Natural Liberation Blog

Vladimir Putin and the Atheist Holocaust

2012-01-28T10:55:00.000-08:00

We almost never put personal faces on the atheist holocaust. Today a news item did just that, though of course it failed to remind people that there was an atheist holocaust during World War II and it was the result of careful planning and execution by the Roman Catholic Church, including Pope Pius XII (real name: Eugenio Maria Pacelli).

The face of the holocaust today is Viktor V. Putin, younger brother of Vladimir V. Putin, currently Prime Minister of Russia. Viktor was born in 1940, in Leningrad (now going by its prior name of St. Petersburg). In 1942 during the Battle of Leningrad, Victor Putin died, probably of starvation or disease caused by starvation. On January 28th, yesterday, Mr. Putin laid a wreath at Piskaroyvskoye Cemetery, which is a mass grave of about 470,000 civilians and soldiers who died in the battle or from the results of the siege. They were not all: the plaque there says over 640,000 people died of starvation between 1941 and 1944, when the Red Army finally got the upper hand and started rolling back the invaders.

The Atheist Holocaust was the idea of Pope Pius XII along with his predecessor Pius XI. It was executed by the fascist, Roman Catholic leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, with some help from other Catholic fascists, notably General Francisco Franco of Spain and Benito Mussolini of Italy. The Atheist Holocaust engulfed some 20 million people. Its most terrible phase began with the Germany occupation of the Eastern U.S.S.R. in 1941.

Of course we cannot be certain that Viktor V. Putin would have grown up to be an atheist. We unconsciously grant 2 year olds the religious status of their parents. His mother, Maria Ivanovna, was so starved that she was mistaken for dead and nearly buried before someone heard her moaning. His father was wounded and hospitalized in the war. Vladimir Putin is their only surviving child, having been born well after the war, in 1952.

Adolf Hitler saw himself as a new Holy Roman Emperor, who should be able to choose Popes and dictate to them. Pius XII saw himself, and the papacy, as the supreme leader of the entire world, to whom men like Hitler should subordinate themselves. They were united in a hatred of non-Catholics, socialists, communists, and even anyone advocating democratic or republican forms of government. Their plan was to conquer the world and impost a single state with a single religion upon it, the same ancient plan of "Saint" Constantine the Great [3rd - 4th centuries A.D.]

Most people are familiar with the fact that about 6 million jews died in their Holocaust. Most people don't know that most of those Jews were not religiously observant. They were modern jews, often socialists, and just as fairly described as agnostics or atheists. Add in the atheists killed by General Franco in Spain and you have a lot of dead atheists. But the really big numbers come from the invasion of the U.S.S.R. Some of the soldiers and civilians murdered in that invasion would have been Russian Orthodox, but the vast majority were atheists.

Why don't we know this, at least in the United States? American capitalists were happy to see Soviet soldiers chew up Hitler's armies. America emerged from the war as the only intact industrial power and proceeded to grab (in an economic sense, not by actual colonization) pretty much the entire world outside of the Soviet sphere. Americans were taught to hate communism. Critically, the U.S. had a large contingent of Roman Catholic voters who provided the balance of power for the Democratic Party over the Republican Party.

As a result, for education and propaganda, there was an instant re-branding of what happened in World War II. Hitler, a Catholic, was called a pagan. Franco was made into an ally even as he continued to execute people for the offense of not being Roman Catholic. Soviet casualties went without mentioning, and the term atheist was never used to describe them. Pius XII suddenly switched from being Hitler's ally against communism to being America's ally against communism.

The American people need to know this story, whether they want to hear it or not. An honest appraisal of World War II would probably have prevented the Vietnam War, which resulted from a Catholic U.S. president, John Kennedy, supporting an unpopular, minority Roman Catholic regime in South Vietnam against a nationalist, non-Catholic popular revolt.

The Roman Catholic Church continues to deny what it has done. It is a package of lies born from Constantine's anti-pagan reign of terror. Millions of Protestant Christians were murdered by the Catholic Church in Europe from the middle ages until the 18th century.

We need to remind American (and global) Protestants that while they might agree with the Pope on certain issues, he is a dangerous bedfellow. Atheists and Protestants are traditional allies on at least one issue: freedom of religion. We may argue with some Protestants about how the concept of freedom of religion is applied in public places, including public schools. That should not separate us on the basic idea of freedom on conscience and religious choice.

We must also keep in mind that any sufficiently large group of people will be complex when we look at its individuals. History has seen intolerant Protestant sects at times, and too often atheist dictators have treated religious belief or practice as criminal. Many modern Catholics do not want to force their religion on others. Those of us who believe in religious tolerance must stick together on that issue. On the other hand, we must not excuse the complicity of churches, or non-religious institutions, in crimes against humanity.

See also: At Event, a Rare Look at Putin's Life [Ellen Barry, New York Times]

Newt Gingrich's Open Presidency

2012-01-20T19:22:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich, who still has a decent chance of becoming President of the United States, actually has a lot in common with Barack Obama. Both are consummate politicians with spines so flexible they can stick their heads up their respective sphincters if they think they can find some votes there. Barack has the votes to get the Dem nomination, so let's take a look at Newt's situation.

Rick Perry, having proven yet again that people who would have been sterilized under the old eugenics programs can indeed become governors of Texas, finally dropped out and endorsed Newt. The field, if that is an appropriate word ("coven" comes to mind) has narrowed to Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul.

