawaii speech by quoting a prayer from a preacher who had once been a slave, and it’s an apt description of the idea of America today: “Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

For once Thomas Friedman gets it (mostly) right.

Bush & Co. did not believe that government could be an instrument of the common good. They neutered their cabinet secretaries and appointed hacks to big jobs. For them, pursuit of the common good was all about pursuit of individual self-interest. Voters rebelled against that. But there was also a rebellion against a traditional Democratic version of the common good — that it is simply the sum of all interest groups clamoring for their share.

“In this election, the American public rejected these narrow notions of the common good,” argued Sandel. “Most people now accept that unfettered markets don’t serve the public good. Markets generate abundance, but they can also breed excessive insecurity and risk. Even before the financial meltdown, we’ve seen a massive shift of risk from corporations to the individual. Obama will have to reinvent government as an instrument of the common good — to regulate markets, to protect citizens against the risks of unemployment and ill health, to invest in energy independence.”

But a new politics of the common good can’t be only about government and markets. “It must also be about a new patriotism — about what it means to be a citizen,” said Sandel. “This is the deepest chord Obama’s campaign evoked. The biggest applause line in his stump speech was the one that said every American will have a chance to go to college provided he or she performs a period of national service — in the military, in the Peace Corps or in the community. Obama’s campaign tapped a dormant civic idealism, a hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves, a yearning to be citizens again.”

None of this will be easy. But my gut tells me that of all the changes that will be ushered in by an Obama presidency, breaking with our racial past may turn out to be the least of them. There is just so much work to be done. The Civil War is over. Let reconstruction begin.

These are not the statements of columnists commenting on the promises of politicians. These are columnists describing what they think the statement from the voters means.

Obama came in promising change, and it got such a glowing reception that his opponent McCain opportunistically jumped onto the bandwagon with "Me too! I'm also for change!" But what is really important is the reaction of the voters and the American public.

Now we need to see what "change" means. The long election has been interesting, but it's just a prologue to what comes next.

The four American cultures

According to Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer, the United States is populated by the cultural descendants of four different cultures from Great Britain, and these cultures provide an explanation for much of the conflict and differing attitudes we observe in American politics.

Sara Robinson has kindly offered a summary of the four cultures which I show below:

To quickly summarize, the first of these groups were the Puritans, the bulk of whom arrived in New England between 1630 and1650. They were Reform Protestants who brought with them a notion of "ordered liberty." They believed that government authority, including the right to use force, properly belongs not to individuals, but to communities; and that individuals would necessarily need to conform their will to that of the larger whole for society to succeed. In the generations that followed, their descendants spread Puritan culture across the northern tier of the county, into the Pacific Northwest, and down the West Coast to northern California. These are, today, still the most liberal parts of the country.

They were followed, starting in 1660s, by Cavaliers -- Anglican royalists from the south of England who took refuge from the English Civil War by settling up the Chesapeake and the coastal south. They believed that liberty and authority rightly accompany tradition, wealth, and inherited social status; and that government had no right to infringe on the God-given absolute "freedom" of the highest-ranking people to order the lives of those under their authority. If you're poor, you don't deserve freedom. If you're rich, you have a sacred right to do whatever you see fit to whomever you please. The lowland South is still dominated by traditional, hierarchy-oriented Cavalier values, from tidewater Virginia all the way around to New Orleans, and remains one of the most conservative parts of the country.

In the 1670s, the Quakers began arriving from England's industrial midlands. They were working class and middle class, earnest, hardworking, and nonviolent. The most productive and successful of all the British immigrant groups, they introduced the ideas of tolerance and racial and gender equality to the American conversation. For them, people were entitled to freedom to the degree that they were willing to grant the same freedoms to others -- a perspective that gave them a very expansive view of human rights. They valued a rough-and-tumble party politics that engaged everyone in political debate to solve problems. Their ancestors (most of whom eventually converted, and became Methodists or Baptists) spread out across the Midwest, where the plain-spoken, plain-living, deeply egalitarian Quaker way still flavors the culture.

And, finally, in the early 1700s, the Borderers (more commonly known as the Scots-Irish) started arriving from the borderlands of northern England, lowland Scotland, and northern Ireland. The area they came from had been a constant war zone between English and Scottish kings for some 700 years; and the never-ending violence had made them clannish, tough, fiercely independent, contemptuous of all forms of authority, and firm believers in a vision of "natural liberty" -- including the God-given rights of man that were eventually enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Philadelphia Quakers and Charleston Cavaliers took one look at this unruly, self-sufficient warrior society, shuddered, and immediately shipped them far off to their own highland frontiers. When we speak of "pioneer stock," we're talking about the Borderers. Their wandering descendants spread out and settled up the roughest places of the south, west and southwest, and gave us cowboys and country music along the way. Wherever you find populists and libertarians, you're likely among Borderers.

Fischer argues that these four groups formed the original cultural and political matrix into which later-arriving immigrant groups adapted themselves; and their ancient differences underlie many of the regional and philosophical differences Americans still grapple with today. The migration patterns of these four groups have largely determined the geography of civil and women's rights, economic justice movements, and many other social and political trends. And it seems possible to me that these conflicting value systems may also be at the cultural root of the strikingly ineffectual way that Democratic candidates have consistently responded to GOP attacks over the past 50 years.
[Highlighting mine - Editor]

I find this explanation intuitively very appealing.

I don't think you will find a lot of people who are purely of one culture or another, though. I think that individuals come from families that tend towards one culture, then are impressed by the culture in which they live. But the attitudes can be seen in election results.

The post Rule of Law America

Glenn Greenwald provides a succinct description of the depths that America has sunk to under the Bush administration and where it will remain if McCain is elected to extend Bush's presidency to a third term.

