The Rag Blog

The fallout from a combination of rising inflation and global recession seems inevitable: how can the world’s economies survive it?

The world economy has had several good years. Global growth has been strong, and the divide between the developing and developed world has narrowed, with India and China leading the way, experiencing GDP growth of 11.1% and 9.7% in 2006 and 11.5% and 8.9% in 2007, respectively. Even Africa has been doing well, with growth in excess of 5% in 2006 and 2007.

But the good times may be ending. There have been worries for years about the global imbalances caused by America’s huge overseas borrowing. America, in turn, said that the world should be thankful: by living beyond its means, it helped keep the global economy going, especially given high savings rates in Asia, which has accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves. But it was always recognised that America’s growth under President Bush was not sustainable. Now the day of reckoning looms.

America’s ill-conceived war in Iraq helped fuel a quadrupling of oil prices since 2003. In the 1970s, oil shocks led to inflation in some countries, and to recession elsewhere, as governments raised interest rates to combat rising prices. And some economies faced the worst of both worlds: stagflation.

Until now, three critical factors helped the world weather soaring oil prices. First, China, with its enormous productivity increases – based on resting on high levels of investment, including investments in education and technology – exported its deflation. Second, the US took advantage of this by lowering interest rates to unprecedented levels, inducing a housing bubble, with mortgages available to anyone not on a life-support system. Finally, workers all over the world took it on the chin, accepting lower real wages and a smaller share of GDP.

That game is up. China is now facing inflationary pressures. What’s more, if the US convinces China to let its currency appreciate, the cost of living in the US and elsewhere will rise. And, with the rise of biofuels, the food and energy markets have become integrated. Combined with increasing demand from those with higher incomes and lower supplies due to weather-related problems associated with climate change, this means high food prices – a lethal threat to developing countries.

Prospects for America’s consumption binge continuing are also bleak. Even if the US Federal Reserve continues to lower interest rates, lenders will not rush to make more bad mortgages. With house prices declining, fewer Americans will be willing and able to continue their profligacy.

The Bush administration is hoping, somehow, to forestall a wave of foreclosures – thereby passing the economy’s problems on to the next president, just as it is doing with the Iraq quagmire. Its chances of succeeding are slim. For America today, the real question is only whether there will be a short, sharp downturn, or a more prolonged, but shallower, slowdown.

Moreover, America has been exporting its problems abroad, not just by selling toxic mortgages and bad financial practices, but through the ever-weakening dollar, in part a result of flawed macro- and micro-policies. Europe, for instance, will find it increasingly difficult to export. And, in a world economy that had rested on the foundations of a “strong dollar,” the consequent financial market instability will be costly for all.

At the same time, there has been a massive global redistribution of income from oil importers to oil exporters – a disproportionate number of which are undemocratic states – and from workers everywhere to the very rich. It is not clear whether workers will continue to accept declines in their living standards in the name of an unbalanced globalisation whose promises seem ever more elusive. In America, one can feel the backlash mounting.

For those who think that a well-managed globalisation has the potential to benefit both developed and developing countries, and who believe in global social justice and the importance of democracy (and the vibrant middle class that supports it), all of this is bad news. Economic adjustments of this magnitude are always painful, but the economic pain is greater today because the winners are less prone to spend.

Indeed, the flip side of “a world awash with liquidity” is a world facing depressed aggregate demand. For the past seven years, America’s unbridled spending filled the gap. Now both US household and government spending is likely to be curbed, as both parties’ presidential candidates promise a return to fiscal responsibility. After seven years in which America has seen its national debt rise from $5.6tn to $9tn, this should be welcome news – but the timing couldn’t be worse.

There is one positive note in this dismal picture: the sources of global growth today are more diverse than they were a decade ago. The real engines of global growth in recent years have been developing countries.

Nevertheless, slower growth – or possibly a recession – in the world’s largest economy inevitably has global consequences. There will be a global slowdown. If monetary authorities respond appropriately to growing inflationary pressure – recognising that much of it is imported, and not a result of excess domestic demand – we may be able to manage our way through it. But if they raise interest rates relentlessly to meet inflation targets, we should prepare for the worst: another episode of stagflation.

If central banks go down this path, they will no doubt eventually succeed in wringing inflation out of the system. But the cost – in lost jobs, lost wages, and lost homes – will be enormous.

01/03/08 “ICH” — – -NEW YORK–What would you do if you learned that Bush Administration officials wanted to round up thousands of Americans and throw them into concentration camps?

For all we know, there is no slippery slope. It’s entirely possible that extraordinary rendition, eliminating habeas corpus, and the torture camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere are exactly what the government says they are — tools for fighting terrorists, not domestic political opponents. But how likely is it?

History is clear: Over and over again, the U.S. government places fascists in powerful positions. Once in office, they exploit wars and national tragedies to roll back hard-won freedoms. They’re Democrats as well as Republicans.

As has happened with increasing frequency in recent years, another blockbuster story revealing the anti-democratic impulse within the top echelon of the U.S. government has appeared and vanished overnight. According to Cold War-era files declassified last week, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly advised President Harry Truman to arrest “all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, jail them in military prisons and try them before kangaroo tribunals that “will not be bound by the rules of evidence.”

“For a long period of time the FBI has been accumulating the names, identities and activities of individuals found to be potentially dangerous to the internal security through investigation,” Hoover wrote in a 1950 memo. “These names have been compiled in an index, which index has been kept up to date.”

Capitalizing on anti-communist hysteria at the start of the Korean War, Hoover asked Truman to preemptively detain 12,000 people, 97 percent of them American citizens, in order to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.”

Hoover was a lunatic. Truman ought to have fired him on the spot. Instead, in September 1950 Congress took his advice and passed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. Truman signed it. In fact, he declared such an emergency three months later. No one knows why, but the president never actually followed through with mass arrests. Hoover’s “subversives” — people suspected of left-wing political sympathies — remained free. He was wrong. There were no acts of sabotage.

It wasn’t the first time the government went “crazy.”

Between 1919 and 1921 the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of the FBI) carried out the Palmer Raids, named for Alexander Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general. The BOI rounded up 10,000 lefties, anarchists and foreigners on a list compiled by a young J. Edgar Hoover, then in charge of the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division. Many were tortured. Five hundred fifty were deported.

Palmer’s clampdown accomplished nothing. On September 16, 1920, a bomb attributed to anarchists went off on Wall Street, killing 38 people and wounding over 400.

Crazy … like a fox.

During the 1960s and 1970s the CIA — in violation of its charter, which limits the agency to acting overseas — cooperated with local police departments across the country to compile a list of 300,000 Americans and organizations suspected of opposing the Vietnam War.

On April 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive No. 52. Reagan targeted 400,000 people for arrest and confinement at concentration camps in mothballed Army bases. The National Security Council’s “secret government within a government,” as Congressional investigators later described it, planned to cancel the 1984 presidential election so Reagan could remain in office indefinitely.

“Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example, helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad,” The Miami Herald reported on July 5, 1987.

People who hate The People never sleep. In 2006 Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which overturns the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibited the use of combat troops on the soil of the United States. For the first time in 128 years, the president can declare martial law in case of a hurricane, riot or terrorist attack. In May 2007 Bush attached a National Security Presidential and Homeland Directive to the National Defense Authorization Act. In case of a “national emergency” — the president could declare it without consulting anyone — he could suspend the Constitution and appoint an unelected provisional government under a “national continuity coordinator.”

To an optimist, America’s brushes with fascism seem like comforting evidence that the system works. Despite it all, even taking into account grotesqueries such as the concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, the First Amendment remains in force. Few Americans feel threatened by government tyranny. Few worry about getting shot by trigger-happy soldiers or being detained in concentration camps (unless they’re flood victims in New Orleans).

So why does a democracy need fascist schemes like Reagan’s Rex-84 Alpha Explan (a FEMA plan to put American protesters against a planned war against Nicaragua into camps)? Because American democracy is an iron fist in a velvet glove, a glove that’s becoming increasingly transparent.

Threats of repression are rarely carried out. They don’t need to be.

If potential opponents are afraid, there’s little need for concentration camps. The threat of repression (and actual crackdowns, explained away as exceptional excesses and brushed off with a token apology) creates a chilling effect on people who might pick up a rock instead of a sign.