So much for right-wing evangelical control of Republican primaries. Mitt Romney is a religious man who practices monogamy. Unfortunately (in terms of Protestant bible brewing voters) he belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He and his fellow Mormons essentially deny the Roman Catholic and Protestant basis of faith: the Trinity, or three gods in One. Nor are the Mormons monotheists like Jews and Muslims. Mormons believe in a male god with a Heavenly Mother consort; we are all the children of Dad and Mom, just like Jesus himself. For all their family this and family that, Protestants overlook the fact that, according to the orthodox New Testament, Jesus had no family of his own. Nor did he recommend having one.

Rick Santorum must have been designed by God because he certainly did not evolve in any rational manner. He is Roman Catholic. When I was a child Protestants in South Carolina lumped in Roman Catholics with Jews and people of undesirable skin color. They still really don't trust the Pope and a bunch of Catholic doctrine that obviously is not in the Bible. Rick Santorum believes in the sanctity of human life until it emerges from the womb, after which it should not be eligible for food stamps, public schooling, or any other waste of taxpayer money. He is all for spending taxpayer money on homeland security and turning the whole world into an American armed camp. He's unemployed, so is probably hoping to be tapped for Vice President, an office that pays well and does not require anyone to get up early in the morning or break into a sweat during the day.

Ron Paul will do better in other primaries. South Carolina is a funny state. People (and not just Republican people) there have almost all experienced socialism and liked it. Only they call it patriotic public service: working in the military sector, usually beginning as soldiers. Ron Paul is the only candidate who is honest about the need to get the people of South Carolina disengaged from the military tit if the federal government is ever to get its debt and deficit under control. The other candidates probably know that, but are not about to say it when votes are at stake.

Newt needs to come in first or second to keep the donations rolling in. His native state of Georgia is next door, so a loss would be embarrassing. But it is hard to embarrass Newt. Despite being a deeply conservative man, he is also an intellectual who prides himself on new ideas.

Newt wants to be President. He already was once Speaker of the House, which back before the development of the Imperial Presidency was considered by many to be a more important job than the Presidency. The House controls taxation and appropriation, it represents the people, and it was considered the most important branch of government until around the Civil War.

Newt's new idea is the Open Presidency. It will make the world a better, more efficient place. If Americans select Newt Gingrich as their President, that will just be a start. He will play the field. If the Canadians want him, he can also be their Prime Minister. If the Mexicans show some love, he can be their President. Who knows, maybe he can be the head of the European Union too. Perhaps something more exotic would excite him: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia all are looking for better leaders right now. Perhaps he can become Emperor of the World.

Open Presidency? Haven't some Presidents been tired out by having to run just this one country? Sure, but Newt is an extra-energetic guy, and this is the era of multitasking. If anyone can keep more than one nation happy, it is Newt.

Also, Newt is a Roman Catholic. There is plenty of historical precedent for a Catholic being head of state of multiple nations. Such open marriages are made in heaven.

Pius XII and the Cordell Hull Lacuna

2012-01-13T10:48:00.000-08:00

It is a mystery, and a lot of secret history may hinge on it.

I came across it last night while reading The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. Or rather, I did not come across it, because it is a lacuna, or gap in the record.

Cordell Hull was one of the most important figures in American history, though he is now largely forgotten. The highest office he obtained was Secretary of State, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). But why was he appointed to that high office? He is the man who brought us the income tax, back when he was a Democratic representative from Tennessee. You would think at least the Tea Party would want to know about the guy. He also brought us Free Trade, or at least a major step in that direction. As Secretary of State he was largely responsible for an unnecessary war with Japan, while evading as long as possible doing anything about Adolf Hitler.
I am reading his Memoirs as my last major research task before drafting my U.S. War Against Asia. His Memoirs are vast: two volumes, 1800 pages of fine print. Only one printing was made [MacMillan, New York, 1948], with most copies doubtless bought by libraries. So far I am only to page 718, in the opening days of what later would be called World War II.

I mention the size of the book because it emphasizes the gap. Hull loved to document and explain his actions in glorious detail.

On page 713 Hull begins recounts his initiative to get Pope Pius XII involved in a peace process, starting in July 1939, well before Germany invaded Poland (regaining the territory lost in the peace settlement after World War I). This account goes on to page 716, corresponding to March 1941. While interesting of itself for the light it throws on U.S. and Vatican war aims, it flashed in my mind that I thought Vatican Secretary of State Eugene Pacelli, before he became Pope Pius XII, had relations with the FDR regime .

I pulled out my copy of Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell, and sure enough, Cardinal Pacelli had visited the United States from October 1936 until November [see pages 176-178]. He met with FDR on November 6, just after FDR had won a second term. They had made a deal, possibly set up and executed by Francis Spellman, then a bishop but later known as Cardinal Spellman. The Roman Catholic Church silenced Father Charles Coughlin, an influential radio-based critic of FDR. Pacelli, in return, received a promise that FDR would work to restore direct relations between the U.S. Government and the Vatican, which had made a treaty with Mussolini in 1929 (see Lateran Treaty) to become a sovereign state as well as the center of a global religion business.

The context for this is important and mostly forgotten. There were two core constituencies of the Democratic Party. There was the southern, racist, white, mostly conservative and Protestant southern wing. In the northern and western states, normally majoirty Republican, the Democratic Party was mainly urban, working class, and Roman Catholic. Holding that coalition together from the Civil War until the 1970s was a great political feat. FDR needed the Roman Catholic Church to stay in power. But the southern democrats did not like that very Church. At the same time, the Depression and popularity of the New Deal (or at least the blaming of Herbert Hoover) brought many former Republicans into the Democratic Party.

So why the lacuna? The Vatican Secretary of State visits America, makes some deals, even has a documented meeting with President Roosevelt. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, who in his own words ran most American foreign policy with only moderate direction from the President, has nothing to say about it?