What we've done over the last seven years -- at least much of it -- isn't a secret. It's worthwhile to state frequently in clear, dispassionate terms what our country has done. Our Government has kidnapped people off the street and from their homes and sent them to places like Syria to be tortured for months (including completely innocent people) and then invoked National Security claims to bar them from holding our Government accountable in a court of law. We've disappeared others into secret prisons beyond even the reach of the Red Cross, or encaged them in a lawless black hole on a Cuban island. We've tortured them, sometimes to death, even with the knowledge that many were innocent. We attacked and completely demolished another country that couldn't attack us even if it wanted to. And our President openly declared that he has the power to break our laws, spy on U.S. citizens with no warrants, and indefinitely imprison even our own citizens with no process of any kind. Those are all just facts that aren't really subject to dispute or debate.

Worst of all, having done all of that -- not for weeks or months following the 9/11 attacks, but for years, still -- we've collectively decided, without much turmoil or debate, that it should all be forgiven, that none of it should be punished or even investigated, that it's best just to keep these crimes concealed and, when accidentally disclosed, to immunize the criminals. And all of that is being done right out in the open, so that our formal human rights reports are self-evident, almost laughable, farces, and even countries like Zimbabwe, when their governments want to engage in tyrannical acts, can and do rationally point to the U.S. as the leading example which they're following.

It's difficult to reconcile what teachers say is America's Constitutional Democracy with this shocking new America, this product of the century of war (also known as the twentieth century.) This new America has taken its form from the Reagan Revolution and the conservative movement.

The nation, looking back at the "glory" of WW II, began to try to solve every social problem with some form of war and military or police government discipline. As it has done so, the American Constitution has been shredded like a flag in a hurricane.

Is it too late to try to resurrect the America of the Founding Fathers who felt that the American Revolution had created a nation based on the sovereignty of the people instead of the sovereignty of tyrants and offered the American ideal to the world as a demonstration of how a great nation should be run? Has the spark from 1776 died away in a new tyranny? Is Liberty dead?

Because that is what is really meant when people say that "America has moved to the right."

American power, wealth was based on oil; That's nearly over

Sara Robinson is a futurist. She studies trends and estimates what they will mean in the future. Last week she reported on a fascinating book about energy as the source of empire. The book, by Thomas Homer-Dixon entitled The Upside of Down postulates that oil has been the source of American world power and the power of the dollar through the twentieth century, and that America's control of oil is running out. What does that mean? Here is an explanation from Sara Robinson:

All empires are built on vast amounts of energy. And no great empire in history has ever come to power without controlling and dominating the market in whatever the current preferred energy resource was at the time. [Snip]

He carefully builds the argument that Rome rose on its ability to harness vast amounts of Mediterranean sunshine, turn it into food, and then reliably move that food around the empire to feed vast numbers of soldiers, builders, and horses and thus consolidate its regime. When that system failed, the empire crumbled.

Likewise, the Dutch built their short-lived empire on the ability to supply oil for Europe's lanterns. They were supplanted by England, which was able to supply better, cheaper fuel out of its vast coal resources. British dominance lasted until a rising America turned out to have unimaginable amounts of coal, which allowed it to undercut the British pound as the world's most stable currency — and outperform the UK economically.

And then came oil, which was soon preferred to coal because it proved to be a far more efficient (hence, cleaner and cheaper) and versatile fuel. You could get far more energy output from a smaller unit (coal's comparative inefficiency made it impractical for small vehicles like cars, for example) and with far less effort; and you could turn it into far more different kinds of products -- not just fuel, but plastics, fertilizers, wonder drugs, and much more.

As the world moved toward oil at the beginning of the last century, the UK — eager not to lose out again — made an early bid for the oil fields of Arabia. But North America counted among its original blessings more oil reserves than any other continent on the planet; and that, argues Homer-Dixon, was decisive. Unable to compete, the British Empire faded, and the American Century began.

Sara then discusses how a second element of developing a full-blown Empire is developing and exporting the infrastructure that allows the rest of the world to build much better lives from that preferred energy source. America leveraged its control of oil resources by developing and exporting oil-fueled cars, power plants, farms and factories. Those exports became the basis of the dollar as the world currency. But that creates a dependence in the dominating nation on both control of the energy source and on world demand for the infrastructure that uses the energy source to create wealth. So Sara continues:

Homer-Dixon also points out another, more sober lesson. It's never happened that an empire that built its wealth on one energy resource also succeeded in dominating the next resource that supplanted it. Human nature being what it is, societies that are deeply invested in the current energy regime tend to fall into denial when that regime comes to its natural end — either because it simply runs out, or because it's superceded by something even more efficient and versatile. People can't believe things won't go on as they always have, or imagine that life could be any different. They shut their eyes to looming trouble, ignore the signs of impending doom, and refuse to make any reasonable plans to navigate the coming changes.

In the meantime, as old system falls apart, someone hungrier and more nimble finds a way to capitalize on a new, more efficient energy resource. And so old empires die, and new ones rise to take their places.

Put it in this perspective, and it becomes obvious that when we talk about running out of oil, we're not just talking about higher prices or low-carbon lifestyles or making an easy transition to something else that America (we like to think) will also dominate. When we fully grasp the foundational role oil played in securing America's wealth and global power, it becomes obvious that when we talk about moving off oil, we're really talking about nothing less than the demise of American power throughout the world, and the end of the American Way of Life as we've known it for generations.

That's serious stuff. But it's the truth that provides the backdrop for everything else that's going on right now. Against this larger process, it's easier to see that the dollar is weakening because our control over the whole oil economy that has supported its value for the past century is in serious trouble — and that we won't be out of financial danger until we can base on the dollar's value on something other than oil. Our political stature is tanking because the world doesn't need to kiss up to us anymore to keep the cars running and the lights on — and it won't rise again until we find something else of equally high value to offer. Our standard of living is falling because it always floated on a sea of oil — and that sea is drying up. Oil prices are high not because of market manipulations and oil company profit-taking (though plenty of oil economists are sure that's part of the story, too); they're high because the whole system is destabilizing, heading for a major tipping point.