A dog doesn’t have to bite everyone every day to earn a fearsome reputation. Mount cameras all over the place, and you don’t need to have anyone actually watching on the other side.

In a country whose legal framework authorizes the government to kidnap, torture and murder them, opponents of U.S. policy must decide whether getting out of line — anything from a letter to the editor to direct action — is worth the risk of getting kidnapped, tortured and murdered.

BAGHDAD — Dr. Ahmed Farid heard it from his family and saw it with his own eyes: his old neighborhood in Baghdad is safer, maybe secure enough to move back from the city of Basra.

Since his family left the capital city in fall 2006, one of the most brutal periods since the war began, he’s worked two medical jobs to cover rent and food. His children study in crumbling school buildings with 55 students to one teacher. Basra is close to his wife’s family, but violence is boiling and Shiite Muslim power struggles continue.

Still, he won’t return to Jihad, his Baghdad neighborhood, just yet. It’s the place where he was a target for kidnappers, his daughter woke daily from panicked nightmares and he’s not sure he can find a job.

“I think of going back,” he said after visiting his old neighborhood during Eid ald Adha celebrations last month. “But I can’t guarantee I will find the comfort, security and accommodations I have here.”

Farid, like millions of other Iraqis who fled the bombs and ambushes in 2006 and 2007, is choosing between the rising costs of displacement and the painful memories of home. For 2008, those choices will become even more difficult as Iraqi officials work to woo them back to their neighborhoods, whether services and security are ready or not.

An estimated 2 million Iraqis are living in neighboring countries; another 2.4 million have fled their homes but remain scattered around Iraq. Former residents of Baghdad make up nearly 60 percent, according to estimates.

As violence dropped in the final months of 2007, thousands of people who’d fled their homes returned, especially in Baghdad. Statistics about how many have come home vary, but Iraq’s Ministry of Displacement and Migration estimated in early December that 30,000 had returned from other countries, along with 10,000 who’d gone home from other parts of Iraq.

That success also will be 2008’s challenge, as uneasy peace and overtaxed services and utilities leave the country unprepared for mass returns.

Abdul Samad Rahman Sultan, Iraq’s migration minister, said the government would need help from other countries and aid organizations to make it possible for people to return. He said the government hoped to resettle people in the neighborhoods they’d left.

“The focus will be on returning them to their original living places, or perhaps to other residences inside their old neighborhoods,” he said.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said that goal would be difficult to meet, and he predicted violence as homeowners and squatters battle over property. Petraeus warned that some people will have to resign themselves to never being able to reclaim their homes.

“That is not ideal, not right, not legal, not a lot of things, but it is reality,” he said last week. “This is just going to remain a very, very tough issue for some time.”

Coalition forces will offer some aid, but Petraeus said he didn’t have ground forces capable of organizing returns, settling property debates and maintaining safety. Those solutions will have to come from Iraqis, he said.

Dana Graber Ladek, a displacement specialist in Iraq for the International Organization for Migration, said fewer people had left their homes in 2007 compared with 2006 as security improved and neighborhoods that used to have both Sunni and Shiite Muslim residents became more homogenous.

Iraqis also had fewer options to leave because of restrictions from nearby countries that couldn’t handle droves of jobless refugees.

Ladek said that for those who didn’t come home this year conditions would worsen as costs rose and savings dwindled.

Middle-class Iraqis — “teachers, doctors, nurses and shopkeepers” — who ran out of money are the biggest group of returnees, Staffan de Mistura, a United Nations envoy in Iraq, said in December, when he warned against a mass return.

The moves already have started in some neighborhoods, such as Khadhraa, a wealthy Sunni-majority district in western Baghdad. Iraqi national police Lt. Col. Raad Ismaeel said his unit had guided the return of about 150 families, including many Shiites. The only return-related violence so far involved a displaced Shiite family that wasn’t originally from the neighborhood.

“Those who are returning are opening their arms to their neighbors. They were living in misery when they were displaced,” Ismaeel said. “Imagine someone who owns a house in a high-class neighborhood paying rent and being displaced again and again. They were desperate to come back.”

For all the improvements in Khadhraa — a 225-member citizen militia, a dozen checkpoints, newly paved roads, functioning telephone service — not everybody is convinced, Ismaeel said. So many people lost family members, property and jobs that they won’t come back unless the government helps them start over and offers consistent water, electricity, food and — most importantly — security.

“I hope refugees will talk to people living here, be convinced to come back, even if there’s no room and people have to stand on the bus,” Ismaeel said. “No matter what, they will not want to leave again.”

(Gumbrecht reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader. McClatchy special correspondents Mohammed al Dulaimy and Hussein Khadim contributed to this report.)

The bi-partisan co-chairmen of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, jointly published an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times which contains some extremely emphatic and serious accusations against the CIA and the White House. The essence:

[T]he recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.

More strikingly still, they explicitly include the White House at the top of their list of guilty parties:

There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the C.I.A. — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot. Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations.

To underscore the seriousness of their accusations, Keane and Hamilton end with this:

What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the (sic) greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.

It’s hard to imagine a more serious scandal than this. As I noted the other day, it is a confirmed fact that Alberto Gonzales and David Addingtion — the top legal representatives of George Bush and Dick Cheney, respectively — participated in discussions as to whether those videotapes should be destroyed. The White House refuses to disclose what these top officials said in those meetings. Did they instruct that the videos should be destroyed or fail to oppose their destruction? The NYT previously quoted one “senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter [who] said there had been ‘vigorous sentiment’ among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes.”

Thus, we have evidence that “top White House officials” vigorously argued that these videos should be destroyed. The number one aides to both the President and Vice President both participated in discussions as to whether they should be, almost certainly with the knowledge and at the direction of their bosses.

And now we have the 9/11 Commission Chairmen stating as explicitly as can be that the mere concealment (let alone destruction) of these videos constituted the knowing and deliberate obstruction of their investigation into the worst attack on U.S. soil in our history. Combined with the fact that the videos’ destruction almost certainly constitutes “obstruction of justice” with regard to numerous judicial proceedings as well, we’re talking here about extremely serious felonies at the highest levels of our government.

Both legally and politically, it’s hard to imagine a more significant scandal than the President and Vice President deliberately obstructing the investigation of the 9/11 Commission by concealing and then destroying vital evidence which the Commission was seeking. Yet that’s exactly what the evidence at least suggests has occurred here.

What possible justification is there for the White House to refuse to say what the role of Addington, Gonzales, Bush and Cheney was in all of this? Having been ordered by Bush’s new Attorney General not to investigate, are the Senate and House Intelligence Committees (led by the meek Silvestre Reyes and the even meeker Jay Rockefeller) going to compel answers to these questions? In light of this Op-Ed, do Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee think the White House should publicly disclose to the country the role Bush and Cheney played in the destruction of this evidence? If there are any reporters left who aren’t traipsing around together in Iowa, it seems pretty clear that this story ought to be dominating the news.

The decision by the New York Times to put William Kristol on their op-ed page exposes all that is wrong with the Mainstream Media.

Kristol’s introduction into the MSM is what phlegm is to the flu- a symptom of a far worse pathology.

Andy Rosenthal – NYT editorial page editor – reacted to criticism of the Time’s decision by claiming not to understand “this weird fear of opposing views.”

Actually, Mr. Rosenthal, I suspect the fact that you’re hiring a proven idiot and a liar has more to do with the anger you’re seeing.

For example, Kristol apparently did not know how visceral the split between Shia and Sunni Moslems was; he nevertheless encouraged Bush in kicking out the UN inspectors and rushing to war. He continued to insist that WMDs were in Iraq long after it was evident there were none. He maintains that he and the Bush administration were victims of bad intelligence even after it became obvious that Bush and Cheney were the progenitors of that bad intel, and he himself pedaled it credulously. Worse, he fiercely advocated a nuclear strike on Iran, and then slinked away without apology when the NIE showed how tragic that course of action would have been. His foreign policy errors are exceeded only by his domestic fiscal prescriptions. I could go on. And on. Mr. Kristol’s record clearly shows he has been wrong (when facts turn out to contradict preceding statements, that’s not a “different perspective” Sir — that’s an error) on nearly every prognostication and recommendation he’s made for well over a decade.

