When Fear Exceeds Our Government’s Capability to Emotionally Deal With It

Posted on October 3, 2008 by RagBlog

U.S. Army North hosted a commanders’ conference and rehearsal of concept (ROC) drill Mar. 18 through Mar. 20, where senior leaders from Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive Consequence Management Response Force (CCMRF) discussed mission requirements and finalized preparations for exercise NLE 2-08. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Joshua R. Ford (released).

Invasion of the Sea-Smurfs
By Amy Goodman / October 1, 2008

A little-noticed story surfaced a couple of weeks ago in the Army Times newspaper about the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team. “Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months,” reported Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro, “the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” Disturbingly, she writes that “they may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control” as well.

The force will be called the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force. Its acronym, CCMRF, is pronounced “sea-smurf.” These “sea-smurfs,” Cavallaro reports, have “spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle,” in a combat zone, and now will spend their 20-month “dwell time”—time troops are required to spend to “reset and regenerate after a deployment”—armed and ready to hit the U.S. streets.

The Army Times piece includes a correction stating that the forces would not use nonlethal weaponry domestically. I called Air Force Lt. Col. Jamie Goodpaster, a public-affairs officer for Northern Command. She told me that the overall mission was humanitarian, to save lives and help communities recover from catastrophic events. Nevertheless, the military forces would have weapons on-site, “containerized,” she said—that is, stored in containers—including both lethal and so-called nonlethal weapons. They would have mostly wheeled vehicles, but would also, she said, have access to tanks. She said that any decision to use weapons would be made at a higher level, perhaps at the secretary-of-defense level.

Talk of trouble on U.S. streets is omnipresent now, with the juxtaposition of Wall Street and Main Street. The financial crisis we face remains obscure to most people; titans of business and government officials assure us that the financial system is “on the brink,” that a massive bailout is necessary, immediately, to prevent a disaster. Conservative and progressive members of Congress, at the insistence of constituents, blocked the initial plan. If the economy does collapse, if people can’t go down to the bank to withdraw their savings, or get cash from an ATM, there may be serious “civil unrest,” and the “sea-smurfs” may be called upon sooner than we imagine to assist with “crowd control.”

The political and financial establishments seem completely galled that people would actually oppose their massive bailout, which rewards financiers for gambling. Normal people worry about paying their bills, buying groceries and gas, and paying rent or a mortgage in increasingly uncertain times. No one ever offers to bail them out. Wall Street’s house of cards has collapsed, and the rich bankers are getting little sympathy from working people.

That’s where the sea-smurfs come in. Officially formed to respond to major disasters, like a nuclear or biological attack, this combat brigade falls under the U.S. Northern Command, a military structure formed on Oct, 1, 2002, to “provide command and control of Department of Defense homeland defense efforts.” Military participation in domestic operations was originally outlawed with the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007, however, included a section that allowed the president to deploy the armed forces to “restore public order” or to suppress “any insurrection.” While a later bill repealed this, President Bush attached a signing statement that he did not feel bound by the repeal.

We are in a time of increasing economic disparity, with the largest gap between rich and poor of any wealthy industrialized country. We are witnessing a crackdown on dissent, most recently with $100 million spent on “security” at the Democratic and Republican national conventions. The massive paramilitary police forces deployed at the RNC in St. Paul, Minn., were complete overkill, discouraging protests and conducting mass arrests (National Guard troops just back from Fallujah were there). The arrest there of almost 50 journalists (myself included) showed a clear escalation in attempting to control the message (akin to the ban on photos of flag-draped coffins of soldiers). There are two ongoing, unpopular wars that are costing lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Nobel-winning economist Joe Stiglitz estimates that Iraq alone will cost more than $3 trillion.

In December 2001, in the midst of restricted access to bank accounts due to a financial crisis, respectable, middle-class Argentines rose up, took to the streets, smashed bank windows and ultimately forced the government out of power, despite a massive police crackdown and a failed attempt to control the media. Here in the U.S., with the prospect of a complete failure of our financial system, the people have spoken and do not want an unprecedented act of corporate welfare. We don’t know how close the system is to collapse, nor do we know how close the people are to taking to the streets. The creation of an active-duty military force, the sea-smurfs, that could be used to suppress public protest here at home is a very bad sign.

Denis Moynihan contributed to this column. Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America.

© 2008 Amy Goodman

Source / TruthDig

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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Tom the Dancing Bug : The Maverick

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Maverick McCain vs. the collapsing economy.

Click on image to enlarge.

Ruben Bolling / Salon.com

Thanks to David McQueen / The Rag Blog

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Roger Baker : Industrial Collapse? Bring it On!

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Collapse the Light into Earth by ~EvidencE~

‘The best outcome is probably for humans to hit the wall soon and hard.’
By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / October 2, 2008

Is industrial collapse the BEST way out of our current economic mess?

Arguably yes and here is why. But does it even matter? Perhaps not. Capitalism, in its global form and as we now know it, is likely finished in any case, so the choice is likely to be an illusion. But the best outcome is probably for humans to hit the wall soon and hard.

The Economic Context

Capitalism as an economic system depends on an endless expansion of material goods production at a rate that allows lenders to earn interest on money saved and invested. The only way to get potential lenders to lend rather than spending their money immediately is to reward them with a real rate of return on their savings. This is done by promising lenders that they will be rewarded with the ability to buy more material goods in the future. A reward must be offered to lenders for not buying and stockpiling bars of gold, barrels of oil, or any other desirable goods or services now as opposed to putting their money in banks or investing it in stocks or bonds or whatever else can earn them a real rate of interest as a reward for offering their savings up for investment by others.

Keynesian economics tries to maintain a mild inflation rate of a percent or two in order to encourage people to save their money in banks and other alternatives that offer a return above the rate of inflation. This is necessary to keep people from simply putting their money under a mattress. If the rate of inflation is one percent and they can earn three percent in a bank, they will bank their spare funds and will, in theory, be able to come out ahead and buy two percent more in the amount of physical goods or services than they had originally put in.

That is how those managing the economic system (like the Federal Reserve representing the banks) try to set things up. It is meant to encourage people to behave predictably and to keep them saving and investing. Under conditions in which in which it is possible to keep the material world always expanding and yielding a production of desirable goods at or above the rate of interest on money saved, this system remains viable and stable. This assumes that the financial system has been well-managed, and that there are no external limiting factors.

Enter Peak Oil

We now live in a world economy that is rapidly approaching the limiting factor of fossil fuel energy sources. The specific limiting factor that is most relevant is a looming shortage of liquid fuel based on petroleum as the total world oil production peaks and declines.

The peaking of world oil production strongly affects the investment equation that underlies the global capitalist economy and rewards investments and savings. The global economy is based on a cheap-oil-related infrastructure for its expansion of the production of real goods. Capitalism requires cheap energy to deliver the exponential expansion of material goods through investments that can pay real interest rates on loans. But this expectation is probably more than the expansion an oil-addicted global production system can really deliver. It changes the system’s economic potential by making it impossible to earn a real rate of return on the money saved by lenders, who in the case of the United States have increasingly been foreign lenders.

The underlying problem is that nobody can think of a way to keep expanding the material production of a global economy that is experiencing a shrinking supply of liquid fuels. These oil-based fuels move almost all goods in our global economy. This economy is based everywhere on the cheap transport of people, goods, and the capital goods needed to expand global production, whether it be by ship, by rail, by road, or by air. When the ability to move almost all goods declines, the expansion of the ability of capitalist investments to exploit nature for human uses must also decline.

Economic Response to an Oil Shock

The global and also the US economy may be roughly divided into two sectors: necessary spending versus spending that is unnecessary or can be postponed. The necessary spending sector corresponds to spending on vital goods such as food, shelter, the fuel needed to heat or cool a home, and the fuel needed to commute to work. Spending of this kind in the United States cannot be reduced very much or very fast without a long and painful restructuring of the economy to reduce suburban sprawl trends, etc.

If such necessary expenditures rise in cost, spending will be transferred to this sector at the expense of the second sector. We may term the latter the discretionary spending sector. This is a sector of the economy devoted to jewelry, fancy cars, iPods, trips to the movies, vacations, eating out, etc. But it must also include voluntary savings, which are vital for the functioning and expansion of global capitalism.

The discretionary spending sector is a big enough part of the total US and global economy that there are job losses and severe disruptions throughout the total economy if the discretionary spending sector contracts. If foreigners will not lend money and if US consumers are also strapped for cash, then the whole system is soon in trouble.

If there is only enough oil to keep the vital spending sector of the economy functioning, even as it gradually and painfully tries to adjust itself, then no possible kind of economic manipulation, whether by the federal reserve or the US treasury or even the most creative economist can prevent an even steeper contraction of the discretionary spending sector as consumer spending shifts over to the vital spending sector. If we are ever to shift to wind and solar energy, this implies that somebody has money enough left over after paying for food and gasoline and house payments to lend to the companies that expand their output of wind turbines and solar panels.