You can call it speculation, but I call it analysis. Pacelli had been working on a long-term plan for Roman Catholic domination of the globe, starting with Europe. Mussolini was cooperating in Italy, but Adolf Hitler, a Catholic, had been chosen by Pacelli to lead God's work, which included converting or exterminating atheists, socialists, communists, and even democrats, republicans, protestants, and of course Muslims, Jews, and other religious sects. Roosevelt had a different agenda: American imperialism, on the model of the British Empire, with democracy in the home company serving as a cover for a global dictatorship. Both Roosevelt and the Pope (as well as Hitler and Stalin) knew the biggest global prize was the British Empire. The Popes wanted it brought back under their religious sovereignty, but that would be second step, after Hitler defeated Russia. FDR wanted it to collapse just enough to allow the U.S. to take it over.

The Popes hoped important men in the U.S., even if not religious themselves, would eventually make the U.S. a Catholics-only nation. In the meantime, they did not want the U.S. economy used to build up the armies of anti-fascist governments and groups in Europe. In 1936 the issue was Spain, where the Pope's pet General (Francisco) Franco had launched a civil war, murdering everyone who disagreed with him, including Roman Catholics who supported the democratically elected government. Probably Pacelli and FDR agreed the U.S. would not arm the elected Republican government of Spain, thus ensuring Franco's eventual victory.

What Pacelli wanted long term was for Hitler, when his armies were ready, to have the freedom to attack Russia (aka the USSR) and destroy Communism and Atheism with one blow. But it's a complex world. While Hitler did eventually attack Russia, and engulfed that region in an Atheist Holocaust, the Pope and Cardinal Spellman were not able to convert Roosevelt to Catholicism. With the defeat of the fascists Catholicism suffered a major setback. The Popes had to spend 30 years trying to convince people that they had never even liked Hitler, Petain, Mussolini and Franco. America did inherit the British empire, got the French empire thrown in as well, occupied Japan, and would have gotten China for good measure if it had not been for the Chinese Communist Party.

The negotiations with Pacelli in 1936 probably continued after he became Pope Pius XII; certainly Spellman retained the ear of both FDR and the pope. The peace negotiations of 1940 went nowhere because there were several very different versions of peace involved. Hitler wanted peace if he could keep Poland and prepare for further advances to the east, in line with the papal plan. Britain and France wanted peace if they got to keep their empires and Germany had to give Poland back. America wanted peace because it was good politics, but we know FDR was hoping the European powers would do a World War I repeat: draining each other so that the United States of America would become the new global imperialist power.

The Republican Five Year Plan

2012-01-08T14:01:00.000-08:00

Although I resolved to write no blogs while on vacation, watching just part of the Republican debate running up to the New Hampshire primary made my blood boil. Even allowing for the candidates needing to appeal to the most misguided wing of their party, the economic generalship they displayed can only be compared to plans for British mass infantry attacks on German trenches in France during World War I.

The central theme of economic planning, Republican style, is eliminating the taxes the rich pay. The truly rich, the already rich, actually don't worry that much about income taxes. Income taxes are for the working poor and the small class of professionals who get wages or salaries over $100,000 per year. The truly rich get their money from inheritances, capital gains, interest, and dividends. All the Republicans want to reduce taxes on these categories of non-income. Most of the candidates wanted to reduce the rates on these categories to zero. Mitt Romney, the moderate, settled for reasonably near zero. In addition, they want to cut the corporate tax rate.

They gave two rationales, both about as plausible as medieval Catholic tests for witchcraft. One is that these cuts only incidentally help the rich, but they really are aimed at helping the middle class. That might be true if by middle class you mean families with assets between $10 million and $100 million, which would indeed generate capital gains, interest and dividends worth worrying about.

The other is job creation, Want jobs? Stop taxing the rich!

If you believe that you probably also believe that God was so infertile he only could manage one child.

What will rich people and corporations do if their tax rates are lowered?

Oh, sure, they may add a job or two here or there. But mainly they will either spend the money on themselves or play financial games with it.

Rich people spending more money could create a few more jobs, especially for luxury leather goods workers in China (whose work product is labeled as Italian). A few people will upgrade from private prop planes to private jets, which I suppose would require a few more factory workers. More cocaine will have to be ponied into the U.S., which creates jobs. Mansions may be expanded or remodeled, expanding the construction work force by a few tens of thousands.

Let's talk about reality now.

Job creation and destruction is dependent on a large number of variables.Most jobs are created when employers (corporate and individual) think they can make larger profits by adding staff. Jobs of the self-employed type are also created by increased demand for services: if consumers are willing to pay (well) for a service, someone will provide it.

To increase demand, American consumers as a whole need to be able to spend more. This can be because more of them are gainfully employed, or because those that are employed are getting higher wages.

The Republican Five Year Plan, essentially central planning by capitalists to further enrich themselves at the expense of the working class, doe not address generating increased demand.

Jobs, and demand, would be generated naturally (in our mostly-free-market system) by increased employer and consumer confidence. Those rely, in turn, on a stable credit and money supply (the job of the Federal Reserve) and a lack of turmoil in Washington.

While the federal deficit and debt need to be addressed once we have an economic recovery, what we really need now is higher taxes on the rich and a closing of corporate tax loopholes and subsidies. The rich, unlike the poor, love money above all else. Tax them more and they will climb out of their $1000 bottle of wine stupors to make up the difference. To make up the difference, they will need to exploit more workers. To exploit more workers, they will have to hire them.

Higher taxes on inheritance, capital gains, dividends and interest are the best policy for job creation in the United States. The taxes could be set too high, but that is not our problem right now. When Republican President Dwight Eisenhower left office in 1960, during our period of greatest prosperity, the maximum tax rate was 91%. We may not need to go that high again, but rates should certainly be higher than they are now, if we want the U.S. to continue to be an economic leader of the world.