Now, it’s obvious the Times believes adding conservatives will expand their readership and help deal with Murdoch and the WSJ. Well, it’s worth a try, I guess. But if that’s your game, Mr. Rosenthal, you’d be better off hiring a competent conservative, not this blatherer.

By the way, my guess is you’ll lose more liberals and progressives than you’ll gain conservatives with this strategy. In fact, you’ll probably lose some conservatives. Times readers are intelligent and value opinion informed by fact and dedicated to accurately reflecting the context and reality of the world we find ourselves in. Counterfactual assertions grounded in strident ideologies such as those Kristol regularly spews out have little appeal to thinking readers — whether conservative or liberal.

But again, the fact that Kristol has escaped from Faux News into the MSM is really an indicator that the MSM has become a business driven by the bottom line, not a profession driven by ethics. It shows clearly that “balance” has become the sine qua non of journalism. Thus, if the Times piles a ton of bullshit on one side of the scale, and a ton of verifiable, factual data on the other, balance is achieved and the new business of journalism is satisfied. Especially if readership increases.

But wait, you say. Conservatism is a legitimate perspective that must be represented. Really? We’ve been running close to a forty year experiment with conservative governance, with only a partial break during the Clinton years, and the results are in.

See, the conservative mantra of weak governments, low taxes, and reliance on the magic markets to deliver all good things by serendipity, simply hasn’t worked, and is need of a much stronger defense than anything Kristol can mount.

Conservatism and it’s mutant step-child, neo-conservatism, is an odd mix of competing ideological assertions without foundation, and the results of our continuing experiments with it are a toxic brew of unintended consequences, and consequences that are the opposite of those advertised. They preach fiscal conservatism but produce record debt; they advocate freedom, but shred the Bill of Rights; they espouse values but produce record breaking greed, graft and corruption.

Weak government and reliance on the magic markets has brought us global warming, unprecedented corruption, wealth inequities equal to that experienced in the Gilded Age, the most expensive — and least effective — health care system in the developed world, and a mortgage and credit meltdown that borders on criminal. It has also brought us record debt, and an evisceration of our constitutional form of governance, and an unprecedented loss of freedom that would make our Founders weep – all the more tragic in that it was done in defense of freedom. Finally, Mr. Kristol’s unique brand of neo-conservatism has resulted in the greatest foreign policy blunders in our nations’ history, trillions of dollars wasted, and more than 100,000 deaths, nearly 4000 of them Americans.

Those are the facts, Mr. Rosenthal. Making “balance” more important than accuracy, insight and reality is unlikely to win the Times many readers, and it will certainly lose you many more. Signing up champions of this discredited philosophy makes little sense — signing up an advocate who has gotten everything wrong for a decade or more makes less.

Unless of course this is another of the Grey Lady’s liberal plots to discredit conservatism. Giving a man like Kristol a forum and making this idiocy transparent might be the best way to show the folly of its tenets.

I cancelled my subscription after the Judith Miller fiasco, the Plamegate incident and your failure to cover the Downing Street memos. I figured three stikes and you’re out. But in the past year, I’ve been buying the Times at news stands with increasing frequency. Everyone deserves another chance, I told myself.

You just blew yours.

At any rate, goodbye and good luck. You’ve consigned your once great paper to something less valuable than bird cage liner and fish wrap.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

— Emma Lazarus, 1883

If you don’t mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn’t an ideal “tempest-tost” candidate for Emma Lazarus’ famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of “the Christmas spirit.” She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, “look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life.” On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the following year without incident.

This time — with the President’s Global War on Terror in full swing — she was pulled aside at passport control at JFK Airport, questioned about those extra three weeks 12 years ago, and soon found herself, as she put it, “handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep… without food and drink and… confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned.” It was “the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected.”

By her account, she was photographed, fingerprinted, asked rude questions — “by men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with megalomania” — confined to a tiny room for hours, then chained, marched through the airport, and driven to a jail in New Jersey where, for another nine hours, she found herself “in a small, dirty cell.” On being prepared for the return trip to JFK and deportation, approximately 24 hours after first debarking, she was, despite her pleas, despite her tears, again handcuffed and put in leg chains, all, as she put it, “because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law.”

On returning to her country, she wrote a blog about her unnerving experience and the Icelandic Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir met with U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst to demand an apology. Just as when egregious American acts in Iraq or Afghanistan won’t go away, the Department of Homeland Security announced an “investigation,” a “review of its work procedures” and expressed “regrets.” But an admission of error or an actual apology? Uh, what era do you imagine we’re living in?

Erla Ósk will undoubtedly think twice before taking another fun-filled holiday in the U.S., but her experience was no aberration among Icelanders visiting the U.S. In fact, it’s a relatively humdrum one these days, especially if you appear to be of Middle Eastern background.

Take, for instance, 20-year veteran of the National Guard Zakariya Muhammad Reed (born Edward Eugene Reed, Jr.), who, for the last 11 years, has worked as a firefighter in Toledo, Ohio. Regularly crossing the Canadian border to visit his wife’s family, he has been stopped so many times — “I was put up against the wall and thoroughly frisked, any more thoroughly and I would have asked for flowers…” — that he is a connoisseur of detention. He’s been stopped five times in the last seven months and now chooses his crossing place based on the size of the detention waiting room he knows he’ll end up in. It took several such incidents, during which no explanations were offered, before he discovered that he was being stopped in part because of his name and in part because of a letter he wrote to the Toledo Blade criticizing Bush administration policies on Israel and Iraq.

The first time, he was detained in a small room with two armed guards, while his wife and children were left in a larger common room. While he was grilled, she was denied permission to return to their car even to get a change of diapers for their youngest child. When finally released, Reed found his car had been “trashed.” (“My son’s portable DVD player was broken, and I have a decorative Koran on the dashboard that was thrown on the floor.”) During another episode of detention, an interrogator evidently attempted to intimidate him by putting his pistol on the table at which they were seated. (“He takes the clip out of his weapon, looks at the ammunition, puts the clip back in, and puts it back in his holster.”) His first four border-crossing detentions were well covered by Matthew Rothschild in a post at the Progressive Magazine’s website. During his latest one, he was questioned about Rothschild’s coverage of his case.

The essence of his experience is perhaps caught best in a comment by Customs and Border Protection agent made in his presence: “We should treat them like we do in the desert. We should put a bag over their heads and zip tie their hands together.”

Or take Nabil Al Yousuf, not exactly a top-ten candidate for the “huddled masses” category; nor an obvious terror suspect (unless, of course, you believe yourself at war with Islam or the Arab world). According to the Washington Post’s Ellen Knickmeyer, Yousuf, who is “a senior aide to the ruler of the Persian Gulf state of Dubai,” always has the same “galling” experience on entering the country:

“A U.S. airport immigration official typically takes Yousuf’s passport, places it in a yellow envelope and beckons. Yousuf tells his oldest son and other family members not to worry. And Yousuf — who goes by ‘Your Excellency’ at home — disappears inside a shabby back room. He waits alongside the likes of ‘a man who had forged his visa and a woman who had drugs in her tummy’… He is questioned, fingerprinted and photographed.”

Despite his own fond memories of attending universities in Arizona and Georgia, Yousuf has decided to send his son to college… in Australia. Knickmeyer adds:

“A generation of Arab men who once attended college in the United States, and returned home to become leaders in the Middle East, increasingly is sending the next generation to schools elsewhere. This year, Australia overtook the United States as the top choice of citizens of the United Arab Emirates heading abroad for college, according to government figures here.”

This is what “homeland security” means in the United States today. It means putting your country in full lockdown mode. It means the snarl at the border, the nasty comment in the waiting room, the dirty cell, the handcuffs, even the chains. It means being humiliated. It means a thorough lack of modulation or moderation. Arriving here now always threatens to be a “tempest-tost” experience whether you are a citizen, a semi-official visitor, or a foreign tourist. (After all, even Sen. Ted Kennedy found himself repeatedly on a no-fly list without adequate explanation.) Think of these three cases as snapshots from the borders of a country in which the presumption of innocence is slowly being drained of all meaning.

News from Nowhere

So far, of course, we’ve only been talking about the lucky ones. After all, Erla Ósk, Zakariya Muhammad Reed, and Nabil Al Yousuf all made it home relatively quickly. In the final weeks of 2007, a little flood of press reports tracked more extreme versions of the global lockdown the Bush administration launched in late 2001, cases in which, after the snarl, the door clanged shut and home became the barest of hopes.