Thus oil production, whether it is stagnating on a level production plateau or actually contracting as population increases, forces a deep restructuring of the global economy. This raises prices in the vital goods sector and forces a restructuring of the vital spending sector of the economy, which is now additionally called upon to feed those thrown out of work by a contraction throughout the discretionary spending sector. This is basically why we are now in a state of slow economic collapse. Those parts of the economy that cannot be restructured to accommodate permanently higher food and fuel prices must shrink. The discretionary sector of the economy shrinks in terms of total spending (although not necessarily in all cases) as the vital necessity sector restructures itself to require less fossil fuel energy input. In doing so it often has to become more labor intensive.

Further Implications

The foregoing is a description of the general trends forced on the global economy by the end of cheap oil, but it still ignores important details in how US and global capitalism, increasingly organized as a global corporate empire, is likely to respond.

Global oil supply and demand are both relatively inflexible. That means that when oil demand rises faster than its world supply (there is essentially one world oil market with all humans bidding for a shrinking supply of what is left), even a slight imbalance tends to cause a sharp price rise. If oil demand falls, then oil price will fall rapidly too.

In much the same way, if a ship in the ocean runs short of potable water available for sale to the passengers, they are likely to try to bid a very high price for whatever water remains. A graph of the water consumed by the ship’s passengers may reflect a slow decline in water consumption as some passengers die of thirst. But this graph of water consumption would not reveal a sharp increase in the water price as the remaining passengers attempt to buy whatever water remains for sale. If they run short of money, then the price will fall even as they remain thirsty.

The same economic dynamic applies to worldwide bidding for what remains of the global oil supply and explains why the price has fallen modestly due to conservation and demand destruction even as production remains flat. As the dollar is devalued further, people will bid up the price of fuel, and food made from fuel, as much as they are able at the expense of savings and discretionary spending.

The Credit Crisis

The current US economic crisis, sometimes termed a credit meltdown, is actually due to a combination of several factors. First banking deregulation has led to the extreme over-leveraging of debt and credit, based on the Greenspan bubble expectation that the economy can and will continue to grow “normally” (that is exponentially) forever into the future. Billions have been lent to expand the production of Chinese toys and Christmas ornaments and similar discretionary sector goods. These debts, and indeed the smooth functioning of the entire global economy, have been insured by the massive issuing of derivatives such as credit default swaps (default insurance), paper created by the investment banks and AIG on a scale in which their total dollar value dwarfs the annual global economy.

The credit market and the highly profitable derivative market were allowed to expand, primarily after the deregulation of investment banks by Phil Gramm under President Bill Clinton. This paper was issued to the degree that seemed prudent by those who stood greatly to benefit by an enormous expansion, including not only the investment banks, but also their clients, the hedge funds.

It was imagined until about a year ago, that if the US or global economy ever threatened to contract, that a Wall Street or global bank run could be calmed by stimulating the global and national lenders with temporary injections of liquidity, through government lending and bailouts, and in accord with the principles of traditional Keynesian economic theory. Whereas total US bank reserves now equal only about three percent of what has been lent, and whereas the usual guidelines are to keep about eight per cent in reserve to calm the markets it was imagined that the Federal Reserve could come to the rescue and calm investors until the crisis subsides. Failing such assistance, the US and probably the entire global lending system is now grotesquely over-leveraged and subject to collapse as investors seek to withdraw their loaned funds on a large scale.

Reaching for the Right Levers

For the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, the crisis continues.

Without the broad bailout plan they invented and lobbied hard for, the two agencies are once again forced to careen from one desperate path to another, and to dig deep into their toolkits to rescue the global financial system. Even before the House stunned the world on Monday by rejecting the Bush administration’s bailout bill, the Fed was already resorting to the oldest action in its book: printing money.

With money markets around the world seizing in fear, the Fed on Monday announced that it would provide an extra $150 billion through an emergency lending program for banks, and an additional $330 billion through so-called swap lines with foreign central banks to help money markets from Europe to Asia.

It was an extraordinary display of financial power, and it reflected acute new anxiety at the Fed and central banks around the world that the crisis of confidence in American financial markets had metastasized to money markets everywhere…

Reaching for the Right Levers in an Anxious Situation by Edmund L. Andrews and Mark Landler / New York Times / September 29, 2008.

The People vs. the Banksters

The financial system is blowing up. Don’t listen to the experts; just look at the numbers. Last week, according to Reuters, “U.S. banks borrowed a record amount from the Federal Reserve nearly $188 billion a day on average, showing the central bank went to extremes to keep the banking system afloat amid the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.” The Fed opened the various “auction facilities” to create the appearance that insolvent banks were thriving businesses, but they are not. They’re dead; their liabilities exceed their assets. Now the Fed is desperate because the hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in the banks vaults have bankrupted the entire system and the Fed’s balance sheet is ballooning by the day. The market for MBS will not bounce back in the foreseeable future and the banks are unable to roll-over their short term debt.

…If there’s going to be a bailout, let’s get it right. Paulson’s $700 billion bill does nothing to fix the deep structural problems in the financial markets; it merely pushes the day of reckoning a little further into the future while shifting the burden of payment for toxic assets onto the taxpayer.

The People vs. the Banksters by Mike Whitney / counterpunch / September 27, 2008.

Inflationary consequences

…Now that the market is finally adjusting the price bubble downward and a lot of firms that were incredibly profitable on the way up are falling like leaves in autumn in a bear market. The Fed is merely trying to inject money to keep the prices not supported by fundamentals from falling. It is a prescription for hyperinflation. The only way to keep price of worthless assets high is to lower the value of money. And that appears to be the Fed’s unspoken strategy…

Inflation is effectively a hidden form of governmental taxation that substitutes for the more honest approach of openly raising taxes. A global or national bank run can be calmed by, in effect, printing money to fill the liquidity gap. This is the gap between the material reward promised on money deposited, which the investment system has promised as a reward for saving, versus what the system can actually deliver to lenders in terms of real goods that can be purchased with the money withdrawn. Over the short run, printing bailout money charged to taxpayers can bridge the gap between the liquidity problems and appear to make them seem to go away.

Thus the Federal Reserve is injecting large amounts of bailout money into the economy in order to stop a widening global bank run and financial panic. But this added money will soon diffuse throughout the general economy and start bidding for real commodities. That means inflation as the bailout money starts chasing vital necessity goods tied to oil and energy, or other commodities, or the traditional physical means of preserving wealth, gold.

The reaction by the Federal Reserve has been more or less predictable, traditional, and automatic. If a credit crisis threatens a bank run, the solution is for the US government to print up enough money to make the immediate crisis go away long enough so that the economic downturn ends, the system can recover, and business confidence restored. This is a stopgap measure, much like stalling creditors while looking for a job. It has tended to work in the past, keeping the high tech and housing bubbles expanding during the last decade. But there is only so long that the US economic bubble can be kept expanding by lowering interest rates or using bank bailouts.

During normal times, it tends to work, and the government can make up its own rules to keep things expanding. To use an analogy, not only is it harder to keep a party going past a certain point no matter how much free liquor is on hand, but the situation is made more complicated by the fact that the liquor supply is running short. The attempt to stimulate the system and keep the investment bubble expanding will not work under conditions in which the real economy can never recover because the material world on which it is based can no longer expand and recover over time because a contraction of its economic base is dictated of declining oil-based fuel production.

Stagflation

In the real world this combination of a credit crisis and peak oil strongly implies stagflation; the serious stagflation we saw in the 1970’s during our first big energy crisis was not a random event due merely to bad luck. Stagflation is characterized by a simultaneous economic contraction in the discretionary spending sector of the economy, along with cost-push inflation caused by competitive bidding for a limited supply of goods in the vital necessity sector of the economy. During a time of stagflation, people transfer spending in favor of bare necessities like housing, food, and the fuel needed for vital transportation. The only good news is that base housing prices are falling, but this comes only after many people have been locked into ballooning housing loans. Something has got to give in terms of consumer spending, and the main option is to sharply reduce spending in the discretionary sector of the economy.

No amount of additional money printed by the government can successfully stimulate a renewed expansion of the discretionary sector of the economy if the added money is mostly used to bid for a limited supply of fuel, and food costs heavily based on fuel. The current economic crisis will unfold as some inflationary variety of economic collapse shaped by political reality. The rate of decline and the severity of such an oil-price triggered crisis is made more abrupt and severe than the gradual decline in oil production itself by its interaction with the credit crisis.

The end result, no matter how the details play out, will be predictably contrary to the continued expansion of the capitalist economic system. The end result is unavoidable but will have a strong tendency toward inflation or hyperinflation in the stages that precede the final economic collapse, in accord with the historical experience elsewhere.

Infinite expansion in a finite world

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” — Kenneth Boulding, economist.