The Sara continues by using this view of American world political power as being based on the American oil monopoly. As the oil and our monopoly of it runs out, so does American world political power.

Even before 9/11, the Bush Administration has always had a sense of panicked desperation about it — a desperation we've usually attributed to conservative revolutionary zeal, religious fanaticism, or free-market fundamentalism. But it's also plausible to interpret some of this as the desperation of people who were tasked with protecting the American empire by keeping the oil taps open and under control at any cost — and who know, deep in their guts, that time is running out.

The Project for a New American Century's stated strategy for maintaining the American superpower in the face of a rising China was to invade and dominate the Middle East, and thus control China's access to oil for the next several decades. That was the intended long-term payoff of the Iraq War: control the oil, and thus control the world. In their minds, if we have to bankrupt the country, tear up the Constitution, and piss off every other country in the world along the way, it's worth it — since they know we're not worth a damn economically or politically without the oil anyway. Sure, the means are ugly; but according to their view of the ends, there's simply no alternative — and no other possible future worth discussing. They don't care if we hate them now, because they're convinced we'll thank them in 20 years for having the statesmanlike foresight to do what had to be done.

(Blame it on too much time in the oil patch. That toxic elixer of crude and money so easily goes to one's head....)

This perspective also provides some extra context for why locally-based power generation, like on-site or community wind and solar, are political non-starters for energy execs and their government minions. It's obvious that they hate it because they can't take profit from it; but they also know that America's global hegemony depends on keeping the world dependent on energy supplies they control. Since nobody can capture a monopoly on the wind or the sun, there's no way to build the next global empire on them. And therefore, renewables simply aren't very interesting to people whose first priority is geopolitical dominance and stratospheric profit.

This view of energy and Empire certainly offers a coherent explanation of the twentieth century American world power. It also provides a connection between the period of American Empire, its decline, and the almost panicky reaction of American conservatives to that decline and to the loss of control of world oil.

One thing is very clear, though. Oil as we have known it is gone. Does that mean that American wealth and power is also gone? Remember, no previous empire every outlasted the loss of its control of the dominant energy source. Can America be different? Back to Sara:

From this 10,000-foot view, it's easy to interpret the political spats and economic machinations and deal-making and climate debates and regional wars — the whole parade that dominates the news now — as simply opening acts in a long transition that could end up taking most of this century. Unless a) we discover vast new reserves on a globe that's been already explored from pole to pole (unlikely) and b) we come up with dramatic new evidence proving conclusively that climate change isn't a problem after all (even less likely), then the hard fact is: We will be spending the next several decades moving off oil.

It's going to be the most important work of this century. And Americans can either get out in front of this change and come out of it at the century's end with much of their greatness intact — or continue to fight it, and end up as another of history's has-beens.

Meeting this challenge means we're going to have to get very smart, very fast, about a lot of things.

• First, we need to accept that this change is happening, and start having serious conversations about how we're going to handle it. The Bush Administration's denial has already cost us eight valuable years. It's an understatement to say that the longer we avoid the issue, the worse the transition will be.

• Second, we need to stay mindful of the horrific pitfalls. The unimaginable grimness of the worst-case scenarios alone should be enough motivation to get and keep us talking.

Even the most-likely-case scenarios are disturbingly short on sunshine and roses. Historically, energy transitions (involving, as they do, the collapse of vast economic and political systems) have never happened smoothly. Rome fell so hard that it took a thousand years for anything like it to rise again. The stable world order held together by the British coal empire shattered apart in two vast world wars and another dozen colonial revolutions (some of which still aren't resolved decades later). It's not unreasonable to expect similar disruptions as the American oil empire begins to unravel. It's not going to be pretty.

When complex economic systems fail, they almost always fail catastrophically, leaving vast numbers of displaced, disoriented and righteously angry people in their wake. Bad economic and environmental decisions get made. Critical issues are ignored, or abandoned due to lack of resources. If folks get desperate enough for security, it's entirely likely that they'll reorganize into feudal kingdoms or even warlord-run clans, as has already happened in too many Middle Eastern countries in the wake of war. Restoring these lost democracies can take generations. Much of that risk can be averted — but only if we're aware of the potential for trouble, and start figuring out how to deal with it now.

• Third, an important part of that planning will involve taking stock of the carbon-based resources remaining to us, and figure out how to best invest them to smooth the way to the next era. We can use that remaining margin of oil to rebuild walkable cities, construct next-generation energy infrastructure, and install electric transit. We can leverage it to repave the world with agrichar, restoring millions of acres of arable land, creating a vast new carbon sink, and eliminating the need for petroleum-based fertilizers in the bargain. We will still be able to afford to run oil-fueled bulldozers and trucks and ships for a while yet. Let's use them wisely while we can.

• Fourth, "globalization" may take on a whole new meaning, one that's more about global governance than global trade. Executing transition plans necessarily means empowering planet-wide organizations that have the ability to make and enforce the rules. We've already done this on a limited scale in the CFC treaties, international non-proliferation efforts, and so on. But navigating a transition of this magnitude is going to force us to take the whole idea of global government to the next level. (Can't you hear the far right howling about this already?)

Creating these new powers will raise all kinds of hard questions about national sovereignty and the rights of the global collective. In the end, we may revisit the meaning and purpose of government, and perhaps create entirely new forms of government that better balance local needs against global goals.

I've quoted more than enough of her article. She has an interesting final section entitled "What's Next?" which I suggest that you go read.

Hillary is not the revolutionary leader that Obama is.