The Dictator of Saudi Arabia

2012-01-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

Meet the dictator of Saudi Arabia. But be careful not to call him that, even if you are as powerful as the New York Times or Fox News Network.

The New York Times calls him King Abdullah, not to be confused with King Abdullah II of Jordan. His full name is Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud.

Truth is, I am not sure anyone holds the official title of dictator in any nation. Even Joe Stalin of the former U.S.S.R. had the official title of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Saddam Hussein was President of Iraq. Adolf Hitler, the great dictator himself, was Fuhrer (leader) and Chancellor of Germany.

Dictator is what you call a strongman (or woman) you don't like.

Dictator Abdullah Al Saud is a friend of the United States, of current President Barack Obama, and of his predecessor President George W. Bush. A few days ago President Obama agreed to sell his friend a fleet of F-15 fighter jets. In return Boeing will get about $30 billion and might even squeeze out a bit of reportable net income to pay taxes on and help a bit with the federal deficit. Obama will carry Washington State as Boeing spreads the joy. Everyone will be happy, except anyone ending up on the receiving end of the F-15 weaponry. [See U.S. Bolsters Saudi Ties, 1/29/2011]

A few days before the big sale Dictator Abdullah Al Saud chopped off the head of a woman. Her crime: practicing witchcraft [See Saudis Behead Woman, U.S.A. Today, 12/12/2011]. You might think that "Hope for Change" Obama and his sidekick "I am a woman, vote for me" Hillary Clinton would not want to be too friendly to witch killers. But rhetoric for elections aside, neither Obama nor Clinton cares about human rights except when it is an excuse to beat up on some nation they don't like.

Do witches float in Saudi Arabia? If the U.S. mission is to interfere in the internal affairs of nations that abuse human rights, as we are currently doing in (at least) Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya and Yemen, why do we refer to the gentleman born as Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud as King Abdullah? Reminds me of King Cole and King Arthur. Or maybe King George.

Yes, I can hear you screaming OIL, but that is not enough. Saddam had oil, and Iran has oil. The difference is that as long as Dictator Abdullah plays along with the global corporate security state, he can behead anyone he wants. Of course he needs assistants, he does not have time to do all the beheading personally. After all, he has over thirty wives and far more children and a whole town full of grandchildren and parasitic relations to look after.

What can get you beheaded in Saudi Arabia, aside from witchcraft? The Dictator strictly enforces Sharia law, which is not quite as cruel as English law was 3 centuries ago, but let's just say that you had better walk right if you want to keep your head. If you are a homosexual boy in Saudi Arabia you had better hope you get sent to English Boarding School and never have to go back. Rape and drug trafficking can also lead to headlessness.

The Obama-Clinton team take a very dim view of Sharia law, with its discrimination against women, when enforced by any Islamic group in Somalia or Afghanistan. But in Saudi Arabia, it is okay.

But hey, the real enemy is Iran, right? They attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor and nuked Japan, right? Wait, it was Japan that attacked Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. that nuked two cities filled with civilians. Let's see, what did Iran do? Nothing, absolutely nothing wrong except ... not following U.S. orders.

But the majority of the Islamic faithful in Iran are of the Shia branch (think Protestant) while the Dictator of Saudi Arabia is Sunni (think Roman Catholic). The Dictator discriminates against Shia Muslims in his own nation, which is also ethnic discrimination, since way back when usually whole tribes either became Shia or Sunni. No no religious freedom, even within the Islamic fold.

If Hillary Clinton were anything more substantial than a bunch of cosmetics painted on animated corruption, she would go to Saudi Arabia and drive a car around, demanding rights for women, free elections, freedom of religion, free speech and free abortions. Even if it meant American F-15s buzzing the Arabian sky to protect her. Then she would go apologize to the Somali people for all the damage the U.S. has done to their nation.

Iowa Caucuses and the GOP Tragedy

2011-12-27T12:06:00.000-08:00

The State of Iowa plays the opening role in America's Presidential election years. It is a farm state with a population of just over 3 million, most noted for its rich soils and agricultural productivity. Despite that over 60% of its citizens now live in urban areas.

When Iowa became a state in 1846 (notably, a "free" state, one prohibiting slavery) the Whigs were slugging it out with the pro-slavery Democratic Party. When the Republican Party formed at the far-left of the American political spectrum in the 1850's, Iowans embraced it. In 1856 Iowa voted for the first Republican Presidential candidate John Fremont. The Civil War cemented the Republican triumph. Although the Democrats returned in strength during the Great Depression, afterwards Iowa reverted to the Republican fold.

Of late the Democrats and Republicans have been more evenly balanced in Iowa, with Clinton and even Al Gore carrying the state, then it switching to George W. Bush. Most recently Barack Obama captured the state in 2008, but Republicans captured most statewide offices in 2010.

Next week Iowa will hold its partisan caucuses. These require more of citizens than just showing up and voting; they have to actually sit through a meeting. The process amplifies partisanship, since only the most committed partisans are willing to engage in it.

No one substantial is challenging President Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination this year, despite his unpopularity in his own party. That leaves us with the Republican lot of would-be Presidents.

Pretty much all of the Republicans are more experienced than Obama was when he became President. On the whole the problem is not the candidates, though I have enjoyed criticizing each of them individually. The problem for America is the Republican activists who will dominate the caucuses.