The situation we face now, on a global scale, is the predictable economic consequence of a deeply dysfunctional economic organization; a system predicated on infinite exponential expansion, struggling to pay the compound interest rates expected by those who have lent their savings to a global capitalist economy:

The global economy is deeply structured in such a way as to be resistant to abrupt change by its national political institutions. The economy and the Wall Street financial institutions are likewise structured in such a way as to always guarantee a real return on long term investments. Something has got to give; a deep and universal economic shock is necessary to reflect the required change on the required time scale. This means the end of exponential economic growth for a long time, assuming the capitalist economic system can ever recover in anything like its current form. Human survival probably now implies reverting to the simpler ways of the past.

If the ultimate limit to continuing economic growth were not liquid fossil fuel, it would be potable water, or arable land, or global warming, or pandemics or some combination of such limiting factors. Given the current world population of six billion people, the current level of human technology, and the powerful ability of that technology to disrupt nature, important limiting factors would soon be reached in any case.

The necessary result must involve a deep restructuring of the entire global economy to reflect the new material reality of declining world energy production. And it must somehow reduce human population growth and reduce the current human population bubble and its unsustainability.

Why should such a painful outcome be encouraged as soon as possible? Few humans can or will change their behavior in response to intellectual arguments or warnings or predictions until they are forced to do so by external factors. If the current reality seems to succeed for those who benefit most, even though they may live in luxury within gated communities, it is human nature for them to attempt to resist change and to try to assure that things continue along the same path as long as possible. But now the global economy system is obliged to change, and to accommodate the new material reality of much reduced energy availability. The faster the accommodation to the limits of nature the better, or else the end result will undoubtedly be worse for humans everywhere.

Faster restructuring now, though it amounts to an industrial collapse, means that we will hit the wall of material reality dictated by the limits of the natural world soon and hard. To hit the wall now, however painful, is preferable to hitting it later, with an increased risk of war and famine if the crisis could somehow be postponed. We probably have little choice in any case.

The Rag Blog

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Groups Protest Honor for Anti-Gay Crusader James Dobson

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

James Dobson leads flock in prayer during an anti-gay “Battle for Marriage” rally.

Uproar over plans to induct evangelist Dobson into broadcast hall of fame.
By Michelle Garcia / October 2, 2008

Four organizations are demanding that the Museum of Broadcast Communications retract its decision to induct Focus on the Family founder James Dobson into its hall of fame.

The groups are urging supporters to contact the Chicago-based museum to share their disapproval, and to participate in a protest against the induction.

Truth Wins Out, the Gay Liberation Network, Equality Illinois, and Soulforce issued a letter to museum organizers asking to leave Dobson out of the annual ceremony.

“It is simply unconscionable that the museum is giving its imprimatur to a demagogue who has profited from divisive and discriminatory rhetoric. If the museum wants to regain its respect and credibility, it will choose to dump Dobson,” Truth Wins Out executive director Wayne Besen said in a statement.

Aside from establishing Focus on the Family, Dobson’s work also includes founding Love Won Out, a prominent organization that claims to cure gays and lesbians of their homosexuality. At least seven scientists and psychologists have accused him of cherry-picking research results to back his teachings, according to the statement.

Dobson established Focus on the Family in the 1970s and launched a radio show after a television appearance in 1978. The internationally syndicated show has been on the radio ever since, airing on 4,000 stations around the world.

Should the museum choose to go ahead with Dobson’s induction, the ceremony will take place November 8 at the Renaissance Chicago Hotel.

Source / Advocate.com

Thanks to Allen Young / The Rag Blog

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Ron Ridenour: Sounds of Venezuela, Part III

Posted on October 2, 2008 by RagBlog

Caracas: Cachapa de jojoto con queso de mano. Photo credit: Xosé Castro.

Click here to view the entire series.

Sounds of Venezuela
Part III: Friendly Internal Critique
By Ron Ridenour / The Rag Blog / October 2, 2008

At the beginning of Hunger Street is a cachapa stand where I often breakfasted on corn pancakes. Margarita, the pancake maker, dresses her diminutive body in colorful clothing. She paints eyelashes and her high cheek-bones in the same color as her garb. Her smooth olive-skin face glistens. Her man and another de-husk the corn and scrape off the kernels. She grinds them in a small electric machine and then scoops up the grainy mass in her delicate, strong hands. Unlike tortilla makers, she pats the mass into a thick cake before frying on hot butter.

Palate and stomach satisfied with just one cachapa, I walked two blocks to the Cilento buildings where the Office of the Budget is located. I informed a secretary that the mayor had suggested I could come by to acquire a copy of the public document. Despite its public nature, she had to ask her boss who was not in. He told her over the phone that I had to go to the Office of the Municipality Council. On the bus, I listened to sing-song pleas for alms until stepping off in front of the government offices, an old colonial Spanish yellow building. Scores of people, many youths, walked about the spacious indoors or sat at desks wearing red or blue t-shirts with slogans for the Bolivarian Revolution. In one such office is one of the three existing copies of the budget, but before I could see it the municipal president had to approve and he was not in. I went to the public library.

“The mayor has not sent us one. We have never had a copy of the budget,” the head librarian told me. I looked up on the Internet but the municipality had no homepage. It took three days to catch up with the municipal secretary. He said my request was unusual and not easy to comply with given that there were so few copies. They couldn’t let theirs out of the office and it was not physically possible to copy several hundred pages. But I did glance through the tome. A secretary would copy the 20-page “general considerations” when she could buy ink for the printing machine. It took a week to get this summary. I have to conclude that, in fact, the public had no real access to their budget.

I could make out from the summary that the amount of funds transferred to “decentralized entities”—grass roots decision-making processes, in principal—was 17.6 million BF or 26.2%. Although not the 32% Rosa had told me, it was still impressive that ordinary people could decide the fate of over a quarter of the budget. Most of the budget not related to staff salaries was allocated in three areas: social development—where most funding had been decentralized—infrastructure and human resources. I needed to see the Municipal Controller for a more thorough understanding.

The controller is Argentina-born Guillermo Forti. In mid-1970s, the four young Forti brothers were on their way with their radical activist mother to the airport, hoping to fly to Venezuela where they would reunite with their father in exile, when forces of the military dictatorship arrested them. After some harrowing days, they let the brothers leave prison and Argentina but they kept their mother, whom they “disappeared”.

Guillermo graduated from law school in Venezuela and was elected to this important oversight position in Municipal Ribas. His brother, Mario, a studious Marxist-Christian-Astrologer was Rosa’s political advisor. Guillermo seemed to be an authentic overseer of funds, who had had run-ins with the mayor’s office for insisting that funds miss-allocated by some greedy members of a few community councils be returned. On the three occasions we met, he presented an overall view of the budget, which he concluded was generally well proportioned and utilized.

“These community councils are better than many in the country. A good example is that in some communities they used less funds than allocated to build water pumps, and the extra money went to other projects,” he told me.

“One of the chronic problems all Chavez municipal and state office backers have to contend with is the entrenched bureaucracies and officials and civil servants who skim what they can. Too many directors come from technical university backgrounds and there are too few with roots in the communities.”

I was amazed to hear politicians and civil servants speak openly of errors being made by the Chavez government and local supporters during my search to discover how well local government functioned and how well the infrastructure and social projects were advancing. This shows a healthy attitude towards leadership and building a better democracy. I heard many supporters of Chavez and Rosa voice critiques of their leaders in all government levels. Chavez was surrounded by too many people removed from the base and was pressured to moderate his drive toward socialism. The most common criticism of Rosa’s management centered on her naiveté, too much confidence in the good will of her people, failure to conduct management with a hard hand, too many advisors too removed from the grass roots, and employees more interested in acquiring expensive cars than in struggling for equality and progress for all.

Even top police officials wish Rosa were a tougher manager. Terry Rojas, chief of crime detective investigators (CICPC) for a five-municipality area including Ribas, told me frankly that Rosa was too kind toward those in her employ. “She needs an effective team, one that completes steps initiated.”

Chief Rojas produced figures indicating how common murder and vehicle robbery are. But he was optimistic that better coordination between Ribas municipal police and the investigative detective branch—something Rose had worked for—was improving recuperation of vehicles and detention of thieves. Eighty percent of stolen vehicles were recovered in 2007 compared with 60% in 2006. That year there were 94 homicides in Ribas; 79 accused murderers were arrested. In 2007, homicides were slightly down to 87.

If these figures represent reality, they defy what everyone told me: most criminals do not get caught or do not get imprisoned.

Crime and traffic accidents are major issues locally and nationally; people feel insecure.

“There are far too many accidents and deaths due to poorly maintained roads, reckless driving, and insufficient traffic police,” Rojas said. He also confirmed what I heard on the streets: many cops take bribes instead of issuing tickets, and many also participate in robberies or take payoffs from criminals.

“There is only one prosecutor for this five-municipal area so our investigation and judicial process is all too slow,” he lamented.

The new Chavez government liberalized the legal code (COOP), in 1999, granting greater juridical rights to arrestees. Detainees must appear before a judge within 48 hours of arrest. Those not apprehended at the scene of the crime are to be released—there is no bail system—during the criminal investigation, unless the judge can determine that there is a great risk of flight. Their cases can take years to adjudicate and they are free to commit more crime, say police.