There is no doubt that the conservative movement has brought America to a very sad low state. We are ineffectively fighting multiple wars in the Middle East while our economy moves into the tank and the middle class is finding itself losing economic ground for the first time since the Depression. Americans are unhappy with the government we have gotten, and the mid-term elections of 2006 are a down payment on that unhappiness. Something is changing, and most of the politicians are unaware of it. The mass media has no clue. It's time for changes. Big changes. The crowds surrounding Barack Obama suggest that he has tapped into the nature of the times, and the times are going to be revolutionary. So what makes the times so revolutionary?

Sara Robinson reports some very interesting research into the causes of revolutions. Some sociologists have study revolution, and they have established a set of conditions that, when they occur, result in revolution. The seven criteria are

1. Economic conditions for most people soar, then crash


2. The upper classes no longer consider the condition of the lower classes to be important to what happens to them. There ceases to be a general consensus across all the society that everyone is in it together.


3. The career and social expectations of the professional and upper military classes cease to be tied to those of the very wealthy. Instead of the best qualified being able to reach the top jobs through talent and hard work, they find that those top jobs are filled by the well-born and wealthy but less competent - like George Bush.


4. Conservatives who do not believe that government should exist run the government. The result is invariably incompetent government and a great deal of corruption. This is the natural result of putting conservatives in charge of government.


5. The world is changing rapidly, yet the top government leaders do not react and lead.


6. The economy is mismanaged to the point of indebtedness, bankruptcy, and currency collapse. Whether through ineptness or corruption is unimportant, although I can identify a great deal of both in the present situation.


7. The use of force is irrational and unproductive.
   • Domestically criminal punishments are widely seen to be unfair and inappropriate, with clear criminals getting no punishment ("Scooter" Libby) or alternatively, punishments wildly excessive to the crimes are handed out (see the mandatory drug sentencing laws.)
   • Outside the U.S. The military is used in wars that offer no benefit to the nation (Iraq is, of course, a classic example.) "These misadventures not only reduce the country's international prestige and contribute to economic declines; they often create a class of displaced soldiers who return home with both the skills and the motivation to turn political unrest into a full-fledged shooting war." Timothy McVeigh would be a classic example of this latter case.

[If I have not adequately summarized the seven items then the error is mine, not Sara Robinson's.]

I have seen every one of these conditions occur in the last two decades, and have grown more and more upset.

The Vietnam war was a beginning of a lot of it. It was clearly a war we did not need to fight, but our conservatives held every other progressive action the government could take hostage until LBJ was forced to send half-a-million soldiers to that country. His goal was to pass Medicare, the Civil Rights Bill, and the Voting Rights Bill. As bad as the Vietnam War was, LBJ was leading America to the solution of the social problems of lack of health care for the elderly and was resolving the problems of Racism and segregation that have plagued America since European settlers arrived. There has not been an example of national leadership since then, unless you want to count the totally negative attacks on modernity that Ronald Reagan represented. Conservatives don't solve social problems. They shoot the messengers who describe real problems and move into gated communities while siphoning as much money off the middle and lower classes as they can. The predator lending that is represented by payday loans, subprime loans, and increased credit card interest with hidden and surprise fees are just the tip of the iceberg. The bankruptcy bill was another step in the same system of predatory lending. All of that sucks money from the middle and lower classes and hands if over to the wealthy and extremely wealthy, who, unsurprisingly, have been purchasing tax breaks from their Congressmen.

If you want to know why the crowds are surrounding Obama as they are, he is the person who is promising the leadership out of this morass. Hillary, for all her technical skills, simply has not demonstrated the awareness or the leadership to make the changes needed to break up the disaster America has become under the Reagan Revolution and the Bush administration.

The conditions for a real revolution are ripe. Obama has tapped into the feelings the conditions have created, and he is stoking them. Will he be able to provide the real leadership that is going to be required at this time of change?

That is always the question. In Obama we seem to have a man who recognizes the nature of the times and who is offering his leadership to deal with them. The question always remains whether he has the abilities. But one thing is becoming more and more clear - there is no one else on the horizon even willing to try.

What's happened to America? Over half a century of war and the conservative movement.

What’s gone wrong with the American economy? The Cold War, excessive military spending, and a refusal to invest in the most important economic resource America has, its work force. This has been concealed by the free market fantasies of the Reagan Revolution, which has destroyed more of the economy than it has built. This has been shown by the failure of real middle class wages to increase since 1970. The economy has been pumped up by first getting housewives out of the home and into the work force, followed by an economy pumped up by making credit easier to get, then during the 90’s the Federal Reserve has manipulated the interest rates to be lower to give the illusion of a healthy economy. This has resulted in the two most recent bubbles in the financial economy, but the manipulations of the financial economy have primarily redistributed income away from the real economy and productive workers to people in positions of control of financial products. Unfortunately, financial products have little or no effect on real economic productivity. All these financial manipulations have had the effect for the last three or more decades of exporting our real economy to the rest of the world.

Charles W. McMillion has written an article, first published in "Manufacturing and Technology News" January 24, 2008, that shows the current state of the American economy.

In just the past seven years, US household debt almost doubled and federal debt soared by near two-thirds, rocketing by a combined $10.5 Trillion. The total combined debt of households ($14.4 Trillion) and the federal government ($9.2 Trillion) is now 168% of GDP, far higher even than in the brief spike during World War II. All other levels and ratios of debt also have soared far beyond any past precedent.

Yet, this record-shattering explosion of debt stimulus created the weakest seven year job growth (4.4%) and one of the weakest periods of real GDP growth (18.1%) since the Depression: less than 6 million new jobs ($1.8 million of debt per job) and a mere $4 Trillion increase in GDP.
This period began with the collapse of Wall Street's stock market bubble from the late 1990s and ends now with the collapse of Wall Street's housing and other debt bubbles. That such massive mortgage and consumer borrowing, tax cuts and war spending produced such remarkably weak real economic results suggests the months and years ahead could be quite difficult.