Take, for example, a December 1st Washington Post piece in which reporter Craig Whitlock revealed one more small part of the CIA’s global network of secret imprisonment. We already knew, among other things, that the CIA had set up and run its own secret prisons in Eastern Europe and probably in Thailand; that it had a network of secret sites in Afghanistan like “the Salt Pit” near Kabul; that it may have used the “British” island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as American ships, naval and possibly commercial, to hold prisoners beyond the purview of any authority or even the visits of the International Red Cross; that it ran an air fleet of leased executive jets (including some from Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which made it back into the news in December because of a lawsuit launched by the ACLU); that these were used to transport terror suspects it snatched up off city streets or battlefields anywhere on the planet to its own “black sites” or which it “rendered” in “extraordinary” manner to the jails and torture chambers of Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and other lands whose agents had no qualms about torturing and abusing prisoners.

Whitlock, however, added a new piece to the CIA’s incarceration puzzle: an “imposing building” on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. This turns out to be the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan’s powerful spy and security agency (and the CIA’s closest Arab ally in the Middle East). Known as a place where torture is freely applied, it has been a way-station for “CIA prisoners captured in other countries.” The first terror suspects kidnapped by Agency operatives were, it seems, flown to Jordan and housed in that building before Guantanamo was up and running or the Agency had been able to set up its own secret prisons elsewhere. There, the prisoners were hidden, even from the International Red Cross. To cite but one case Whitlock mentions:

“Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiology student, was captured in a U.S.-Pakistani operation in Karachi a few weeks after 9/11 on suspicion of helping to finance al-Qaeda operations. Witnesses reported seeing masked men take him aboard a Gulfstream V jet at the Karachi airport Oct. 24, 2001. Records show that the plane was chartered by a CIA front company and that it flew directly to Amman. Mohammed has not been seen since. Amnesty International said it has asked the Jordanian government for information on his whereabouts but has not received an answer.”

Also in December, because of that lawsuit against Jeppesen, we got our first insider’s account of the CIA “black sites” (and, thanks to Salon.com, even architectural plans for a few of the interrogation rooms and prison cells at those sites, all of which seem to have cameras in them). It was here that “high-value targets” were incarcerated, isolated, and subjected to various “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni, was picked up by the Jordanians in Amman in 2003 and tortured into signing a “full confession” (to acts he had not committed). He was then turned over to the CIA and flown to Kabul (and possibly Eastern Europe as well) where he was imprisoned. He has offered in-depth accounts that give a sense of what those “enhanced interrogation techniques” the Bush administration sponsors so enthusiastically are all about at a personal level. In the end, while in CIA custody, Bashmilah was driven to several suicide attempts, including one in which, using a bit of metal, he slashed his wrist and wrote, “I am innocent,” on a cell wall in his own blood.

Here is just part of a description he offered Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! of being prepared for transport by CIA air taxi into black-site hell:

“And then they put… like little plugs inside the ears, plastic. And then they put gauze on that, on the ears. And then they taped that with very strong adhesive tape. And then they put a hood over my head. And then, on top of that, they put a headphone. This is as far as the top of my body was. And then they handcuffed me with a chain, and also they chained my ankles. Then they put a belt above the pants, and then they tied the hands and the ankles to that belt. This was after being slapped and kicked until I almost fainted.”

In his cell in a secret prison in Afghanistan, “[i]n the beginning, it was totally dark. It was as if you were inside a tomb. Then, after that, they would turn a light on. Above the door, there was a camera. And there was constant loud music.” From then on, neither the lights, nor the music went off. As Mark Benjamin of Salon.com wrote, “His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake… Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. ‘I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,’ Bashmilah wrote in his declaration…

“After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him [in Yemen] with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered.”

No charges, no lawyers, no judge. This is increasingly the norm of — and a legacy of — George Bush’s world. In this way, the snarl at the borders melds with the screams of terror in cells worldwide.

Embedded Reports from the Dark Side

A new Pentagon term came into use in the Bush era. With the invasion of Iraq, reporters were said to be “embedded” in U.S. military units. That term — so close in sound to “in bed with” — should have wider uses. You could, for instance, say that Americans have, since September 2001, been “embedded,” largely willingly, in a new lockdown universe defined by a general acceptance of widespread acts of torture and abuse, as well as of the right to kidnap (known as “extraordinary rendition”), and the creation and expansion of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, all based on the principle that a human being is guilty unless proven (sometimes even if proven) innocent. What might originally have seemed like emergency measures in a moment of crisis is now an institutionalized way of life. Whether we like it or not, these methods increasingly define what it means to be an American. In this manner, despite the “freedom” rhetoric of the Bush administration, the phrase “the price of freedom” has been superseded by the price of what passes for “safety” and “security.”

Media coverage of such subjects reflects this. The cases above, all reported in December, barely scratch the surface of this universe. Just a glance at other December stories — some barely attended to, or dealt with by minor outlets or in humdrum ways, but many well covered in major papers and still causing little consternation — indicates just how normalized all this has become.

A legacy can often be framed in words. So here’s a little rundown of just some areas in which, when it came to torture, kidnapping, and offshore imprisonment, 2007 ended in a deluge, not a trickle:

Destroyed Tapes: One issue connected to torture — sorry, “enhanced interrogation techniques” — did get major coverage last month, the revelation on the front page of the December 6th New York Times of the destruction, in 2005, of hundreds of hours of CIA videotapes of the first two major interrogations, including waterboardings, of al-Qaeda operatives — in this case, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the weeks that followed, responsibility for the decision to destroy those tapes has been creeping ever higher, with four key lawyers connected to the White House and the Vice President’s office brought into the mix in mid-December, and reports that the chief of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Jose A. Rodriguez, who ordered their destruction, may soon testify before Congress under immunity and implicate as yet unnamed higher-ups.

As with all such cover-up stories, this one can only get worse. It has already been reported in the Wall Street Journal that the faces of more senior CIA officials, not just low-level interrogators, may have been caught on those tapes from the administration’s secret torture chambers. We are sure to learn that these were hardly the only interrogations taped by the Agency. As yet, by the way, almost all attention has gone to the destruction of the tapes, little to why they were made in the first place. As December ended, however, Scott Shane of the New York Times wrote a piece, “Tapes by CIA Lived and Died to Save Image,” with this telling line from the CIA’s then number three official, A. B. Krongard: “You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes.” Think about that a moment. The Justice Department, which, along with the CIA’s Inspector General, launched an investigation of the tape destruction under pressure, also attempted to shut down congressional investigations of the same — unsuccessfully.

Kidnapping Is the Law: According to the British Sunday Times, “A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned it.” According to that lawyer, the precedent “goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s.” This applies, it seems, not just to terror suspects in extraordinary rendition cases, but to white businessmen wanted for, say, fraud. “The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.” International human rights lawyer Scott Horton writes at his No Comment blog:

“This is not U.S. law, it is a Bush Administration hallucination as to U.S. law… The sort of nightmare which refuses to recognize the sovereignty of foreign states or the solemn commitments of U.S. governments over the last two centuries in treaties and conventions. The sort of nightmare that refuses to recognize the ‘law of nations’ referred to by the Founding Fathers and incorporated into the Constitution.”

Innocence at Guantanamo: New military and court documents were released in December, thanks to a suit by lawyers representing Murat Kurnaz, that further illuminated the case of the 19-year old German citizen who “chose a bad time to travel.” Kurnaz was captured by the U.S. Army in Pakistan in 2002 and transported to Guantanamo. There, within months, according to the Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig, “his American captors concluded that he was not a terrorist.” This was the consensus of intelligence officials. He was nonetheless declared a “dangerous al-Qaeda ally” by successive military tribunals at the prison and was not released until August 2006 when he was flown to freedom in Germany “goggled, masked and bound, as he had been when he was flown to Guantanamo Bay.”

Evidence from Waterboarding: According to Josh White of the Washington Post, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, “[t]he top legal adviser for the military trials of Guantanamo Bay detainees told Congress… that he cannot rule out the use of evidence derived from the CIA’s aggressive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.” He even refused to say that waterboarding would be illegal if used by the interrogators of another country on U.S. military personnel. In a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, like his boss Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Mark Filip, the administration’s nominee for second-in-command at the Justice Department, also refused to take a stand on waterboarding, even though he called it “repugnant.”