The radical mayor of Caracas, Freddy Bernal, told the media, “In each important crime committed there is a metropolitan policeman involved.” “There are officers who rent their arms to criminals”. (Quinto Día, January 25).

Because of the difficulty in convicting criminals some police also commit extrajudicial killings, reported at from 100 to 300 annually in this decade. Few cases get prosecuted as there is no system of independent investigation of police abuse.

In March, Chavez announced a “National Police System Plan”. For the first time in history police were to be unified. There was top-level resistance to this since most police units adhere directly under governors, who have traditionally appointed police chiefs. Political considerations often take precedence over combating crime and rooting out corruption. The hope was that police unity would increase arrests and criminal prosecution, and improve vigilance over police behavior. Murder is the key issue for most.

On the national level, Interpol shows 10,000 annual murders (2006), which equates to 33 per 100,000 population, one of the world’s top ten homicide rates. Colombia’s 32,000 non-war related murders is a rate of 70 per 100,000. Right-wing mercenaries commit several thousands murders against prostitutes and homosexuals, part of their ideological “social cleansing” politics. Para-militarists also cross the border into Venezuela to sell drugs and guns at low prices to youth gangs, part of their ideological battle to destabilize the progressive government. They also serve rich landowners and cattlemen by murdering poor peasants and unionists in the border area. National figures show 200 such murders in recent times.

Ribas municipal police chief, Alberto Navas, told me, “This is a very violent area, mainly so because it is close to the capital and a transitional stop for people from the most backward areas of the country. With the new prosperity for many, those with nothing flee these areas in search of jobs and better living conditions in the cities. If they don’t find this, many live from crime. Some parts of Caracas are the poorest areas and have the greatest amount of crime. Most murders are of young gang members. Our hands are often tied because witnesses fear coming forth, and modern laws and judges render too lenient sentences.”

Another reason for high crime rates among youths is the lack of recreation facilities and entertainment. There are not even movie houses in the whole of Ribas. Before Rosa’s time as mayor there were three but they closed down for lack of profits. Many say Rosa should allocate funds to rectify this problem. Rosa has increased police pay but it is still not a well paid job and one with risks of physical violence.

On a parting note on this grime theme, I cite a June 23, 2008 Reuters story:
“Venezuela’s youth orchestras and choirs have helped [300,000] children resist thug life…and now wealthy countries are lining up to emulate the system.”

Part of the government’s efforts to combat barrio gangs from trafficking in drugs, from committing thievery and murders is to get them interested in classical music. There are now 200 such orchestras. As part of the $35 million project, each player gets a free instrument. Governments in Scotland, Britain, and Los Angeles are copying the idea. Venezuela is using the program in its crowded and violent prisons as well. Trombones confront pistols in this peaceful revolution, peaceful, at least, from the government’s side.

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Noam Chomsky on Latin American and Caribbean Unity

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Photo by Alizar Raldes / AFP / Getty Images.

‘The initiatives taken in Venezuela have had a significant impact throughout the subcontinent, what has now come to be called “the pink tide.”‘
By Noam Chomsky / September 30, 2008

CARACAS — During the past decade, Latin America has become the most exciting region of the world. The dynamic has very largely flowed from right where you are meeting, in Caracas, with the election of a leftist president dedicated to using Venezuela’s rich resources for the benefit of the population rather than for wealth and privilege at home and abroad, and to promote the regional integration that is so desperately needed as a prerequisite for independence, for democracy, and for meaningful development. The initiatives taken in Venezuela have had a significant impact throughout the subcontinent, what has now come to be called “the pink tide.” The impact is revealed within the individual countries, most recently Paraguay, and in the regional institutions that are in the process of formation. Among these are the Banco del Sur, an initiative that was endorsed here in Caracas a year ago by Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz; and the ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean, which might prove to be a true dawn if its initial promise can be realized.

The ALBA is often described as an alternative to the US-sponsored “Free Trade Area of the Americas,” though the terms are misleading. It should be understood to be an independent development, not an alternative. And, furthermore, the so-called “free trade agreements” have only a limited relation to free trade, or even to trade in any serious sense of that term; and they are certainly not agreements, at least if people are part of their countries. A more accurate term would be “investor-rights arrangements,” designed by multinational corporations and banks and the powerful states that cater to their interests, established mostly in secret, without public participation or awareness. That is why the US executive regularly calls for “fast-track authority” for these agreements – essentially, Kremlin-style authority.

Another regional organization that is beginning to take shape is UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations. This continental bloc, modeled on the European Union, aims to establish a South American parliament in Cochabamba, a fitting site for the UNASUR parliament. Cochabamba was not well known internationally before the water wars of 2000. But in that year events in Cochabamba became an inspiration for people throughout the world who are concerned with freedom and justice, as a result of the courageous and successful struggle against privatization of water, which awakened international solidarity and was a fine and encouraging demonstration of what can be achieved by committed activism.

The aftermath has been even more remarkable. Inspired in part by developments in Venezuela, Bolivia has forged an impressive path to true democratization in the hemisphere, with large-scale popular initiatives and meaningful participation of the organized majority of the population in establishing a government and shaping its programs on issues of great importance and popular concern, an ideal that is rarely approached elsewhere, surely not in the Colossus of the North, despite much inflated rhetoric by doctrinal managers.

Much the same had been true 15 years earlier in Haiti, the only country in the hemisphere that surpasses Bolivia in poverty – and like Bolivia, was the source of much of the wealth of Europe, later the United States. In 1990, Haiti’s first free election took place. It was taken for granted in the West that the US candidate, a former World Bank official who monopolized resources, would easily win. No one was paying attention to the extensive grass-roots organizing in the slums and hills, which swept into power the populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Washington turned at once to undermining the feared and hated democratic government. It took only a few months for a US-backed military coup to reverse this stunning victory for democracy, and to place in power a regime that terrorized the population with the direct support of the US government, first under president Bush I, then Clinton. Washington finally permitted the elected president to return, but only on the condition that he adhere to harsh neoliberal rules that were guaranteed to crush what remained of the economy, as they did. And in 2004, the traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the US, joined to remove the elected president from office once again, launching a new regime of terror, though the people remain unvanquished, and the popular struggle continues despite extreme adversity.

All of this is familiar in Latin America, not least in Bolivia, the scene of today’s most intense and dangerous confrontation between popular democracy and traditional US-backed elites. Archaeologists are now discovering that before the European conquest, Bolivia had a wealthy, sophisticated and complex society – to quote their words, “one of the largest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the face of the planet, with causeways and canals, spacious and formal towns and considerable wealth,” creating a landscape that was “one of humankind’s greatest works of art, a masterpiece.” And of course Bolivia’s vast mineral wealth enriched Spain and indirectly northern Europe, contributing massively to its economic and cultural development, including the industrial and scientific revolutions. Then followed a bitter history of imperial savagery with the crucial connivance of rapacious domestic elites, factors that are very much alive today.

Sixty years ago, US planners regarded Bolivia and Guatemala as the greatest threats to its domination of the hemisphere. In both cases, Washington succeeded in overthrowing the popular governments, but in different ways. In Guatemala, Washington resorted to the standard technique of violence, installing one of the world’s most brutal and vicious regimes, which extended its criminality to virtual genocide in the highlands during Reagan’s murderous terrorist wars of the 1980s – and we might bear in mind that these horrendous atrocities were carried out under the guise of a “war on terror,” a war that was re-declared by George Bush in September 2001, not declared, a revealing distinction when we recall the implementation of Reagan’s “war on terror” and its grim human consequences.

In Guatemala, the Eisenhower administration overcame the threat of democracy and independent development by violence. In Bolivia, it achieved much the same results by exploiting Bolivia’s economic dependence on the US, particularly for processing Bolivia’s tin exports. Latin America scholar Stephen Zunes points out that “At a critical point in the nation’s effort to become more self-sufficient [in the early 1950s], the U.S. government forced Bolivia to use its scarce capital not for its own development, but to compensate the former mine owners and repay its foreign debts.”

The economic policies forced on Bolivia in those years were a precursor of the structural adjustment programs imposed on the continent thirty years later, under the terms of the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” which has generally had disastrous effects wherever its strictures have been observed. By now, the victims of neoliberal market fundamentalism are coming to include the rich countries, where the curse of financial liberalization is bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and leading to massive state intervention in a desperate effort to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

We should note that this is a regular feature of contemporary state capitalism, though the scale today is unprecedented. A study by two well-known international economists 15 years ago found that at least twenty companies in the top Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments “socialise their losses.” Such government intervention “has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries,” they conclude from a detailed analysis. [Ruigrok and von Tulder]

We might also take note of the striking similarity between the structural adjustment programs imposed on the weak by the International Monetary Fund, and the huge financial bailout that is on the front pages today in the North. The US executive-director of the IMF, adopt ing an image from the Mafia, described the institution as “the credit community’s enforcer.” Under the rules of the Western-run international economy, investors make loans to third world tyrannies, and since the loans carry considerable risk, make enormous profits. Suppose the borrower defaults. In a capitalist economy, the lenders would incur the loss. But really existing capitalism functions quite differently. If the borrowers cannot pay the debts, then the IMF steps in to guarantee that lenders and investors are protected. The debt is transferred to the poor population of the debtor country, who never borrowed the money in the first place and gained little if anything from it. That is called “structural adjustment.” And taxpayers in the rich country, who also gained nothing from the loans, sustain the IMF through their taxes. These doctrines do not derive from economic theory; they merely reflect the distribution of decision-making power.