Yet, along with Fed rate cuts for cheaper debt, the only policies seriously considered by this year's crop of Wall Street-funded political candidates is more short-term household and federal debt "stimulus." Locked into a failed, 30-year-old ideology of deregulation and debt, there is no option to compete with the remarkably effective industrial and trade policies pursued by China and others.

2008 will be the ninth consecutive year the US economy grows slower than the world's growth while China grows more than three times faster. In the past seven years of sluggish growth, the US accumulated Manufacturing trade deficits (production shortfalls) of over -$3 Trillion with full Current Account trade losses of -$4.3 Trillion; more than the entire nominal growth of GDP.

At the same time, now in the third year of their remarkable 11th 5-Year Development Plan, China's accumulated Current Account surplus soared by nearly $1 Trillion since 2001, near 13% of GDP in 2007. These surpluses are funding China's now $1.5 Trillion war chest of foreign currency reserves.
Record US trade losses have accelerated the hollowing-out of the once dynamic US economy. For the first time on record, in 2002 the US lost its historic global trade surplus in Advanced Technology Products. Worsening sharply, since 2004 the ATP deficit became larger than the US trade surplus for Intellectual Property services, royalties and fees. That is, for the past four years the US has a worsening combined deficit in technology goods and services. Technology no longer pays any part of the US import bills for oil, cars, electronics and clothing, etc. China now accounts for half the US Manufacturing trade deficit and more than the entire deficit in technology.
Reflecting the production shortfall from the trade deficits, BLS data show output growth since 2001 is among the weakest since the Depression and the gain in total hours worked (just 0.5%) is, by far, the weakest. This is why productivity growth has appeared misleadingly healthy; productivity is a measure of output per hour of labor.

Another powerful measure of the hollowing out in the economy is the radical shift in the job market. Of the 5.92 million total new jobs in last seven years, only 4.32 million were in the private sector while 1.66 million were in state/local governments, mostly for public education, health and prisons. The federal government cut jobs in the Postal Service.

More than all of the new jobs added by the private sector since 2001 are in private education and health care bureaucracies (3.34 million new jobs) and in bars and restaurants (1.53 million new jobs.) Uniquely, all net new jobs added fall in the non-supervisory/production category -- half a million supervisory jobs were lost. Manufacturing lost -3.28 million jobs (-19.1%) and now provides fewer jobs than in July 1942 -- seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Despite concerns about illegal immigration, since 2001 the labor force has grown more slowly (7.4%) than during any seven-year period since 1955 and participation rate of those in the labor force, those working or looking for work, also fell sharply -- from 67% to 66%. This is the reason that the un-employment rate, now 5.0%, is not much higher.

The average weekly wage for non-supervisory jobs buys 2.0% more now than seven years ago and the average real salary and benefits for all workers is up by 9.0%. These real increases are down from the bubble period of the late 1990s but they are far better than the declines of the previous 20 years. Unfortunately, these recent increases in "average" wages appear to be a product of the latest financial bubbles, the widening use of stock options and very large bonuses in compensation, particularly on Wall Street.

Median real wages have continued to decline, including by -1.4% over the past year. Median household real incomes fell -2.0% from 2000 to 2006 (latest data available) and even the average income fell -0.5% with inequality now the worst on records back to the 1960s. The total current savings of ALL households over the past three years is virtually nothing; by far the worst since the 1933.

The foolishness of powerful, self-interested claims of a "new paradigm" is again exposed. The fantasy is that soaring debt and the loss of production through trade deficits are good things and the lack of current savings irrelevant. As a long forgotten advertisement once proclaimed: "If you don't have yourself an oil well, get one!" We can all live well from royalties and asset appreciation.

Soaring debt and debt schemes did drive up many asset prices, creating a borrowed illusion of general prosperity along with enormous actual wealth and power for a few. But now, unprecedented debt and soaring inventories of unsold homes are driving down the inflated prices for homes and other assets. For at least the next several years, most households will now be forced to cut spending and earn, not borrow, their living standard.

Another short-term debt stimulus may take the edge off the difficult economic conditions of the next few months. But trading away our once unique economic strengths while borrowing against the future has failed. Making even minimum interest payments on these massive, soaring debts will be increasingly difficult as the success of thoughtful industrial and trade policies in China and elsewhere continues.

That tells us where we are right now.

How did we get here, after America had the most powerful and productive economy in the world following WW II? The short answer is “the Cold War.”

We put our investments into military forces and international military expansionism instead of economic growth, mass education and universal health care. While containment of the USSR was worth it, it drained America’s economy as much as it did that of the USSR. America “won” the Cold War by outlasting the Soviet Union in a test of who could waste more money on military spending, something that always detracts from economic growth.

The Reagan Revolution has been a three-decade effort to avoid admitting that what America was doing economically was not working. Fred Kaplan is right to state that conservatism is based on the myth that America gained strength during the Cold War. The truth is the exact opposite. Both the Soviet Union and America squandered their national strength, and America just outlasted the Soviet Union. But the destruction of the American economy lasted throughout the Cold War. The Conservative movement was a panicky set of actions attempted to forestall the clear decline of the American economy. (The invasion of Iraq was a similar conservative panic in which an attack on a small and relatively defenseless Middle Eastern nation was to have been a demonstration of the folly of threatening the American Superpower. The Iraq War and Occupation has been another failed conservative idea.)