Torture Veto: In December, President Bush threatened to “veto a House [of Representatives] bill that would explicitly ban a variety of abhorrent practices. The bill would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow interrogation rules adopted by the armed forces last year.”

Torturers speak out: In December, two figures connected with U.S. torture practices spoke out. John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in capturing top al-Qaeda operatives, gave interviews to ABC and NBC News in which he called waterboarding “torture,” regretted its use (“we Americans are better than that”), and also insisted that “[t]his was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and justice department.” In the meantime, Damien Corsetti, a former private in the U.S. Army who served as an interrogator in Kabul, Afghanistan (and was nicknamed the “king of torture” and “the monster” by his colleagues at Bagram prison), gave an interview to the Spanish paper El Mundo, describing the beatings and torture techniques used there. (“They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of their children, where they live — we show them satellite photos of their houses. It is worse than any torture.”) He also claimed that 98% of the prisoners, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and observed, “In Abu-Ghurayb and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them.” Both men denied themselves torturing or mistreating anyone.

Justice Moves Fast: The Justice Department, which dragged its feet on those destroyed CIA videotapes (and then tried to submarine a congressional investigation of the same), nonetheless reacted strongly to the horrors of torture in another context. Its officials moved swiftly to investigate whether former agent John Kiriakou, in giving that interview about waterboarding to ABC News, had “illegally disclosed classified information in describing the capture and waterboarding of an al-Qaeda terrorism suspect.” Consider that a message about priorities from the powers that be.

Iraqis in American Jails: Latest estimates are that up to 30,000 Iraqis are now held in American prisons in Iraq. While this figure falls 10,000 short of the number of Iraqis American commander Gen. David Petraeus believed might be arrested during the “surge” months in Baghdad and elsewhere, it does add up, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment website, to 0.1% of what’s left of the Iraqi population, or approximately one out of every 1,000 Iraqis.

Think of these eight stories as themselves only the tip of December’s melting iceberg of news on such topics. You could no less easily write about lawyer Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the Naval Reserves, who resigned his commission in response to the unwillingness of Gen. Hartmann “to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture.” In a letter to The Peninsula Gateway of Gig Harbor, Washington, Williams wrote in part:

“Thank you, General Hartmann, for finally admitting the United States is now part of a long tradition of torturers going back to the Inquisition…. Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai… Waterboarding was practiced by the Khmer Rouge at the infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Most recently, the U.S. Army court martialed a soldier for the practice in 1968 during the Vietnam conflict.

“General Hartmann, following orders was not an excuse for anyone put on trial in Nuremberg, and it will not be an excuse for you or your superiors, either. Despite the CIA and the administration attempting to cover up the practice by destroying interrogation tapes, in direct violation of a court order, and congressional requests, the truth about torture, illegal spying on Americans and secret renditions is coming out.”

Or you could mention the news that the “Australian Taliban,” David Hicks, the sole person actually convicted on terrorism charges at Guantanamo, was released after serving a nine-month sentence in Australia (and five years of non-sentence time in Cuba); or the first reports on the Internet of speculation in Washington that George Bush himself might have viewed parts of those CIA interrogation tapes, or the Washington Post report that, in 2002, four key Congressional figures, including Nancy Pelosi, had been given “a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk,” including waterboarding, without objections being raised. Or… but the list is almost unending.

The Bush Legacy

As a people, we Americans have not faintly come to grips with how centrally the Bush administration has planted certain practices in our midst — at the very heart of governmental practice, of the news, of everyday life. Many of these practices were not in themselves creations of this administration. For instance, the practice of kidnapping abroad — “rendition” — began at least in the Clinton era, if not earlier. Waterboarding, a medieval torture, was first practiced by American troops in the Philippine insurrection at the dawn of the previous century. (It was then known as “the water cure.”)

Torture of various sorts was widely used in CIA interrogation centers in Vietnam in the 1960s. Back in that era, the CIA also ran its own airline, Air America, rather than just leasing planes from various corporate entities through front businesses. Abu Ghraib-style torture and abuse, pioneered by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, was taught and used by American military, CIA, and police officials in Latin America from the 1960s into the 1980s. If you doubt any of this, just check out Alfred McCoy’s still shocking book, A Question of Torture. Even offshore secret CIA prisons aren’t a unique creation of the Bush administration. According to Tim Weiner in his new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes, in the 1950s the Agency had three of them — in Japan, Germany, and the Panama Canal Zone — where they brought double agents of questionable loyalty for “secret experiments” in harsh interrogation, “using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing.”

And yet, don’t for a second think that nothing has changed. Part of the Bush legacy lies in a new ethos in this country. In my childhood in the 1950s, for example, we knew just who the torturers were. We saw them in the movies. They were the sadistic Japanese in their prison camps, the Gestapo in their prisons, and the Soviet Secret police, the KGB, in their gulags (even if that name hadn’t yet entered our world). As the President now says at every opportunity, and as we then knew, Americans did not torture.

Today, and it’s a measure of our changing American world, a child turning on the TV serial “24” or heading for the nearest hot, new action flick at the local multiplex knows that Americans do torture and that torture, once the cultural province of our most evil enemies, is now a practice that is 100% all-American and perfectly justifiable (normally by the ticking-bomb scenario). And few even blink. In lockdown America, it computes. The snarl at the border fits well enough with what our Vice President has termed a “no-brainer,” a “dunk in the water” in the torture chamber. There is no deniability left in the movies — and little enough of it in real life.

American presidents of the Vietnam and Latin American war years operated in a realm of deniability when it came to torture and other such practices. No American could then have imagined a Vice President heading for Capitol Hill to lobby openly for a torture bill or a President publicly threatening to veto congressional legislation banning torture techniques. Call it the end of an era of American hypocrisy, if you will, but the Bush legacy will be, in part, simply the routinization of the practice of torture, abuse, kidnapping, and illegal imprisonment.

George W. Bush didn’t invent the world he inhabits. He, his top officials, and all their lawyers who wrote those bizarre “torture memos” that will be hallmarks of his era chose from existing strains of thought, from urges and tendencies already in American culture. But their record on this has, nonetheless, been remarkable. In just about every case, they chose to bring out the worst in us; in just about every case, they took us on as direct a journey as possible to the dark side.

It’s not necessary to romanticize the American past in any way to consider the legacy of these last years grim indeed. Let no one tell you that the institution of a global network of secret prisons and borrowed torture chambers, along with those “enhanced interrogation techniques,” was primarily done for information or even security. The urge to resort to such tactics is invariably more primal than that.

Words matter more than one would think. In the Bush era, certain words have simply been sidelined. Sovereignty, for instance. If, in principle, you can kidnap anyone, anywhere, and transport that person into a ghost existence anywhere else, then national sovereignty essentially no longer has significance. This is one meaning of “globalization” in the twenty-first century. On Planet Bush, only one nation remains “sovereign,” and that’s the United States of America.

If you want to test this proposition, just take any case mentioned above, from Erla Ósk’s landing in New York on, and try to reverse it. Make an American the central victim and another country of your choice the perpetrator and imagine the reaction of the Bush administration, no less the American media and the public (no matter what Gen. Hartmann may be unwilling to say about the waterboarding of an American serviceman).

Or consider another word that once had great resonance in American culture, not to speak of its legal system: innocence. Americans prided themselves on their “innocence” — even when mocked as “innocents abroad” — and took pride as well in a system based on the phrase, “innocent until proven guilty.”

Despite their repeated, thoroughly worn denials about torture, the top officials of this administration remade themselves, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, as a Torture, Inc. And their actions since then have gone a long way toward turning us, by association and tacit acquiescence, into a nation of torturers, willing to accept, in case after case, that a “war” against “terror” supposed to last for generations justifies just about any act imaginable, including the continued mistreatment and incarceration of people who remain somehow guilty even, in certain cases, after being proven innocent.

This is the American welcome wagon of the twenty-first century. If you really want to catch the spirit of the Bush legacy one year early, try to imagine the poem an Emma Lazarus of this moment might write, something appropriate for a gigantic statue in New York harbor of a guard from Mohamed Bashmilah’s living nightmare — dressed all in black, a black mask covering his head and neck, tinted yellow plastic over the eyes, a man, hands sheathed in rubber gloves, holding up not a torch but a video camera and dragging chains.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Note to Tomdispatch Readers: If you wish to read a translation of Erla Ósk‘s blog about her 24 hours “in” the U.S., click here and then scroll to entry 306. Expect the next Tomdispatch post, a new piece by Chalmers Johnson, on Sunday night January 6th.]