The designers of the international economy sternly demand that the poor accept market discipline, but they ensure that they themselves are protected from its ravages, a useful arrangement that goes back to the origins of modern industrial capitalism, and played a large role in dividing the world into rich and poor societies, the first and third worlds.

This wonderful anti-market system designed by self-proclaimed market enthusiasts is now being implemented in the United States, to deal with the very ominous crisis of financial markets. In general, markets have well-known inefficiencies. One is that transactions do not take into account the effect on others who are not party to the transaction. These so-called “externalities” can be huge. That is particularly so in the case of financial institutions. Their task is to take risks, and if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. To themselves. Under capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do. In economists’ terms, risk is underpriced, because systemic risk is not priced into decisions. That leads to repeated crisis, naturally. At that point, we turn to the IMF solution. The costs are transferred to the public, which had nothing to do with the risky choices but is now compelled to pay the costs – in the US, perhaps mounting to about $1 trillion right now. And of course the public has no voice in determining these outcomes, any more than poor peasants have a voice in being subjected to cruel structural adjustment programs.

Read all of this article here. / ZNet

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BANNED BOOKS : ‘Grapes Of Wrath’ And The Politics of Book Burning

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Clell Pruett burns a copy of The Grapes Of Wrath as Bill Camp and another leader of the Associated Farmers stand by. At the time this photograph was taken, Pruett had not read the novel. Years later, after he read the book at the behest of Rick Wartzman, Pruett declared that he had no regrets about burning it. Image from Kern County Museum.

Judith Krug: ‘They’re not afraid of the book; they’re afraid of the ideas’
by Lynn Neary / September 30, 2008

Read an excerpt from Obscene in The Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” Below

Sept. 29 marked the beginning of the American Library Association’s annual “Banned Books Week,” a commemoration of all the books that have ever been removed from library shelves and classrooms. Politics, religion, sex, witchcraft — people give a lot of reasons for wanting to ban books, says Judith Krug of the ALA, but most often the bannings are about fear.

“They’re not afraid of the book; they’re afraid of the ideas,” says Krug. “The materials that are challenged and banned say something about the human condition.”

John Steinbeck’s 1939 classic, The Grapes Of Wrath, which chronicles an Oklahoma family’s hapless migration westward, is a perfect example. The book was an immediate best-seller around the country, but it was also banned and burned in a number of places, including Kern County, Calif. — the endpoint of the Joad family’s migration.

Though fictional, Steinbeck’s novel was firmly rooted in real events: Three years before the book was published a drought in the Dust Bowl states forced hundreds of thousands of migrants to California. Penniless and homeless, many landed in Kern County.

When the book came out, some of the powers that be in the county thought that they had been portrayed unfairly; they felt that Steinbeck hadn’t given them credit for the effort they were making to help the migrants. One member of the county board of supervisors denounced the book as a “libel and lie.” In August 1939, by a vote of 4 to 1, the board approved a resolution banning The Grapes Of Wrath from county libraries and schools.

Rick Wartzman, author of the new book Obscene In The Extreme, says what happened in Kern County illustrates the deep divide between left and right in California in the 1930s.

One powerful local player who pushed for the ban was Bill Camp, head of the local Associated Farmers, a group of big landowners who were avid opponents of organized labor. Camp and his colleagues knew how to get a bill passed in the state Legislature — and they also knew how to be physical.

“They knew how to work with tire irons, pick handles and bricks,” says Wartzman. “Things could get really ugly and violent.”

Camp wanted to publicize the county’s opposition to The Grapes Of Wrath. Convinced that many migrants were also offended by their depiction in the novel, he recruited one of his workers, Clell Pruett, to burn the book.

Pruett had never read the novel, but he had heard a radio program about it that made him angry, and so he readily agreed to take part in what Wartzman describes as a “photo op.” The photo shows Camp and another leader of the Associated Farmers standing by as Pruett holds the book above a trash can and sets it on fire.

Meanwhile, local librarian Gretchen Knief was working quietly to get the ban overturned. At the risk of losing her job, she stood up to the county supervisors and wrote a letter asking them to reverse their decision.

“It’s such a vicious and dangerous thing to begin,” she wrote. “Besides, banning books is so utterly hopeless and futile. Ideas don’t die because a book is forbidden reading.”

Knief’s argument may have been eloquent, but it didn’t work. The supervisors upheld the ban, and it remained in effect for a year and a half.

Still, says Krug, the censorship of The Grapes Of Wrath was a key event in the creation of the Library Bill of Rights, the statement Krug describes as ensuring that “as American citizens we have the right to access whatever information we wish without anyone looking over our shoulders. … that we have the right to utilize this information once we have acquired it.”


Excerpt: ‘Obscene In The Extreme’
by Rick Wartzman

The lights dimmed and dimmed some more, and darkness fell upon the Big Room. No one talked or even dared to breathe too loudly. The children had been shushed, whispers stifled, and cigarettes snuffed. The only sound to be heard was the thwack-thwack-thwack of limestone water dripping onto rock. It is impossible to know, of course, what those in the crowd felt as this black blanket swallowed them completely, engulfing the afterglow and playing tricks on their eyes. They had come here, to Carlsbad Caverns, to vacation and take their minds off their workaday concerns; and for some, sitting 750 feet below the surface of the earth, surveying a gargantuan stalagmite known as the Rock of Ages, this undoubtedly was the high point of their trip. Before the lights had gone out, the tourists had soaked in the spectacle: several million years old, wrinkled and tinted with orange, rising up nearly forty feet, as huge as a house. The Rock of Ages was such a wonder that Robert Ripley, Mr. Believe It or Not, had visited this spot just weeks earlier to make a radio broadcast, his voice carried upward by telephone cables and then out across the country by CBS. And yet one can imagine that for others, descending deep into the ground and watching the last trace of light vanish would have brought feelings not of joy and adventure, but of angst and foreboding. It wouldn’t have taken much of a leap, in those thirty seconds when all was quiet and still, to see that darkness was settling upon the world as well.

It was an uneasy time, late summer 1939. Hitler’s troops were amassed along the fifteen-hundred-mile German-Polish border. The Soviets and Japanese clashed along Mongolia’s Khalka River. And Franco was ruthlessly consolidating his power in Spain. At home, America teetered on the edge of war. The worst of the Depression was over, but the economy was still sick. The Roosevelt Recession — in which industrial production had tumbled by 40 percent, unemployment had jumped by four million, and stock prices had plunged by nearly 50 percent — was barely more than a year past. The jobless rate hovered above 17 percent, and personal income and total economic output were no higher than they had been a decade before. Even the national pastime had taken on a melancholy cast: in June, Yankees slugger Lou Gehrig had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cutting short his extraordinary career. He may have just described himself as “the luckiest man on the face of this earth,” but it seemed like an awfully tough break for a thirty-six-year-old dubbed “the Iron Horse.” As for politics, things were as crazy as ever. President Roosevelt’s popularity had ebbed in the last few years, and a volatile mixture of -isms was boiling and bubbling all over the place — Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Coughlinism, Longism, Townsendism. It was hard to tell sometimes which one might slosh out of the pot and stick.

Of all the eyes staring into the cave, among the weariest must have been Gretchen Knief’s. She had trekked to New Mexico by way of theSouth and was on her way back home, to California’s San Joaquin Valley, where she was the chief librarian for Kern County. She was a tall woman, impeccably dressed, her smile warm. No one would have called the thirty-seven-year-old a beauty, and she could be a little awkward at times. But it was an endearing awkwardness, and everybody admired her smarts. Knief had spent a portion of her trip examining libraries in Florida and Louisiana, and she had walked away feeling pleased with how Kern County’s far-flung network of seventy-one branches, many of which she had single-handedly expanded, stacked up by comparison. But pressures were mounting too. Kern’s main library was housed in the basement of the county courthouse in Bakersfield, in quarters so cramped that some of its materials were buried beneath old lighting fixtures, furniture, and other bric-a-brac. A proposed $300,000 bond issue to finance a new facility was scheduled to go before the voters in the fall. But who knew what they’d decide, given the budget squeeze afflicting the county? The situation showed no signs of easing, either, the way people were still streaming in to California’s heartland, taxing public services of all kinds. “Authorities Predict Increase in Migrant Flow to Kern Soon,” read the headline in the August 7 edition of the Bakersfield Californian.