The conservative free market policies and the anti-union policies have been designed to compensate for the poor economic performance by substituting the magic of well-finances and highly rewarded entrepreneurs for a lack of economic investment. But intelligent people resort to magical solutions when they cannot see a realistic solution to the problems they face. That this magical solution (“The Invisible Hand”) has not been working has been concealed behind a combination of Federal Reserve manipulation of the monetary economy and interest rates, together with massive international borrowing by the federal government. The borrowing drove America from a creditor nation to a debtor nation during the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War, and sharply accelerated during the Reagan/Bush41 administrations. The government activities have all been ways of papering over the basic economic failure of massive military spending combined with the refusal to invest in workforce education and healthcare.

So now America is facing economic exhaustion. For half a century we have hollowed out our productive economy, shipping it to the rest of the world, and replaced it with a paper-based financial economy that is internationally dependent on the good will of the rest of the world to continue to operate. Yet the 300 million plus American people are still a powerful economic resource, and with investment, the economic infrastructure still exists. The challenges of the increased cost of energy, global warming, and polluted environments will require a great deal of effort to deal with, an effort that paying the massive American military force and for the war of the occupation of Iraq will detract from.

The challenge is facing us, and Rambo is not going to meet that challenge. American workers are. It’s time to put them back to work in real productive jobs. We'll see an indicator that America has turned back in the correct direction when we start graduating more American-born engineers than MBAs and Lawyers. But that will not happen without coordination. Remember - government is not the enemy. The American government is us. Reagan and the conservatives got that wrong, too.

It's time to stop blaming others for the failure to meet the challenges facing us and get down to work to build and fix things instead of bombing every imagined threat.

The last stages of American world dominance have arrived

If you want to understand what has happened to America, go read the short but very interesting article American Parallels. In it Ian Welsh compares the pattern of the decline of American world dominance to the declines of the Empires of Great Britain, Spain, Rome, and Athens. This is where we are:

American world dominance, as with British, was based on a military dominance that came out of economic dominance. From about 1890 on America had the world’s most powerful economy, out producing Britain industrially, and backed moreover by a continental resource base. At the end of world war II the US was producing about half the world’s goods.

Since then there has been a gradual decline, and the rise of larger powers – China and India, whose population are significantly larger than that of the US. As in the decline of Britain, capital is fleeing the old empire, heading for the rising powers.

• As in the decline of Britain, the new powers flout intellectual property laws, refusing to pay rent to the old power.
• As in the 1890’s – the rising power has now, on a pricing parity scale, an economy equal to the old empire.
• As in the case of Britain military overstretch is straining the dominant power.
• Financialization, the curse of late stage empires, has hit the US as it hit Britain, with rent-seeking the predominant method of making money, and actual production of goods ignored. American capital flows to other countries seeking returns, and builds factories there. American ex-pats teach other nations how to compete, even as Scottish engineers did during the decline of the UK. As with Britain, America, breathless with greed, is teaching others how to defeat it.

[Highlighting and bullet points mine - Ed. WTF-o]

If you have read my earlier posts you may notice that I have repeatedly pointed out the futility of trying to use tax cuts to stimulate the American economy. Tax cuts won't work, because the investors will try to seek the highest return, and like the British investing in mines and railways South American and India in the late 19th century, those returns are much more available in the rest of the world. The utter stupidity of a government policy based on a refusal of the government to interfere in - or even plan for - the American economy has made the American decline inevitable.

Mr. Welsh makes a final statement with which I heartily agree:

America will follow its own unique path. All Republics end, and so do all Empires. There is, in human history, a series of cycles of renewal, decay and renewal. Each one ends in a crisis period, and each crisis must be overcome. It is never inevitable that you’ll fail – but it’s never guaranteed you’ll succeed either. It is this generation’s task to renew the tree of liberty and keep the American experiment going – to remain true to the ideals that made America and have driven it since 1776. It is my profoundest wish, as we come up on the New Year and look both back and forward, that you are successful in doing so, and that America once again becomes the beacon of liberty and hope that its founders wanted it to be.

Go read the rest of Ian Welsh' article.

Our task as Americans is clear. We need to renew the ideals from 1776 that have made America great. The most urgent task at the moment is to destroy the power of the conservative movement who have betrayed those ideals.

Happy New Year.

The truth from John Edwards

America's government has failed a great people. We have let wealthy businessmen and greedy church leaders take over our government and work to convince Americans that government it their enemy rather than an expression of American greatness as it has been in the past. Of all the candidates currently running for Presidential nominations, only John Edwards is speaking out about this. Here is an excerpt from his speech:

It's time to tell the truth. And the truth is the system in Washington is corrupt. It is rigged by the powerful special interests to benefit they very few at the expense of the many. And as a result, the American people have lost faith in our broken system in Washington, and believe it no longer works for ordinary Americans. They're right.

As I look across the political landscape of both parties today -- what I see are politicians too afraid to tell the truth -- good people caught in a bad system that overwhelms their good intentions and requires them to chase millions of dollars in campaign contributions in order to perpetuate their careers and continue their climb to higher office.

This presidential campaign is a perfect example of how our politics is awash with money. I have raised more money up to this point than any Democratic candidate raised last time in the presidential campaign -- $30 million. And, I did it without taking a dime from any Washington lobbyist or any special interest PAC.

I saw the chase for campaign money at any cost by the front runner in this race -- and I did not join it -- because the cost to our nation and our children is not worth the hollow victory of any candidate. Being called president while powerful interests really run things is not the same as being free to lead this nation as president of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. If protecting the current established structure in Washington is in your interest, then I am not your candidate. I ran for president four years ago -- yes, in part out of personal ambition -- but also with a deep desire to stand for working people like my father and mother -- who no matter how hard things were for our family, always worked even harder to make things better for us.

But the more Elizabeth and I campaigned this year, the more we talked to the American people, the more we met people just like my father, and hard working people like James Lowe. James is a decent and honest man who had to live for 50 years with no voice in the richest country in the world because he didn't have health care. The more people like him that I met, the more I realized something much bigger was stirring in the American people. And it has stirred in each of us for far too long.