Historically, there is a lot good to be said about the Republican Party. They abolished slavery and tried to make the former slaves equal in the eyes of society and the law. They treated the American Indian tribes much better than the Democrats ever had. They tried to do something about America's alcoholism problem. Excepting the Spanish American War, they were the anti-war party until President Eisenhower retired in 1960. The Republican core values of being an economically responsible, law-abiding, moral citizen and good neighbor are hard to argue with.

Where did the people who dominate the Republican primary process come from? It is as if the doors of hell have opened and the legions marched forth. Instead of taking responsibility and building an economically strong, just, and durable America, they want to blame anyone but themselves for their troubles. They don't want to pay taxes even though Iowa is probably the most heavily subsidized state in the nation. Iowa's relative prosperity is propped up by food stamps (which prop up grain prices), ethanol subsidies, and direct crop subsidies.

The Christianity of these people makes Islam and atheism both look good. It is a narrowly-constructed Christianity, carefully avoiding entire directives from God himself. Jesus said to pay your taxes and stop complaining ["Give unto Caesar ..."]. He said to be kind and charitable. He asked Christians to find a way to feed the hungry even if only a few loaves and fishes are available. The activist Republicans instead want to regulate birth control, deny human rights to women and homosexuals, and let the weak starve and freeze.

The Republican activists pretend to be supporters of free-market capitalism, but mainly they have a criminal mentality that should frighten all decent American citizens. They want to make money by destroying the environment, destroying the health of their neighbors, and endangering the lives of workers. Why not just sell crack or weed or untaxed bathtub gin, if you need money?

I'm not saying that every government agency or regulation is necessary, but I do know that the threat of enforcement deters crime. Have we had too little economic crime these past 10 years? Too few Madoff's and mortgage derivative scams? Too few nuclear reactor meltdowns? Too few oil spills? I think not.

I know there are plenty of sensible Republicans out there. It is still a big party. With a little bit of reform—throwing out the Tea Party mad dogs and the corporate security state operatives—it could be a beloved American Party again.

But who could those sensible Republicans vote for in Iowa?

While I like Ron Paul's stance on dismantling the U.S. global military empire (which would straighten out the federal budget deficit pretty quickly), his love of nutty, discredited ideas like the Gold Standard limits him to being my second choice.

I think Mitt Romney is by far the most competent of the Presidential candidates in the field. This might seem like a dangerous thing to Democrats, who would prefer an less competent opponent, like Michele Bachman. But consider:

When highly competent people have been elevated to being President of the United States they have usually stepped outside of the narrow interests of their pasts. It Mitt's case, I don't think his Latter Day Saints upbringing or Bain Capital days will prejudice him.

I think he is the kind of individual that will try to serve all of the American people if elected. He won't just serve his Wall Street friends, or any particular constituency. He'll do what a President can to get the economy humming, without disregarding environmental or consumer safety. He'll stand up to corrupt interests in Washington, and to the worst impulses of the Tea Party.

Let me repeat: Romney excels in competence. He didn't use his family fortunes to put coke up his nose and then party on borrowings against his inheritance. He got both an MBA and a Law Degree from Harvard in just four years, no easy feat. He excelled in business and then served as governor of Massachusetts.

Romney makes me think of Joe Kennedy, the father of President John Kennedy. In his early life Joe was a lot less ethical than, but just as competent as, Mitt Romney. Joe got rich on Wall Street and was notorious for his slick dealings that made him a billionaire (he even sold his stock holdings well before the 1929 market crash). When it was time to reform Wall Street, President Franklin Roosevelt chose Joe Kennedy to be the first head of the SEC. Having used every trick in the book himself, Joe was able to create a set of regulations that served American investors, large and small alike, from the 1930's until a new wave of mischief was invented in the 1980's.

Of course, there is the opposite story of competence, Robert Rubin, U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1995 to 1999. He used his position to gut regulations, including the Depression-era Glass-Steagall act, thereby heavily contributing to the economic calamities of the following decade.

So, if Mitt Romney becomes President, let us hope he turns out to be a Joe Kennedy, not a Robert Rubin.

In any case, it would take three or four Barack Obamas to match the competence of one Mitt Romney. Muddling through is not what we need right now. Four years of that is enough.

I am not, however, endorsing Mr. Romney. He is still part of the two-party, corporate security state system. I will probably support the Green Party nominee, Gill Stein, or an independent candidate, depending on who emerges. Mitt is just the best I think we can hope for out of the old, hopefully dying, two-party system.

De Facto Governments and U.S. Foreign Policy

2011-12-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

On this Christmas day you might want to consider the virtue of our early American republic's foreign policy.

That foreign policy can be summed up in two key ideas: de facto recognition of governments, and non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations, including those with de facto governments.

The best known statement of these policies was made in the Monroe Doctrine. President James Monroe had fought in the Revolutionary War, served in the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, and played a key role in getting the new Constitution adopted by the State of Virginia. In 1823 President Monroe warned against Spain trying to regain control of any of its former North or South American colonies that had become independent. Partly this reflected a sympathy for Republics and Democracies over the reassertion of monarchies then prevalent in Europe. Partly it reflected the desire of the ruling class of the U.S. to exert influence over a potential commercial empire. But consider it as just principled, sincere policy.

As to the colonies still in the Western Hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine stated, "With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power, we have not interfered, and shall not interfere." It is notable, however, that in the Spanish-American War the United States not only interfered with the remnants of the Spanish Empire, but grabbed Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines.

Further, the doctrine with regard to Europe was "not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it."

It makes sense that the founding citizens of the United States of America should see the value of recognizing de facto governments, and of one nation not interfering in the internal affairs of another nation. The Continental Congresses and individual State governments that fought the British Empire during the American Revolution were precisely de facto governments. The British legal system did not recognize them, nor, at first, did any other members of the international community. The Royal governors of the British Empire were the legal, de jure, government of the British colonies, and in certain places, the very real government right up until the King agreed to the independence of the colonies.