The exodus had been underway for nearly a decade, with as many as four hundred thousand folks from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and other states flocking to California in search of a better life. They were by no means exclusively poor. But many were. And the plight of these human tumbleweeds, as one observer had labeled them, had by now worked its way into the national consciousness. Leading periodicals had sent their correspondents to rural outposts up and down Highway 99 to chronicle the suffering. “Uncle Sam Has His Own Refugee Problem,” the Providence Journal declared during the spring. “Lured to the West, They Find Misery, Squalor, Disease.” Collier’s magazine put it this way: “Perhaps the native and adopted sons of California pitched their voices a note or two too high when they warbled praises of the Golden State. Anyway, they got the idea across, and now they’re sorry. An army is marching into California — an army made up of penniless unemployed, desperately seeking Utopia. ‘Here we are,’ say the invaders, ‘what’re you going to do about us?’ And nobody knows the answer.”

That may have been a tad hyperbolic, but coming up with answers was in no way simple. Kern County, for one, had seen its population swell by more than 60 percent in the last five years, and although health officers had cleaned up the squatter camps that once plagued the area, many migrants were still living in slums with inadequate sewers and drains, ramshackle houses, and litter-strewn dirt roads that would turn to mud after a hard winter rain. Who, though, was culpable for such conditions? Were they the fault of a grudging local government? Or were the newcomers themselves guilty somehow? Many suggested as much. The migrant community in Kern was branded as being full of “drunks, chiselers, exploiters and social leeches” — and that was in an official county report that had just been released. The language used on the street was even more blunt; in the lobby of a Bakersfield movie theater, a sign was posted: “Negroes and Okies Upstairs.”

An alternative view, however, had also found its voice. This one laid the blame for the migrants’ deprivation at the door of California agriculture, an industry that since the late nineteenth century had been defined by one main thing: its enormity. The state’s giant landowners had made a travesty of the Jeffersonian ideal of 160 acres, assembling dominions that ballooned to one thousand times or more that size. “We no longer raise wheat here,” said one grower. “We manufacture it.” This wasn’t family farming; it was agribusiness. And with it came a caste system in which relatively few got rich while many remained mired in the worst sort of poverty: Chinese in the 1870s, Japanese two decades later, Hindustanis early in the new century, Mexicans and Filipinos during and after World War I. Joining this ethnic parade were Armenians and Portuguese, Italians and Swiss — wave after wave of low-priced labor. Among the leviathan landholders were those who took care of their workers, some patronizingly, others with a genuine measure of respect. But many big farmers regarded their hands as expendable — “beasts of the field,” in the words of an 1888 edition of the Kern County Californian. In many ways, things hadn’t changed much in the fifty years since that description had been written, and with the Okies and Arkies now faring so terribly, social critics were pointing their fingers at California’s agricultural elite.

The most articulate and powerful of the finger-pointers was author John Steinbeck, whose book The Grapes of Wrath had not only leapt onto the best-seller list after its publication in April but was also well on its way to becoming seared into the public’s imagination forever. Darryl Zanuck was already busy with the film version of the story, starring Henry Fonda, and Woody Guthrie would soon record his ode to Steinbeck’s protagonist, Tom Joad: Wherever little children are hungry and cry / Wherever people ain’t free. / Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights, / That’s where I’m gonna be, Ma. / That’s where I’m a gonna be. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had called her reading of The Grapes of Wrath “an unforgettable experience.” And in the coming months, the president would tell the nation that he, too, had read of the Joads’ journey from the bone-dry plains of Oklahoma to the bountiful lands of California, where they and others toiled away for a pittance and found themselves wishing “them big farmers wouldn’ plague us so.” “There are 500,000 Americans,” the president said, “that live in the covers of that book.” By 1940, The Grapes of Wrath would be invoked so often that it almost seemed to cheapen the novel. Good Samaritans, looking to raise money to aid the migrants, would hold “Grapes of Wrath” parties. The union seeking to organize California’s farm fields — the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America — recruited five young Broadway actors to tour the West and Southwest, with ticket sales going into UCAPAWA’s coffers. The troupe’s name: The Grapes of Wrath Players. Meanwhile, pundits of all stripes would reference the Joads in articles and speeches, as if they were real: “Meet the Joad Family,” “The Joad Family in Kern County,” “What’s Being Done About the Joads?” “The Joads on Strike.” Men began to wear a hat called the “Joad Cap.”

Knief peered into the inky cavern, and slowly the lights came up, like a sunrise in the distance. Then a ranger’s voice washed over the Big Room:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy wounded side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure;
Save from wrath and make me pure.

In that very instant, it is conceivable that Knief and all the others assembled in the Big Room let their worries — the weight resting on “our troubled and confused generation,” as she once expressed it — melt away. Whether that sense of tranquility lasted very long is another matter. As Knief headed back to Bakersfield, her vacation done, she motored along Route 66, the same stretch of highway on which the migrants “scuttled like bugs to the westward,” as Steinbeck wrote. The Mother Road, as she was known, was the path to California’s promise. Knief counted herself a Steinbeck devotee, having briefly met him during one of his research outings to the area. And on the eve of the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, she had lauded him as “one of our major creative writers in America today,” a literary force on par with Faulkner, Hemingway, Saroyan, and Dos Passos. In “The Reading Hour,” a column that she wrote for the Bakersfield paper, Knief had also noted that this tale of migratory labor was bound to be “of more than passing interest” to local readers.

As she’d soon discover, that would prove to be quite an understatement.

[From the book Obscene in the Extreme by Rick Wartzman. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008.]

Source / National Public Radio

Also see Jonathan Yardley on ‘Obscene in the Extreme’ / Washington Post / Sept. 14, 2008

Find Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s the Grapes of Wrath on Amazon.com.

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Congressional Bailout Add-Ons : Lotsa Pork in This Baby

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Bullseye: Bailout bill now festooned with corporate tax breaks including one for a company that makes arrows for children.
By Ryan J. Donmoyer / October 1, 2008

Rose City Archery Inc., an Oregon company that makes arrows used by children, hit a bull’s-eye with Senate legislation that would rescue Wall Street banks.

Senators attached a provision repealing a 39-cent excise tax on wooden arrows designed for children to an historic $700 billion financial-markets rescue that passed tonight by a vote of 74-25. The provision, originally proposed by Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith, will save manufacturers such as Rose City Archery in Myrtle Point, Oregon, about $200,000 a year.

It’s one of dozens of tax breaks benefiting Hollywood producers, stock-car racetrack owners and Virgin Islands rum- makers included in the broader legislation in an effort to win support from House Republicans, whose defection contributed to a rejection of an earlier version of the legislation two days ago on a 228-205 vote.

“This is how Washington works,” said Keith Ashdown, chief investigator at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington research group. “A big pot of pork is their recipe for final passage.”

Representatives for Wyden, a Democrat, and Smith, a Republican, didn’t immediately return calls. Jerry Dishion, president of Rose City Archery, was in meetings and unavailable to comment, a receptionist at the company said.

Most of the provisions are part of a package of provisions known as “extenders” because they are renewed for only a few years at a time.

Research Tax Credit

Popular with lawmakers, the provisions include a research tax credit worth about $8.3 billion a year for companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Harley-Davidson Inc., and subsidies for the overseas financial services earnings of U.S.-based multinational corporations such as General Electric Co. and Citigroup Inc.

The tax package also would spare 24 million American households from a scheduled increase in the alternative minimum tax amounting to $62 billion this year and renew about $17 billion of incentives to promote energy production from renewable sources such as solar and wind.

Other, smaller provisions, such as one that will save Nascar track builders $109 million this year, have been staples of the tax code since 2004 or earlier. They periodically expire and are renewed, and include hundreds of millions of dollars of tax incentives for companies that invest on Indian reservations, in the District of Columbia, and American Samoa. Other breaks would subsidize renovations of restaurant franchises and cut import duties on wool and wood.

Break for Filmmakers

Several others are new provisions, including two tax breaks worth $478 million over the next decade for movie and television producers who shoot films in the United States. The legislation would allow filmmakers to qualify for a 3 percentage-point reduction from the 35 percent top tax rate approved in 2004 for domestic manufacturers.

The arrows provision seeks to reverse an anomaly in a 2004 law that created the 39 cent excise tax on the weapons. Intended the levy more expensive arrows, the tax also applies to arrows used by Boy Scouts and other youth organizations that cost about 30 cents a piece. Ten manufacturers in nine U.S. states stand to benefit from the change, according to a description of the legislation from Wyden’s office.

Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner, said the inclusion of the tax breaks “will increase the appeal of the package for our members.”

The Congressional Budget Office said today the tax provisions will add about $112 billion to budget deficits over the next five years because the legislation doesn’t contain enough offsetting revenue increases to keep the budget balanced.