Last month Ken Burns -- who made the great Civil War documentary -- launched his newest epic on World War II on PBS -- and what a story it tells.

At the cost of great suffering, blood and enormous sacrifice, within four years after Pearl Harbor it is incredible what this nation achieved. America built the arsenal of democracy worthy of our great history. We launched the greatest invasion armada in the history of warfare against Hitler's fortress Europe, and, with our allies, we freed a continent of suffering humanity.

At the same time on the other side of the globe we crossed 10,000 miles of ocean and liberated another hemisphere of humanity -- islands and nations freed from the grip of Japanese militarists. While at the same time succeeding in the greatest scientific endeavor ever undertaken -- the Manhattan project -- and topped it off with building the Pentagon, one of the largest buildings in the world in a little over a year.

It is incredible what America has accomplished. Because no matter what extraordinary challenges we have been faced with, we did exactly what America has always done in our history -- we rose to the challenge.

And, now, as I travel across America and listen to people, I hear real concern about what's going on. For the first time in our nation's history, people are worried that we're going to be the first generation of Americans not to pass on a better life to our children.

And it's not the fault of the American people. The American people have not changed. The American people are still the strong, courageous people they have always been. The problem is what our government has become. And, it is up to us to do something about it.

Because Washington may not see it, but we are facing a moral crisis as great as any that has ever challenged us. And, it is this test -- this moral test -- that I have come to understand is at the heart of this campaign.

Just look at what has happened in Iraq. What was the response of the American people to the challenge at hand? Our men and women in uniform have been heroes. They've done everything that's been asked of them and more. But what about our government? Four years after invading Iraq, we cannot even keep the lights on in Baghdad.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the American people were at their best. They donated their time and their money in record numbers. There was an outpouring of support. I took 700 college kids down to help -- young people who gave up their spring break. But what about our government? Three years after hurricane Katrina thousands of our fellow Americans, our brothers and sisters, are still housed in trailers waiting to go home.

There's no better example of the bravery and goodness of the American people than the response to the attacks of 9/11: firefighters and first responders risking and too often giving their lives to save others, charging up the stairs while everyone else was coming down; record bloodbank donations; and the list goes on. But what about our government? Six years after 9/11, at Ground Zero there sits only a black hole that tortures our conscience and scars our hearts.

In every instance we see an American people who are good, decent, compassionate and undeterred. And, American people who are better than the government that is supposed to serve and represent them.

And what has happened to the American "can do" spirit? I will tell you what has happened: all of this is the result of the bitter poisoned fruit of corruption and the bankruptcy of our political leadership.

It is not an accident that the government of the United States cannot function on behalf of its people, because it is no longer our people's government -- and we the people know it.

This corruption did not begin yesterday -- and it did not even begin with George Bush -- it has been building for decades -- until it now threatens literally the life of our democracy.

While the American people personally rose to the occasion with an enormous outpouring of support and donations to both the victims of Katrina and 9/11 -- we all saw our government's neglect. And we saw greed and incompetence at work. Out of more than 700 contracts valued at $500,000 or greater, at least half were given without full competition or, according to news sources, with vague or open ended terms, and many of these contracts went to companies with deep political connections such as a subsidiary of Haliburton, Bechtel Corp., and AshBritt Inc.

And in Iraq -- while our nation's brave sons and daughters put their lives on the line for our country -- we now have mercenaries under their own law while their bosses sit at home raking in millions.

We have squandered millions on building Olympic size swimming pools and buildings that have never been used. We have weapons and ammunition unaccounted for that may now be being used against our own soldiers. We literally have billions wasted or misspent -- while our troops and their families continue to sacrifice. And the politically connected lobby for more. What's their great sacrifice -- higher profits.

It goes on every minute of every day.

Corporate executives at United Airlines and US Airways receive millions in compensation for taking their companies into bankruptcy, while their employees are forced to take cuts in pay.

Companies like Wal-Mart lobby against inspecting containers entering our nation's ports, even though expert after expert agrees that the likeliest way for a dirty bomb to enter the United States is through a container, because they believe their profits are more important than our safety. What has become of America when America's largest company lobbies against protecting America?

Trade deals cost of millions of jobs. What do we get in return? Millions of dangerous Chinese toys in our children's cribs laden with lead. This is the price we are made to pay when trade agreements are decided based on how much they pad the profits for multinational corporations instead of what is best for America's workers or the safety of America's consumers.

We have even gotten to the point where our children's safety is potentially at risk because nearly half of the apple juice consumed by our children comes from apples grown in China. And Americans are kept in the dark because the corporate lobbyists have pushed back country of origin labeling laws again and again.

This is not the America I believe in.

Nor is it the America I believe in. I grew up around WW II veterans and survivors of the Depression. They had seen hard times, and as I was growing up in the fifties, they were seeing good times. They knew that people faced good times and they faced bad time, and when times got bad they didn't didn't hunker down with what they had and ignore people who had it tough. They acted to help, either individually or as groups. And I grew up on the west side of my home town where the more wealthy families were.

Today the conservative mindset has taken over. When people have tough times, its their fault and up to them to dig out of it or die. Helping people in difficulty is welfare and government handouts. Such things are stealing from the rich. The rich should retreat to their gated communities, hire private security to protect the perimeter, ignore government and even refuse to pay taxes to make it go away, and ignore the suffering of others.

This isn't America. This is a bunch of rich people trying to turn their families into aristocrats over a dying society, then blaming the less fortunate for the death of the society.