Non-interference was also important to our early republican democracy-in-the-making. Monroe, Patrick Henry & their crew were not in a position to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations, but the great powers of Europe had occasional reason to interfere in the relatively weak United States.

Of course, like all general principles, de facto recognition and non-interference have their particular issues in real world circumstance. Before taking on that complexity, it should be admitted that neither principle got in the way of American appetites for land speculation and empire. American Indian nations were interfered with and stomped on with little or no justification. Florida was grabbed from Spain, Northern Mexico was grabbed, Hawaii was grabbed (its native de facto and de jure government ignored). For good measure the de facto government of the Philippines was not recognized, the U.S. preferring to pretend that Spain still held the colony, so that it might be transferred easily to U.S. control.

Basically, the more powerful the United States government (and its economic ruling class) became, the more the U.S. interfered in the affairs of other nations. Bullying of Latin American nations became a regular event as the 19th century wore on (and we ran out of Native American tribes to reduce to ethnic "reservations"), puppets were installed when feasible, and starting with President Woodrow Wilson, U.S. troops were sent in on almost any pretext. In Asia, even before the U.S. program of genocide in the Philippines, we started manipulating the Chinese and forced Japan to provide fueling stations for the U.S. Navy (which needed to refuel on its way to and from bullying the Chinese).

Many Americans wished we had done some interfering with the Spanish Civil War and the National Socialist rise to power in Germany in the 1930's. They argued that if we had supported the Republicans in Spain, World War II would not have happened. That, and Pearl Harbor, was pretty much the end of non-interference. During World War II the U.S. even set up the United Nations to provide a fig leaf of democracy for the new global empire. Internal interference became the rule.

Unfortunately the new bossing-other-nations-around foreign policy of the U.S. has not been used to promote democracy, freedom of religion and speech, and other rhetorical ideals. In every case the sole deciding factor has been the "interests," mainly economic, but sometimes strategic, of the capitalist, imperialist class. Examples could fill a book on U.S. (or global) history since World War II. Just a few:

When it looked like elections would result in parties winning that were not considered "pro-U.S.," the U.S. has installed dictators. South Korea, South Vietnam, and Iran, were major examples in the 1940's and 1950's. Most Latin American countries have suffered at times under U.S. backed military regimes in the last half-century.

Elections are only encouraged when they will get rid of anti-U.S. regimes. This was true in Eastern Europe. The elections held in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been shut down had anti-U.S. politicians won them. We saw that in Algeria in the 1980's. Only elections won by pro-American political parties are honored by the State Department.

Somalia is a rather spectacular case of counter-productive interference in foreign nations. The United States did not like a mildly Islamic regime (the Islamic Court System) so we paid to overthrow it. The result was a de facto government by Al Shabaab fighting a non-stop civil war with a U.S. appointed and financed "provisional" government. The holocaust of the Somali people this past decade can be directly attributed to the actions of the U.S. governments led by Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

But what else would you expect from the new, pseudo-democratic American corporate security state?

Aside from the likely Green Party presidential nominee, Jill Stein, the only current presidential candidate who supports non-interference as a foreign policy is Ron Paul. Hopefully when the election comes around you will be able to vote for non-interference, rather than feeling you have to vote for one or the other of the two corporate security state nominated candidates.

Legal Basis for the Separation of States

2011-12-18T16:35:00.000-08:00

Suppose the citizens of one of the states constituting the United States, for whatever reason, wanted to separate from the United States. How could they do that?

So far in U.S. history there is only one precedent. The states of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, by the end of 1861, withdrew from the United States of America by votes within their states. President Abraham Lincoln, supported by a Republican Party-controlled Congress, simply made war (the Civil War) on the untied states, and the federal government won that war.

Since then the predominant thinking in the re-United States has been that a state cannot separate from the Union because military force will be used by the federal government to overcome any such manifestation of local democracy. Kind of like when Czechoslovakia tried to opt out of the Soviet Block. Because the issue of slavery was entangled with the issue of separation of states during the Civil War, it is still hard to have a rational discussion of the topic.

Clearly the U.S. Constitution allows for an amendment that would either allow a particular set of states to separate, or would set rules for separation in general. In fact, one could dissolve the entire Union with a Constitutional amendment. However, before writing such an amendment, we should look at the Constitution as it now stands.

Reading the Constitution, you will not find a single phrase that says that a state cannot withdraw from the union. Nor does it say that a state can withdraw. This is not that different from many issues of federal powers. How broad the specific powers granted the the Federal government are to be in practice has been a constant source of argument and litigation since the ink was dry on the original Constitution.

A majority of Americans opposed the Constitution as written at the time. To get it passed by the nine required states a great deal of bribery and intimidation was used. Also, it was promised that a number of amendments would be appended to the Constitution, to make the package more attractive.

Regarding the separation of states, clearly Amendment X, the Tenth Amendment, has the greatest bearing. Many people voted for the new Constitution with the idea that their state could withdraw from the Constitution if the whole experiment did not work out. They feared a central government that could become as tyrannical as the British Empire had been. Hence the amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

I don't think you can get more clear than that without illegally declaring war on your neighbors, as Abraham Lincoln did. No where in the Constitution did it say that the Federal government could prevent a state government from withdrawing. The power to decide whether to be part of the United States was clearly a power "reserved to the States."

To force people to be governed against their will by any government, including the Federal government of the United States, is against the natural right of the people to govern themselves. That was recognized by the architects of the American revolution, or at least was prominent in their rhetoric.

If citizens of a state should ever decide they want to separate from the United States, I suggest they go about it with more care than the State of South Carolina did in 1860.