The biggest revenue-raising provision in the bill would cost managers of hedge funds about $25 billion over the next decade by prohibiting an accounting technique they currently use to defer for as long as 10 years U.S. taxes on their income earned in foreign countries, usually tax havens such as the Cayman Islands.

Source / Bloomberg

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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Ike Aftermath : Residents of Galveston Public Housing Given Heave-Ho

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Clean up after Ike in Galveston. Now it’s the human toll that must be dealt with.

Galveston’s public housing residents ordered out with nowhere to go.

Residents of Galveston’s storm-devastated public housing projects have been ordered to clear their belongings out — but they’re still waiting for answers about where they’re supposed to go.

A reporter with the Galveston Daily News visited the city’s housing projects this week and found inhabitants — many of them elderly or disabled — at wits’ end. The paper reports:

Angry residents stopped every car that drove by the housing projects to search for answers.

Latrice Walker, who’s five months pregnant, cornered the housing authority crew that was battering down doors.

“What are y’all doing?” she shouted. “I live here — you can at least give me some answers.”

She cornered a smartly dressed housing authority building supervisor and started peppering him with the same questions everyone was asking Wednesday morning: Where am I supposed to live? How long do I have to get my things out? Where is FEMA? Where is the housing authority? Are they going to tear this place down?

The housing authority’s employees had no answers for residents. One member of the battering crew said he wasn’t allowed to talk to the media but hoped the “real story” got out about what’s happening.

Many of the residents never signed a lease, he said, and there’s concern they might not quality for federal assistance. He also noted that in order to stay in a hotel paid for by FEMA, the agency requires a credit card — but many residents don’t have one.

The only option left for those with nowhere else to go is a public shelter, but spaces have been scarce. Galveston opened its first shelter Wednesday at a community center, but it offered room for only about 100 people and filled up fast, the Associated Press reports. The city set up a second shelter — tents at an old elementary school — yesterday.

Also yesterday, the Red Cross opened a shelter in Galveston offering 500 slots. But some public housing residents expressed a reluctance to stay in mass shelters because of uncomfortable conditions.

Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas testified before Congress this week about her city’s needs, but she did not discuss public housing in her prepared statement. Also this week, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Federal Emergency Management Agency announced an 18-month housing assistance plan for families displaced by Ike, but it’s not slated to begin until November.

Source / Facing South / Posted Sept. 26, 2008

Also see Galveston needs a housing plan by Heber Taylor / Galveston Daily News / September 27, 2008

Thanks to Houston Indymedia / The Rag Blog

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Condi Rice: Just Another BushCo War Criminal

Posted on October 2, 2008 by RagBlog


Rice Admits She Led High-Level White House Talks About Torture
By Jason Leopold / September 30, 2008

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has admitted for the first time that she led high-level discussions beginning in 2002 with other senior Bush administration officials about subjecting suspected al-Qaeda terrorists detained at military prisons to the harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, according to documents released late Wednesday by Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee.

Responding in writing to questions by Levin, who will convene a hearing today on the administration’s interrogation program, John B. Bellinger, Rice’s legal adviser at the State Department, said they recalled participating in meetings with Ashcroft and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in July 2002 about an Army and Air Force survival training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) meant to prepare U.S. soldiers for abuse they might suffer if captured by an outlaw regime.

Bellinger, who also worked with Rice at the NSC, the then National Security Adviser “expressed concern that the proposed CIA interrogation techniques comply with applicable U.S. law, including our international obligations” and that Rice asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to “personally review the legal guidance” of specific interrogation techniques.

In April, President George W. Bush told an ABC News reporter during an interview that he approved of meetings of a National Security Council’s Principals Committee, whose advisers included Vice President Dick Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, former CIA Director George Tenet and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, where these officials discussed specific interrogation techniques the CIA could use against detainees.

Waterboarding—or simulated drowning–has been regarded as torture since the days of the Spanish Inquisition.

“I recall being told that U.S. military personnel were subjected in training to certain physical and psychological interrogation techniques and that these techniques had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm,” Rice wrote in response to a question about the SERE techniques.

But those techniques were meant to prepare U.S. soldiers for abuse they might suffer if captured by a brutal regime, not as methods for U.S. Interrogations, which is what Rice said the discussions at the White House centered on. Moreover, the SERE methods were first designed by the communist government of China to be used against U.S. soldiers.

The hearing Wednesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee will focus on the genesis of the SERE techniques used during the interrogations of suspected terrorists.

Rice has denied that the U.S. tortured or abused prisoners. But in declaring the U.S. does not engage in torture, appears to be relying on a narrower U.S. definition of torture than that is accepted under international law, such as the 1984 Convention Against Torture that was signed by the Reagan administration in 1988 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994.

“The threshold for torture is lower under international law: acts that do not amount to torture under U.S. law may do so under international law,” wrote Philippe Sands, law professor at University College London, in a column published in the Dec. 9, 2005, edition of The Financial Times.

“Waterboarding – strapping a detainee to a board and dunking him under water so he believes that he might drown – plainly constitutes torture under international law, even if it may not do so under U.S. law. …

“When the U.S. joined the 1984 convention it entered an ‘understanding’ on the definition of torture, to the effect that the international definition was to be read as being consistent with the U.S. definition The administration relies on the ‘understanding.’

“So, when Ms. Rice says the U.S. does not do torture or render people to countries that practice torture, she does not rely on the international definition. That is wrong: the convention does not allow each country to adopt its own definition, otherwise the convention’s obligations would become meaningless. That is why other governments believe the U.S. ‘understanding’ cannot affect U.S. obligations under the convention.”

There is ongoing debate as to whether the brutal interrogation techniques first used against a suspected terrorists predated an Aug. 1, 2002 legal opinion, widely called the “Torture Memo,” that provided CIA interrogators with the legal authority to use long-outlawed tactics, such as waterboarding, when interrogating so-called high-level terrorist suspects.

Neither Rice nor Bellinger provided dates about the discussions Rice led regarding interrogation methods. Additionally, Levin did not ask Rice whether Bush or Cheney participated in the talks.

In his book, “At the Center of the Storm”, former CIA Director George Tenet wrote that he attended a meeting with Rice in May 2001 where Tenet discussed how Abu Zubaydah, the alleged high-level al-Qaeda operative, planned to attack the US and Israel.

“For my regularly scheduled meeting with Condi Rice on May 30, [2001], I brought along [deputy CIA director] John McLaughlin, [then director of the CIA’s counterterrorist center] Cofer Black, one of Cofer’s top assistants, Rich B. (Rich can’t be further identified here). Joining Condi were [former White House counterterrorism czar Richard] Clarke and [former CIA official] Mary McCarthy,” Tenet wrote. “Rich ran through the mounting warning signs of a coming attack. They were truly frightening. Among other things, we told Condi that a notorious al-Qa’ida operative named Abu Zubaydah was working on attack plans.”

Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan less than a year later and was whisked to a secret CIA prison site in Thailand, where he was interrogated and subjected to waterboarding—believed to have taken place sometime in July 2002 based on the discussions about interrogation methods Rice participated in with other White House officials.

FBI officials objected to the methods CIA interrogators used against Abu Zubaydah, according to previously released documents and testimony.

However, Rice wrote in response to a question from Levin that she did “not recall any specific discussions about withdrawing FBI personnel from the Abu Zubaydah interrogation.”

The Abu Zubaydah case was the first time that waterboarding was used against a prisoner in the “war on terror,” according to Pentagon and Justice Department documents, news reports and several books written about the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.

In his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” author Ron Suskind reported that President George W. Bush had become obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.

“Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

The waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah was videotaped, but that record was destroyed in November 2005 after the Washington Post published a story that exposed the CIA’s use of so-called “black site” prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects.

John Durham, an assistant US attorney in Connecticut, was appointed special counsel earlier this year to investigate the destruction of that videotape as well as destroyed film on other interrogations.

The latest disclosures by Rice undercut assertions by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials who have blamed cruel treatment of detainees on “a few bad apples” who acted on their own.

In June, Levin released dozens of pages of documents that detailed a pattern of humiliation, abuse and even torture inflicted on detainees was a deliberate policy of the Bush administration – debated by mid-level lawyers at the CIA and the Pentagon, given legal cover at the Justice Department and approved at the highest levels of government.

The Armed Services Committee’s 18-month investigation, which generated 38,000 pages of documents, singled out Rumsfeld and William “Jim” Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former general counsel, as the officials who sought guidance on implementing more aggressive interrogation methods.

The committee is expected to release a full report later this year. So far, the probe has found that Rumsfeld and Haynes solicited input from military psychologists in July 2002, months earlier than they had previously acknowledged, about developing harsh methods interrogators could use against detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

The documents Levin released in June states that as early as July 2002, Rumsfeld, Haynes and other officials queried military psychologists about the use of waterboarding and other brutal methods to extract information that might not be gained through more conventional interrogations methods.

The questions from Rumsfeld and Haynes were raised one month before John Yoo, a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, issued two memos that authorized interrogators to use stress positions, military dogs and other still unknown methods against terror suspects at Guantanamo.