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico: Several Guantanamo Bay prisoners are seriously ill, lawyers said Monday, rejecting U.S. claims after the death of one prisoner that no other detainees are in immediate medical danger.

On Sunday, a 68-year-old Afghan died from cancer at the isolated U.S. base in southeast Cuba, heightening lawyers’ concerns over clients held at Guantanamo for suspected al-Qaida or Taliban links.

“Many attorneys are concerned,” said H. Candace Gorman, a Chicago lawyer whose Libyan client held at the camp has Hepatitis B and tuberculosis.

At least four of the 275 men held at Guantanamo Bay are gravely ill and another has become psychotic, lawyers told The Associated Press.

The death of Abdul Razzak at the prison clinic Sunday marked the first time any of the more than 700 men who have been held at Guantanamo Bay has died from natural causes, the military said. Four prisoners committed suicide. The U.S. now holds about 275 men there.

The sick prisoners have ailments that include liver infection, heart disease and another possible case of cancer and lack adequate medical treatment, according to lawyers for the men.

Razzak was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in September and had been receiving chemotherapy treatment since October, the military said. His death was expected, and he had been living in the clinic in recent weeks as his condition deteriorated, said Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, a spokesman for the Guantanamo detention center.

Haupt said he did not know if Razzak was allowed any final contact with family in Afghanistan before he died.

U.S. authorities accused Razzak, who had been held at Guantanamo since early 2003, of being a senior leader of a 40-man Taliban unit — an allegation he denied. No charges were ever filed against him.

“There are so many ill people there — according to my client and clients of other attorneys — that it’s just a matter of time before someone else dies from this medical neglect,” Gorman said.

Haupt said no other detainees are in any immediate medical danger. Military authorities have long praised the medical care at Guantanamo — noting last year that they have performed more than 300 surgical procedures and treated hepatitis, battlefield wounds, tuberculosis, appendicitis, malnutrition and malaria.

“We go to significant lengths to provide every bit of medical care to the detainee population,” Haupt said.

The military brought a surgical team and a mobile cardiac lab to Guantanamo — at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of about US$400,000 (€270,000) — for a heart procedure on Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman accused of supporting al-Qaida.

Paracha refused the treatment. His lawyers insist it is too risky to allow the procedure to be done at Guantanamo and want him transferred to a properly equipped cardiac care facility. In November, he said his chest pain is so severe that “he is convinced he is dying,” said Zachary Katznelson, an attorney with the British legal rights group Reprieve.

Attorney Clive Stafford Smith, also from Reprieve, said he has at least two seriously ill clients, including Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese cameraman for the Al-Jazeera TV network who is being evaluated by doctors at Guantanamo after he complained of pain and blood in his urine. The lawyer said that cancer is a possibility, but he does not know the results of the cameraman’s latest examination.

Stafford Smith also said that another client, Ethiopian national Binyam Mohamed, is apparently psychotic — engaging in such behavior as smearing feces on the walls of his cell.

Gorman said her client, Abdul Hamid Abdul Salam Al-Ghizzawi, has not been treated for his hepatitis or tuberculosis and has developed a severe liver infection. In court papers, she said: “Al-Ghizzawi is dying a slow and painful death.”

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, America isn’t alone on top. What’s replacing the unipolar world of the 1990s? A gang of five superpowers: China, Russia, India, the Eurozone and the U.S.

01/01/08 “Toronto Star ” — — “We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of our way.”

Kevin Conrad, delegate from Papua New Guinea, at the Bali summit on climate change earlier this month, to a U.S. delegation that tried to thwart reforms agreed to by the other 185 nations present.

It became more apparent than ever this year that the U.S. is no longer the world’s lone superpower. Instead, there are five superpowers that will define the world for at least the next half-century: the U.S., China, India, Russia and a united Europe.

The news came home to Americans on Main St. from tainted Chinese products to the fact that practically every toy sold in America comes from Red China. Boston seniors on group tours of the great capitals of Europe were humbled to discover that their greenbacks had shrivelled in value to 60 per cent of the local currency. And New Yorkers were taken aback that the credit crisis arising from cascading defaults on U.S. subprime mortgages had so weakened the balance sheets of leading financial institutions in the Big Apple that the likes of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had sought bailouts from state-owned investment funds in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Canadians felt it, too, in a 15 per cent gain against the greenback.

That America was not in charge in Iraq was widely known for some time. That American global hegemony had severely dissipated was news. Nor was it of the passing variety, like the 1970s U.S. economic “stagflation” that inflated the German and Swiss currencies; or the Japanese boom a decade later in which Tokyo parking spots fetched $90,000.

This was different. Mandarins in Brussels now passed judgment on merger proposals between American companies, not hesitating to block them on antitrust grounds. Chinese oil interests in Sudan made Beijing intransigent about Western meddling in Darfur. Russia wouldn’t abide Washington’s sanctions on Iran. India insisted upon, and received, U.S. support of its nuclear arms program despite predictable outrage from Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the pursuit of Al Qaeda. It was either that or have New Dehli turn to the Russians. To an unprecedented degree, decisions affecting America were being made elsewhere. A mere 16 years after attaining its lone-superpower status, the crown had slipped, and America’s destiny is now shaped by a new world disorder of five superpowers.

All five members of this new quintet are nuclear powers. All but one, India, have veto power at the United Nations. Collectively, the four non-U.S. superpowers have 10 times the population of the U.S. The European economy has eclipsed that of the U.S., and those of China and India will do so by mid-century. The imperial legacy of many EU members and of Russia provide them a lingering influence from Indonesia to Zaire to Brazil that the U.S., whose experiences with colonizing have been reluctant and short-lived, cannot match.

The resentment of what the French labelled “the U.S. hyper-power” in the 1960s subsided in the 1990s. The Europeans were preoccupied with their unification project. China and India were experimenting with a free-market model to replace sclerotic command economies. And by the early years of this decade, Russian recovery from the upheaval of the Soviet breakup was manifesting itself in a new national pride and respect for a decisive Vladimir Putin.

The aim of the four new superpowers has been the same: to unleash, under the banner of patriotism, the potential economic prowess of a nation or region, and in doing so to claim a role on the world stage equal to that of the U.S. Here’s Tony Blair, who revered Britain’s “special relationship” with the U.S. more than most of his predecessors. “A single-power world is inherently unstable,” Blair said back in 2005. “That’s the rationale for Europe to unite.

“We are building a new superpower. The European Union is about the projection of collective power, wealth and influence. When we work together, the European Union can stand on par as a superpower and a partner with the U.S.”

The euro has been the world’s strongest currency since 2005. But not until this year did everyone from OPEC to the People’s Bank of China to rock stars flirt with abandoning the U.S dollar – the world’s undisputed reserve currency since the end of World War II – in favour of a euro that has soared to a current $1.48 (U.S.)

It was a year of new boondoggles coming to light in the U.S. occupation of Iraq; and of U.S. diplomatic setbacks in Pakistan, China, Turkey, Burma, the Middle East – almost everywhere the U.S. has tried to exert influence. But then, America’s deficient military and intelligence capabilities have removed the big stick behind diplomatic threats.

America now is the world’s largest borrower, and China the biggest creditor nation.

As everyone but the White House acknowledges, it’s difficult to have much impact in pressuring China on its under-valued currency, its military buildup and its human-rights record when that country is also your biggest banker.

World leaders have been putting distance between themselves and Washington ever since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, embarked upon with a theological righteousness that alienated the secular Europeans, and based on assumptions seemingly designed to salvage the reputations of Barbara Tuchman’s cast of feckless leaders in The March of Folly.

But this year, world leaders lost their reticence and subjected Washington to a parade of embarrassments. Kevin Rudd, the new Australian PM, isolated the U.S. on global warming by embracing a Kyoto Protocol that incoming U.S. president George W. Bush trashed in 2001. Gordon Brown, the new British PM, used the occasion of his first state visit to Washington to state that Afghanistan, not Iraq, is the central front in the battle against Islamic extremists. Bush watched in stony silence as America’s staunchest ally in the Iraq invasion bluntly repudiated an assertion the U.S. president has been making for five years.