First, the government of the State in question should write a state law saying that it has they right to separate and is indeed separating. Then this should be the basis of trying a case in the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Supreme Court is most likely, in fact certain, to rule that the State cannot secede by virtue of its own legislation. The point is not to expect an honest verdict, but to get a statement of why they cannot rule themselves, and of the construction of the Constitution the court uses to rationalize this un-democratic ruling.

Then, having been ruled to still be part of the United States, the state needs to introduce legislation in the U.S. Congress allowing it to leave. Its leaders should also try to pass a U.S. constitutional amendment making it clear what the rules are for leaving.

Of course, this whole path could be cut off by a Constitutional Amendment saying, roughly, "no State shall be allowed to separate from the United States, and the President and Congress shall have the power to use the military to enforce this provision."

The United States went to a great deal of trouble to break up the former nation of Yugoslavia just a couple of decades ago. We broke Vietnam in half in the 1950's when we did not like the projected outcome of elections there. I don't see why U.S. states should not be granted the same rights of divorce that the U.S. empire has so gladly imposed on weaker nations.

On the other hand, no one should want a messy divorce. Any such separation should be mutual and amicable.

But, given sufficient unaddressed grievances, a Declaration of Independence, backed by the right to self-defense, may be worth a try.

Immigrants and Housing Proposal

2011-12-12T09:59:00.000-08:00

I was surprised to find the following in the New York Times this morning:

"Two senators, Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, have proposed a bill that would offer three-year visas to foreigners who spent at least $500,000 to buy homes in the United States. But the idea has many opponents who fear expanding the nation’s oversupply of workers (a worry not shared by a fair number of economists)."

That was in a longer article, Goodbye House, Hello Pot Plantation by Catherine Rampell. There are over 1.2 million for sale and empty houses in the U.S. today, including hundreds of thousands repossessed by banks but being held off the market. On the other hand moving the unemployment number back to 5% would soak up all of this housing (partly in the form of rentals) and create more than enough demand for another construction boom.

We are in a massive housing and economic Catch 22. We probably can't get to 5% unemployment unless there is strong new construction. Housing construction requires local labor (can't be done overseas) and the materials used themselves are heavy enough that shipping is a large cost component, so they tend to be regional as well. In addition banks are reluctant to loan to home buyers. That would change if housing prices firmed.

I proposed moving house-buying immigrants to the front of the line back in A Cheap, Quick Housing and Economy Fix [November 18, 2008]. A number of people thought it was a good idea, but getting traction in anything related to immigration is difficult.

If you want to look at the Lee-Schumer bill or track it through Congress, it is S. 1746: Visa Improvements to Stimulate International Tourism to the United States of America Act. Here is the key text:

(a) Nonimmigrant Status- Section 101(a)(15) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended by section 5(a), is further amended by adding at the end the following:
‘(X) subject to section 214(t), an alien who, after the date of the enactment of the VISIT USA Act--
‘(i)(I) uses at least $500,000 in cash to purchase 1 or more residences in the United States, which each sold for more than 100 percent of the most recent appraised value of such residence, as determined by the property assessor in the city or county in which the residence is located;
‘(II) maintains ownership of residential property in the United States worth at least $500,000 during the entire period the alien remains in the United States as a nonimmigrant described in this subparagraph; and
‘(III) resides for more than 180 days per year in a residence in the United States that is worth at least $250,000; and
‘(ii) the alien spouse and children of the alien described in clause (i) if accompanying or following to join the alien.’.

One of my complaints about the New York Times and other traditional web sources is that they hate it when a link takes you off their site, unless it is a paid ad. Not only do they not link to one of the bill tracking sites (there are several), they do not even give the official name of the bill, or its number. So getting more detail is unnecessarily difficult in this hyperlinked age. That is poor reporting, in my view. Probably not because of the reporters themselves, but because of "policy."

Richard Grossman, Compost in Peace

2011-12-05T13:28:00.000-08:00

Richard Grossman, a noted political activist in the United States of America, died this November 22, 2011. Richard was known for his criticism of for-profit corporate control of the American (and global) political system, economy, and culture. Richard had no issues with criticizing other dissidents who did not agree with him on strategy and tactics. To honor his memory, I will not refrain from criticism (as is typical in a requiem) while I share my personal experiences about Richard.

Richard tried to influence the discourse of American environmental and pro-democracy dissidents, with varying degrees of success. I had never heard of him until my wife, Jan Edwards, began working with Alliance for Democracy and made herself the first modern crusader against the legal doctrine of corporate personhood (c. 1999). I could not say exactly when Richard came into the mix, as I was never "wowed" by him or his organization, POCLAD (Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy).

But at some point, when Jan was determined to get the City of Point Arena to pass a law against corporate personhood, I became aware that she was talking on the telephone to one Richard Grossman, among others. Richard never really adapted to computers (he was born on August 10, 1943), but large packages of xeroxed copies of old articles about corporate power began arriving at our house.

Jan had a fixed idea that corporate personhood was the central evil of the modern era. Richard did not agree with that; he tried to expand her attention to other issues of corporate power. But he did provide us with a lot of material about corporate personhood, notably Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights by Carl J. Mayer [Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 4, March 1990] and a series of articles from the 1950's by Howard Jay Graham. These were fine, but too much, too fast to serve as introductory material.

No one at POCLAD had written anything substantial about corporate personhood. Jan, assigning duties to our small local team of activists, decided I should write the first modern introduction to the topic. This resulted in Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy.