It is time to stop the destruction of America and its basic ideals. It is time to eliminate the scourge of conservatism and return to the days when Americans looked out for other Americans and used government to protect us all from disease, fire, hurricanes, bandits and terrorists. The big corporations don't want America protected if it costs them anything. They don't want to pay taxes, decent pay rates or for employee health care. Like government, corporations are the servants of the American people, not our masters. They need to be brought to heel.

John Edwards understands this.

Castro Saved Reagan from assassination in 1984

This is an interesting story. MSNBC reports that an essay published Wednesday in the Communist Party newspaper Granma says that the Cuban government gave information to the American FBI that headed off an attempt on President Reagan's life in 1984.

The only source for this information is the Cuban newspaper report, but it states that

Castro said Cuban authorities learned the FBI had arrested several people in North Carolina and he said several days after that Robert C. Muller, the U.S. security chief at the U.N., expressed America’s thanks to the Cuban official over lunch. Castro didn’t identify the Cuban official.

Reagan visited Charlotte on a campaign stop Oct. 8, 1984, accompanied by Sen. Jesse Helms, and he attended a reception for local Republican leaders, according to Reagan’s presidential papers.

So far this is the plot for a thriller, and little more. Current FBI special agents in North Carolina have released no acknowledgement that they are aware of such an event.

It looks to me like there are at least two significant questions about this report beyond just its veracity. The first is, assuming the event occurred, why would the Cubans warn the U.S.? My bet would be fear of being blamed for it. American reaction to the assassination of Reagan could have been as extreme and irrational as the invasion of Iraq following 9/11.

Second, and more interesting, is why put out this information now? My bet here is that they are attempting to improve the public relations between Cuba and the U.S. in anticipation of Castro's death. A worst case scenario for that would be if the Cuban Exiles (who still train in South Florida for an invasion of Cuba) were to attempt to take over the Cuban government when Castro dies, and they are trying to get American public opinion on their side well in advance of such an eventuality.

Just guessing. I have no real information on the background to this report.

A "Democrat" acting bipartisanly is collaborating with American's enemies

We hear a lot of blather from the D.C. pundits that Democrats need to act in a more 'bipartisan' manner. To my real regret, we also hear this from Barack Obama. But the Republican Party is well on its way to destroying the Constitution of America and turning this country into something that Americans cannot recognize as the American Republic. Do David Broder and Barack Obama really expect America-loving Democrats to collaborate with the very people whose goal is to destroy the great idea that has been America? Should Democrats really collaborate with the enemy?

Did the American soldiers and sailors in the Pacific look for ways to collaborate with the Japanese on December 8, 1941? Any who did were traitors to America and should rightly have been lined up against a wall and shot.

The Republican Party, which has failed to prevent 9/11, then attacked a nation that was not involved in 9/11 while refusing to put the needed resources into capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, the party which has created an international gulag with its headquarter in Guantanamo in violation of all laws, which has picked up people it declared enemies and secretly imprisoned them, which has dispensed with habeas corpus (the cornerstone of Anglo Saxon law) and which is now asserting that the President is the source of law rather than Congress - This Republican Party is more of a danger to America than the Japanese Navy was in 1941.

I find no value in collaborating in a 'bipartisan manner' with this dangerous Republican Party. To do so places bipartisanship and collaboration with those out to destroy America above support of the Constitution of America.

I am an American Partisan. I will not collaborate with the enemies of America, and right now the biggest enemy of America is the Republican party.

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Jane Hamsher has a few things to say about being partisan.

Then there is this from Digby.

The biggest cheerleaders for Democratic collaboration include David Broder on the editorial page of the Washington Post. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, has sent this letter to the Washington Post. The anti-Communist right-wing had a description of the supporters of America's enemies. They were 'fellow-travelers.' The Washington Post editorial pages are filled with either Republicans like the Editorial Page Editor Hiatt or fellow travelers like David Broder. They have chosen to go along with America's enemies, which makes them also enemies to our nation.

Only a minority of Americans hold conservative beliefs

The majority of Americans hold progressive views. From "Our future":

This report by the Campaign for America’s Future and Media Matters for America shows that in study after study, solid majorities of Americans take progressive stands on a full spectrum of issues, from bread-and-butter economics to the so-called “values” issues where conservatives claim preeminence.

So go read the report (.pdf)

Jerry Falwell's death

I haven't been sure how to respond to the Reverend Falwell's death. He has been a man who has had a massive impact on public life in America. In my opinion, most of his impact has been negative. But I think it unlikely that I will be called on to give a eulogy at his funeral, so what I think isn't too important. Whatever, here it is anyway. I finally found the words to get close to what I feel.

The Newshour last night had someone who graduated from Falwell's Liberty University and spoke at length about what a truly fine person Rev. Falwell was in person, and how quick he was to offer a hug to so many. OK. I never knew him personally, and I doubt that he would even allow me to walk on the said-to-be-beautiful campus of his Liberty University. I knew (know?) his through his works as reported by the media. Since he made his bones through his Television activities, followed by his establishment and operation of the organization he called the "Moral Majority." (See also Wikipedia on the "Moral Majority.") my reaction to his death is based on those activities.

Rick Perlstein today writes about his public works, and his writing in fact matches my memories quite well. Rick begins with the rather shocking statement "He was, of course, a monster." and then he goes on to present his (strong) evidence for that statement.

As I say, I know Rev. Falwell through his public works and not as a living person. I can accept that in his personal life he was (as attested) a really fine, warm, and loving human being. I offer my sympathies to those close to him for their loss. But I judge his worth only through his most public works. Those are what matter to most of us.

Based on his public works, I am glad he is no longer with us. I certainly don't think he spoke or acted well for organized religion, and his incursion into politics has helped to bring much of the worst side of the American character into a leadership positions in both the Republican Party and in the governmental structures of America.

Perhaps with his demise, the rest of us can begin to recover and look to the better aspects of America.