As Russia has slipped into autocracy, and shipped uranium to Iran this fall over U.S. objections, Bush has been reduced to tacitly endorsing Russian actions the U.S. is powerless to control. After his first encounter with the Russian president, Bush famously said he had looked into Putin’s heart and found a man he could work with. In an angry Munich speech earlier this year, Bush’s soulmate excoriated the U.S. for “an almost uncontained hyper-use of force . . . that is plunging the world into an abyss of conflicts.”

America’s foreign policy impotence hit a nadir in Pakistan, where Washington’s full-court-press diplomacy failed to prevent the leader of an unreliable but nonetheless vital ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda from imposing martial law and imprisoning his country’s supreme court justices. In one go, with its continued support of Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf, America has turned its back on supposed goals of promoting democracy, punishing nuclear proliferators, and taking a hard line against nations harbouring large populations of Al Qaeda operatives.

“No [U.S.] president will ever have handed over a worse international situation than George W. Bush,” says Richard Holbrooke, the former U.N. ambassador in the Clinton administration and adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Which is to suggest that America can reclaim its lone superpower status by simply installing a new president in 2009 who will extricate the U.S. from Iraq and sign Kyoto 2.0, to be negotiated over the next two years.

America lost its chance at enduring supremacy in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, which coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then-U.S. president George H.W. Bush spoke at the time of creating a “New World Order” of universal peace and mutual prosperity.

Had it only chosen then to redeploy its massive defence and foreign aid budgets to humanitarian causes, rather than propping up its military allies, America could have secured its new found global supremacy by simply setting a good example.

Instead, the lone-superpower era began with a unilateral, botched invasion of Somalia and ended with the Project For The New American Century, a late-1990s doctrine of preserving U.S. hegemony by overthrowing unfriendly regimes – a moronic vision that nonetheless manifested itself in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, with Iran as the regime-changers’ next target.

In the Middle East, which has some of the youngest populations in the world, the past two generations have come of age with the belief that America is antagonistic to Muslims, a proposition reinforced by America`s invasion of two Muslin nations in the space of three years. And a new generation of Europeans – the “E generation,” as author T.R. Reid labels it in his bestselling United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (2005) – has grown up with the isolationism of the 1990s U.S. Republican Congress and the calamitous unilateralism of George W. Bush.

Plainly, the U.S. has failed to lead on climate change; genocide; nuclear proliferation; human rights; and the other most pressing global concerns for so long it has effectively ceded its claim to the “benign hegemony” that still shapes America’s regard of its impact on the world.

And Americans know it, at least in Bill Clinton’s view. In the 1990s, then-president Clinton declared that “America is the indispensable nation.” In a Charlie Rose interview earlier this month, a Clinton who has grown more internationalist in retirement from the White House, said, “The American people now know something they’ve never known before. In their bones they know that there’s almost no problem we can solve all by ourselves – terror, war and peace, nuclear proliferation, climate change, you name it. They know we have to do this in a co-operative way.”

Gwynne Dyer, heralding the end of America’s lone-superpower status, has warned that “Seeing the United States reduced to only one great power among others cannot be a prospect that appeals to American strategic thinkers of a traditional bent – so what is their grand strategy for averting it?

“They must have one,” the London-based global military analyst wrote. “Paramount powers facing relegation always have one, although it rarely stays the same for long and it never, ever works. There is no way of stopping China and India from catching up with the current Lone Superpower without nuking their entire economies.”

Without exception, the emerging superpowers have achieved that status by tending to the home front, where much work remains to be done. China is the world’s second-largest CO2 emitter, trailing only the U.S. India has the world’s largest population of poor people. Europe has national licence plates, birth certificates and a lottery played from Krakow to Liverpool, but lacks a foreign policy and has a nascent army of just 60,000 troops. Russia’s regard for investors, whose property it expropriates on a whim, will have to change for the country’s entrepreneurial forces to be fully unleashed.

The same focus on domestic shortcomings would serve America well. The factors undermining its prosperity and global influence are almost all self-inflicted. There is more at stake here than even the current crop of presidential candidates seem to realize. They all talk of restoring America’s respect in the world, with no apparent sense that a big part of the problem is that the world is increasingly less inclined to regard America as “the shining city on the hill” that Ronald Reagan invoked.

With strikingly little notice, David Walker, head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, spoke in August about disturbing parallels between today’s America and the decline of the Roman Empire. Among the similarities Walker cited were “declining values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.”

Even in a world without budding rivals, the American superpower would still be jeopardized by its “unsustainable” disregard for tackling rundown schools and inner-city neighbourhoods, a yawning gap between rich and poor, and a route to citizenship for the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

Even superpowers are fragile once the rot of complacency sets in. “It’s time to learn from history,” Walker said, “and take steps to ensure that the American republic is the first to stand the test of time.”

“What we’re seeing (in the U.S.) isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: Income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite … It’s time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.” – Paul Krugman, New York Times, Feb. 27, 2006.

01/01/07 “The Star” — — In the mid-1990s, the Wall Street Journal delivered the classic insult to this nation when it called Canada an honorary Third World country.

Indeed, at that time Canada’s economy was coming out of a period of relative difficulty.

Our balance of payments was shaky, the federal government had posted a long string of budget deficits and the Canadian dollar was weak.

Adding to these economic woes, as of the mid-1990s, Canada also had a long history of posting substantially higher inflation rates than in the United States.

Now, however, the trade and fiscal deficits situation has been turned on its head, with the United States incurring huge fiscal deficits and borrowing enormous amounts of foreign capital to balance its hefty international trade deficit. In fact, in a relatively short time span, the U.S. has become the largest debtor nation in the world.

And as Paul Krugman and many other economists have pointed out, U.S. income disparity is obscenely large and increasing, while higher education is not overcoming the polarization of income and the shrinking of the middle class.

The latter point is somewhat surprising, since most Western democracies see the elimination or reduction of economic inequality as a good idea. Indeed, it is a generally accepted principle that the underlying causes of economic inequality based on such non-economic differences as race, gender, or geography should also be minimized or eliminated.

In other words, there is a strong predilection in most Western countries to level the economic playing field as much as possible. This seems not to be the case in the United States.

The United Nations publishes a Human Development Index that ranks countries in terms of life expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living. The latest published data were based on 2005 statistics. The U.S., despite its vast wealth and power, placed only in the 12th position among industrial countries. The top four countries were Iceland, Norway, Australia and Canada. These top four countries still pay some lip service to income distribution as an important economic and social goal.

Ironically, the U.S. today has many more features in common with Third World status than Canada ever did back in the mid-1990s.

What is usually meant by a Third World economy? A half-century ago, the term was associated with the economically underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania. The common characteristics of these Third World countries were high levels of poverty, income inequality, high birth rates and an economic dependence upon the advanced countries. Third World countries were simply not as industrialized or technologically advanced as Western countries.

But what are some of the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary Third World countries? They go beyond these nations’ fiscal position or undue concentration on natural resource exports.

The glaring features today include poverty, lack of democratic institutions, controlling oligarchies and the unequal distribution of income and wealth. In other words, the few enjoy a rich lifestyle while the many share subpar incomes and poverty.

Another characteristic of Third World countries is that a major portion of their fiscal expenditures is allocated to the military. In many Third World countries, the military is controlled by an elite or a small collection of the wealthy.

Finally, in many Third World countries one finds that leadership is passed from one generation to the next, often via a close relative.

Guess what country we are talking about now?

Dozens of African-Americans gathered in Philadelphia on January 1, 1808not for festivities celebrating the New Year but to commemorate a new freedom for members of their race.

A federal law prohibiting the importation of new slaves into the United States took effect on Friday 1/1/1808 and this law provided the basis for that commemoration.

Another legal event enlivened those blacks gathering at the St. Thomas African Episcopal Church ­ then located not far from the building where America’s Founding Fathers issued their Declaration of Independence and approved the nation’s Constitution.

The year 1808 marked freedom for scores of slaves in Pennsylvania under terms of the Gradual Abolition of Slavery enacted by that state’s legislature in 1780.

Persons attending that commemoration at St. Thomas listened to the Rector of that church, Absalom Jones, deliver what is now his historically famous “Thanksgiving Sermon” praising the abolition of the African slave trade.