Bellinger said, in a separate memo to Levin, that Yoo participated in the meetings led by Rice and gave the CIA oral guidance on interrogation techniques.

The June documents did not square with previous statements made by Haynes, who testified in 2006 that the impetus for the harsh tactics came from below, from lower-level military personnel who asked the Pentagon in October 2002 about using more aggressive techniques against detainees.

Richard Shiffrin, Haynes’ former deputy on intelligence issues, told the Senate committee that in July 2002 Haynes became interested in using the SERE techniques, such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation, as a form of interrogation against detainees.

According to one document, Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, discussed with U.S. military officials how interrogators could use the “wet towel” technique, also known as waterboarding, against detainees to extract information.

“It can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function,” Fredman said on Oct. 2, 2002, during a meeting where specific techniques were reviewed and debated, according to the meeting minutes.

Fredman added that the “wet towel” technique would only be defined as torture “if the detainee dies.”

“It is basically subject to perception,” Fredman said. “If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.”

Source / IntelDaily

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Food Production and Delivery : We May Have to Rethink the Model

Posted on October 1, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘We all know eating locally grown foods is best and during the normal harvest season we buy locally when we have the choice.’
By Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / October 1, 2008

Most models of present and future food distribution assume that the supermarket will be with us until the end of time. It will be this institution that will dictate what we eat and how much it will cost. There are different supermarkets for each neighborhood but they all have much in common, especially shelves filled with junk food which is loaded with preservatives, etc. Companies like General Mills and Kraft and Tyson are represented in most all of these markets.

Most of the fruits and vegetables in these stores are grown in California and shipped all across the USA. In some cases this is good since the fruits are often organically grown and shipped with consummate care in refrigerated trucks. But it is unlikely that you will buy fresh foods at your store unless you live in California. Also, these shipped foods have a shorter shelf life and in spite of being sprayed and treated to make them appear to be fresh, they will spoil quickly after you bring them home. And, of course, the cost in diesel fuel involved in the delivery system is huge, not to mention the smoke it adds to the environment.

We all know eating locally grown foods is best and during the normal harvest season we buy locally when we have the choice. For the rest of the year we buy at the supermarket. While this represents an improvement over the traditional past, it is only a partial answer to the problem. Growing food is not so difficult. Processing it is more difficult. Storing it is the most difficult problem.

While we regularly can foods, dry them, grind them into flours, etc. to have them available in the months between harvests, most all these methods destroy much of the nutrition in the foods. Canning involves lots of heat (fuel intensive) as well as the cost of cans, preservatives and other additives, and labor. It works and we have been relying upon it for some time but those with an eye for the fresh and untampered have learned to look upon it as a last choice. That stuff in the can is not the top of the food chain.

Grinding grains into flour and baking them is also a popular way to consume food. Just one little problem with the idea, by the time the flour is ground and cooked most of the nutrition is destroyed. The processing is also quite fuel intensive from the beginning (grinding mills) to the end (baked in ovens which use gas or electricity). Not all cultures are flour users, some use whole grains that are processed at meal time. It is easier to store whole grains than flour and they will retain their nutritive content longer. But the real potential in economical, simple and effective processing and storing is drying foods, dehydration.

When dried and reconstituted all we have to do is add water and the foods come back to life. Yes, there is some loss in the process but it is really negligible. The conflict here is with our habits, our addiction to the easy life provided by the supermarkets. The Native Americans did not have this luxury and they were quite accustomed to living from harvest to harvest off what they hunted and caught and from what they stored. Dried foods were the norm.

I don’t know that we will be easily converted to this lifestyle but I highly recommend that each of us starts thinking in terms of a food stash consisting of bulk grains and nuts and dried fruits and veggies. Yeah, you can dry meat too if that is on your menu. You don’t have to grind and bake the grains, simply soak them overnight and they will not only be ready to eat but also retain virtually all their nutrition. No heat equals live enzymes.

Another important consideration is the support of small local corporate farms, those owned by stockholders who get their food nearby and thus fresher. You pay the farmer in advance and he does the growing for you. This method insures that the farmer will have the capital to plant without borrowing and also be able to have a bad year due to the natural causes without having to abandon the farm. Small farms are better for a variety of reasons; for one, a big storm is not likely to destroy them all the way it can a large farm (look at the Midwestern floods of 2008); for another, they can specialize more easily and make the delivery process much less costly.

In the future we will have to protect crops more than we do today. This will require extensive use of greenhouses and crop covers. Smaller farms can be more versatile with this. For instance, in years when the grasshopper population is great, the farmer has to cover the crops or lose them, much easier to do on 20 acres than on 2,000. A home garden with a greenhouse nearby, power from small solar and wind generators for every household, battery driven appliances and transportation are the directions our society needs to be moving.

We need to spend quality time rethinking our food production and delivery systems. We need to break the habit of blindly supporting supermarkets and eating whatever they offer. And we need to start eating more dried foods in winter. If you think the stock market crash is terrible for our financial future, think about what happens if the big trucks stop running, even for a few weeks, or global warming takes out one of the big valleys in California. Better to make adjustments now than at the last minute.

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British Ambassador : Afghanistan Situation Is Bad

Posted on October 1, 2008 by RagBlog


Memo Leak Says Mission In Afghanistan Doomed
By Cernig / October 1, 2008

I’d recently begun to think there was no way back from seven years of Bush administration mismanagement in Afghanistan – but it’s still shocking to hear it from the British ambassador in Kabul.

The London Times reports that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles told his French counterparts exactly that at a high-level meeting, however, and that the secret memo of the meeting has now been leaked to the French press (h/t our tireless researcher Kat). Le Canard Enchaîné, a “respected French weekly” reproduced the memo.

“The current situation is bad. The security situation is getting worse. So is corruption and the Government has lost all trust. Our public statements should not delude us over the fact that the insurrection, while incapable of winning a military victory, nevertheless has the capacity to make life increasingly difficult, including in the capital.

“The presence — especially the military presence — of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis (which, moreover, will probably be dramatic).”

The French diplomat sent the cable to brief President Sarkozy and Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, ahead of meetings with Britain and other Nato allies over the Afghan deployment.

…Sir Sherard, 53, was also quoted as saying that while Britain had no alternative to supporting the United States, the Americans should be told to change strategy.

Reinforcing the military presence against the Taleban insurrection would be counter-productive, he said, according to Le Canard. “It would identify us even more clearly as an occupying force and it would multiply the number of targets (for the insurgents),” he was quoted as saying.

The allied governments should start preparing public opinion to accept that the only realistic solution for Afghanistan was to be ruled by “an acceptable dictator”.

“In the short term we should dissuade the American presidential candidates from getting more bogged down in Afghanistan,” the ambassador was quoted as saying.

The British government are saying the French memo is a “parody” of what was actually said at the meeting, with insiders telling the Times that ‘the British position was deliberately “exaggerated” to produce a version that Paris wanted to hear’.

So either the British ambassador to Kabul thinks that the US-led strategy is wrong and the war is as good as lost or he doesn’t quite think that – but very obviously the French up to and including President Sarkozy do and are willing to officially “leak” a possibly hyped-up account of the ambassador’s words as cover and justification. Which doesn’t bode well for NATO solidarity for a new US administration that will have to go cap in hand to European allies for additional troops and political support in Afghanistan (and ever-escalating incursions into Pakistan) even with a partial drawdown in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the new National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan is, apparently, too grim to release.

Seth Jones, an expert on Afghanistan at the Rand Corporation think tank, called the situation in Afghanistan “dire.”

“We are now at a tipping point, with about half of the country now penetrated by a range of Sunni militant groups including the Taliban and al Queida,” Jones said. Jones said there is growing concern that Dutch and Canadian forces in Afghanistan would “call it quits.”

“The US military would then need six, eight, maybe ten brigades but we just don’t have that many,” Jones said.

… Perhaps foreshadowing the NIE assessment on Afghanistan, Adm. Mullen told Congress, “absent a broader international and interagency approach to the problems there, it is my professional opinion that no amount of troops in no amount of time can ever achieve all the objectives we seek in Afghanistan.”

There’s not enough troops to provide stability for long enough, even if there were there’s not enough reconstruction and reconcilliation and even if there was there’s not enough regional goodwill for American adventurism. Just like Iraq. And just like Iraq the Afghan occupation is an unwinnable one. Neither nation is looking at long-term internal stability or even freedom from crippling internicene violence. Worse, the violence in Afghanistan has polarized the two major players in the region and contains even more of a prospect of igniting a regional bloodbath than the occupation of Iraq.The best that can be done is a “slow bleed” which will hopefully be less destructive to the region and American interests than a fast one. Just like Iraq, though, there’s no evidence that such is possible.

Yet, unfortunately, both mainstream party’s prospective Presidential candidates will continue to decide foreign policy by the touchstone that America has always used and inflict domestic vote-winning tough talk on foreigners yet again.

Source / Newshoggers

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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