During that sermon, Jones expressed hope that January 1st would become a day of public “thanksgiving” recognizing the “abolition of the slave trade in our country.”

Rev. Jones desired this annual “thanksgiving” recognition to ensure that “our children in the remotest generations [knew the]history of the suffering of our brethren, and of their deliverance”

While that national day of observance Jones desired never materialized, Jones would be pleased that nearly 200-years after his Sermon, black Philadelphians successfully pushed the federal government to approve erection of a memorial to slaves.

This first-ever federally sanctioned memorial for slaves is slated for construction outside the Liberty Bell Pavilion in Center City Philadelphiathe famed facility now located not far from where Jones delivered that January 1, 1808 address.

And given Jones’ concern that blacks in the distant future understand the importance of that January 1808 abolition on importing slaves, it’s ironic that the Philadelphia group that took a lead role in pushing for the memorial is named the: Avenging the Ancestors Coalition.

This memorial particularly recognizes the nine slaves that President George Washington kept inside the then Philadelphia based White House.

The stable area where Washington’s slave slept was located a few feet from the front door of the Liberty Bell Pavilion.

Much to the disappointment of those attending that 1808 “Thanksgiving Sermon” the importation of slaves did not end, largely due to lax enforcement by the federal government.

That dynamic of the federal government’s lax and/or discriminatory enforcement of laws continues to operate today to the detriment of African-Americans in Philadelphia and across the nation.

Rev. Jones spearheaded historically significant struggles against abuses of the Fugitive Slave Law where free blacks (emancipated slaves and free born) were illegally sold into slavery.

Jones authored the first two petitions (1797 and 1799) sent to Congress by blacks asking for relief from Fugitive Law abuses, with the 1799 petition being the first formal request from blacks for an end of domestic slavery.

Both petitions sought congressional action against illegal Fugitive Law abuses.

“Is not some remedy for an evil of such magnitude highly worthy of the deep inquiry of the supreme Legislative body of a free and enlightened people?” the 1797 petition asked, stating freedmen were being “hunted day and night, like beasts of the forest by armed me with dogs.”

Congress rejected both petitions ­ refusing to enforce the law fairly for free blacks.

Those abusing the Fugitive Slave Law to kidnap free blacks often asserted that black skin created the assumption that the person was probably a slave.

This skin-color based assertion is hauntingly similar to an assumption driving contemporary racial profiling: being black creates the presumption of possible criminal behavior.

For over a decade, charges of racial profiling rocked the New Jersey State Police, arising from the presumption that blacks are more prone to criminal conduct than whites…similar to the assumption that all blacks are slaves.

In 1826 a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling declared “It is a settled rulethat the black color is proof of slavery” A decade later a NJ high court ruling noted “It was once the doctrine of this court that every colored person was presumed a slave till the contrary was shown”

In November 2007, Chicago black Congressman Danny Davis (D-7th Dist) accused police of profiling him leading to a traffic ticket.

While Chicago police officials rejected Davis’ profiling charge months earlier Illinois state officials released a study showing police across that state disproportionately stopped and searched minorities.

Rep. Davis, weeks after that profiling incident, joined a bi-partisan congressional group in co-sponsoring legislation to enact federal prohibitions against racial profiling.

President Bush opposed racial profiling while campaigning in 2000 and condemned the practice in his first State of the Union speech but failed to follow-up following 9/11 when be backed profiling of Muslims.

President Clinton refused to take strong action against profiling during his two terms despite the issue flaring nationwide repeatedly during the 90s including in Maryland not far from the White House.

Clinton was well aware of the issue of racial profiling since a federal judge cited the Arkansas State Police for violating an anti-profiling settlement when Clinton served as Arkansas’ Governor.

President Clinton also refused to end what many condemn as a modern slavery-like matter ­ injustices arising from federal crack cocaine laws.

Days after delivering an October 1995 speech declaring that blacks “indeed have lived too long with” an unjust justice system, President Clinton approved a congressional rejection of a US Sentencing Commission recommendation to end crack cocaine law inequities.

Clinton did grant a few clemencies to persons serving onerous crack law sentences unlike his predecessor President George H.W. Bush.

The first President Bush did grant Christmas Eve 1992 pardons to six of his Reagan Administration colleagues involved in the Iran-Contra Scandala scandal where the Reagan White House ignored illegal cocaine sales inside the United States that help fund the Contras.

President George H.W. Bush failed to either pardon or grant clemency to the Washington, DC teen lured to the park across the street from the White House by federal drug agents to make a purchase of crack that Bush used as a prop during a September 1989 presidential speech about the war on drugs.

Experts see promise in easing crack law injustices from a December 2007 US Supreme Court ruling and a sentencing reform action by the US Sentencing Commission days after that ruling.

Rev. Absalom Jones’ 1797 petition to Congress criticized the hypocrisy of those in “eminent stations” who would callously deny free blacks “public Justice and the protection which is the great object of Government.”

Then Virginia Congressman James Madison, an author of the US Constitution and a proponent of the adoption of the Bill of Rights, proved to be one of those hypocrites.

In urging the adoption of the Constitution, Madison had written that justice is the end of both “government and civil society.”

Yet when it came time for Madison to back his beliefs by fighting for justice for illegally enslaved freedmen, he urged his congressional colleagues to reject consideration of that petition authored by Rev. Jones.

Jones, during his 1/1/1808 Sermon, said “Let us further implore the influence of his divine and holy Spirit to dispose the hearts of our legislatures to pass laws to ameliorate the condition of our brethren still in bondage.”

Congress can take a big step towards ameliorating historic injustice by resolving this year to approve measures to end abuses in racial profiling and crack law inequities.

DALLAS — Many Texans busted for misdemeanor marijuana possession are still being jailed despite a new state law that allows police to issue a citation instead of making an arrest, according to a newspaper report.

Texas lawmakers hoped to ease jail crowding with the new legislation, which took effect Sept. 1, but some local prosecutors worry what message getting a mere ticket for pot might send.

“It may…lead some people to believe that drug use is no more serious than double parking,” Collin County prosecutor Greg Davis said in Tuesday’s editions of The Dallas Morning News.

The Travis County Sheriff’s Department is the only law enforcement agency in the state known to be taking advantage of the new legislation, according to the newspaper.

Prosecutors in Dallas, Tarrant and Collin counties said they have no plans to set up a system dealing with citations for misdemeanor possession, which is less than 4 ounces of marijuana.

In addition to easing crowding, the new law would also theoretically keep officers on the street instead of making runs to jail for nonviolent offenders.

The Dallas County Jail has a history of being understaffed and crowded, which has led, in part, to repeated failed state inspections.

But Dallas County officials worry that because the misdemeanors could still result in a case for prosecution, citations raise issues like making sure suspects appear in court and that no one is misidentified.

“These are not just tickets. These are crimes that need to be appropriately dealt with,” said Ron Stretcher, Dallas County’s director of criminal justice. “We want to make sure we get them back to court to stand trial.”

State Rep. Jerry Madden, a Plano Republican whose district includes Collin County, said it’s likely that some counties are taking a wait-and-see approach, looking for someone to lead the way.

Travis County sheriff’s spokesman Roger Wade said his department lobbied for the new law to help ease jail crowding and increase efficiency.

Issuing citations also helps save the department save gas by not driving suspects from the county’s outlying areas to the jail in Austin, he said.

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) — President Bush on Monday signed a bill aimed at giving the public and the media greater access to information about what the government is doing. The new law toughens the Freedom of Information Act, the first such makeover to the signature public-access law in a decade. It amounts to a congressional pushback against the Bush administration’s movement to greater secrecy since the terrorist attacks of 2001.

Bush signed the bill without comment in one of his final decisions of the year.

The legislation creates a system for the media and public to track the status of their FOIA requests. It establishes a hot line service for all federal agencies to deal with problems and an ombudsman to provide an alternative to litigation in disclosure disputes.

The law also restores a presumption of a standard that orders government agencies to release information on request unless there is a finding that disclosure could do harm.

Agencies would be required to meet a 20-day deadline for responding to FOIA requests. Nonproprietary information held by government contractors also would be subject to the law.

The legislation is aimed at reversing an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft after the 9/11 attacks in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty about how doing so would affect national security.

Dozens of media outlets, including The Associated Press, supported the legislation.