With a million things going wrong in the world, do-gooders argue among themselves about priorities, strategies and tactics. Richard stated, strongly, that he thought the environmental and social justice movements were taking the wrong approaches. He believed that because of corporate power activists might win an occasional point (the Clean Air Act, or temporarily protecting an individual habitat) but were regularly losing ground on the whole.

Richard Grossman wanted to challenge fundamental legal doctrines that (with money) are the foundations of corporate power. These include, but are not limited to, corporate charters being treated as contracts, the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, limited liability, and the ability of corporate money to influence elections.

The question activists asked, in return, was how was that to be done? What was to be sacrificed (streams, mountaintops, oceans, human beings) in the meantime if activists stopped what they were doing and all ran to law libraries and spent a half-century arguing for legal reform?

Richard's point was not to train more environmental or social justice lawyers. They are plentiful enough, so much so that many can't earn a living, or even end up being employed by corporations. He did not want to fight corporations within the law. He wanted to change the law.

Changing the law really happens in only one of three ways. You can win Supreme Court cases. You can change the law with legislation. Or you can have a revolution and write the law anew.

The Revolution never came in Richard Grossman's lifetime. This is the sad fate of most revolutionaries. I cannot fault Richard for trying, and for thinking outside the usual boxes.

Knowing a little history, however, makes one wonder if Richard ever deserved to be the intellectual leader of American dissidents, as was clearly his wish. Richard moved from being the executive director of Greenpeace in the 1980's to a messenger of the nature of corporate power.

It was not a new message. You probably did not know old-time American Communist Party members, but they talked a lot about corporate power. It tied in well with their strategy of radicalizing labor unions so that the working class (or at least its authoritarian vanguard) could come to power in this bastion of capitalism. Anarchists, too, long pre-dated Grossman in their analysis of the System, but did not care to try to change obscure doctrines like corporate personhood. They wanted, and want, to go straight to building a new society out of the ashes of the old.

Without the legal framework of corporate power we would most likely just have private ownership of large businesses, much as is the case in the Soviet Union today.

How do you de-power the ruling class when they can buy politicians and courts and, yes, can even divert activist organizations simply by strategic donations of money? Richard could never answer that question. Perhaps simply raising taxes on the rich, in particular with estate taxes, would do the trick. Taxes could break up the growing "title of nobility" that the Constitution warns against in Article I, Section 9.

Perhaps with a third party. Perhaps with the tactics being practiced by CELDF or MoveToAmend (both groups spawned by Grossman). Perhaps by anarchists, or communists, or social democrats, or revolutionary environmentalists. Why, it is not absolutely impossible that reforms could come from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

No one knows. Richard Grossman's greatest trait was his willingness to revise his views. He kept revising them until the day he died. Maybe if more people did more thinking outside their usual boxes, we might collectively find a solution that can transition us to an environmentally sound, ecologically sustainable, and culturally rich world.

Professors Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich, and Woodrow Wilson

2011-11-29T16:13:00.000-08:00

This week Newton Gingrich has become the Republican Party Presidential primary candidate best positioned to beat front-runner Mitt Romney. Before he was a politician Newt was a History Professor. President Obama was a Law Professor before he became a politician. When you look at the history of American Presidents, college professor is not a very common occupation. The other exception was Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor of Political Economy at Princeton.

While Newt has not been, and may not be President, he did hold what I believe should be a more important office, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (from 1995 to 1999).

There is a saying that if you can't do, teach, but teaching is an important human activity. College professors also usually do some research and writing. How good is that as preparation to be President of the United States of America?

Woodrow Wilson served as President of the United States from 1913 until the beginning of 1921. Before that he served as governor of New Jersey from 1911. He is typically portrayed as a progressive President who also showed his spine by siding with the British Empire and the French Empire against Germany in World War I.

While Wilson did support some needed reforms like women's right to vote, on the whole he was a romantic reactionary. Most notably, he was a racist. When he ran for President in 1912, as a Democrat he could depend on the "Solid" racist, south, where Negroes (a respectful term then) were not allowed to vote. He made campaign promises to Negro voters in northern states, gaining many of their votes. Then he presided over segregation of the federal government, even instructing Post Offices to set up racially segregated windows to serve customers. He also fired most black federal employees and appointed white southerners in the places.

In other words, although Wilson was able to break with the past on some issues, his mind was not unusually far ranging. He lectured the nation and Congress, but all too often his lectures had no basis in human experience. I would argue that Wilson was a disaster, and that disaster echoed through the 20th century, adversely affecting not just Americans, but people around the globe.

For instance Woodrow Wilson thought no one should drink alcohol. Is that progressive or conservative? He refused to serve it at the White House, and on January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, making "intoxicating liquors" illegal throughout the United States. Certainly consumption of alcohol has some bad effects. But Prohibition did not stop the flow of alcohol. Instead it created black markets and attendant crime and political corruption. Just like Barack Obama's attacks on medical marijuana clinics are doing today.

Imperialism was a big issue in the 1912 elections. The United States had become an imperialist system in the late 1800's. Both Democratic Party farmers (the nation was not yet mainly urban) and reformers were against imperialism, and candidate Wilson said anti-imperialistic things, just as Barack Obama would hint he was an anti-war, anti-defense spending candidate in 2008. But Wilson invaded more nations that any other President, not even counting World War I. He invaded Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Mexico. For good measure he bought the Virgin Islands. In the super-hypocrisy department he signed the Jones Act in 1916, which promised independence to the Philippines. The Philippines did not get independence until the Japanese granted it to them during World War II.

For Wilson the idea was more important than the deed. Because he thought the South should have won the Civil War, he supported the idea of what we would now call national autonomy. Back then it was called national self-determination. But, after World War I, when the Japanese asked that Asia be de-colonized, Wilson vetoed that idea. Self-determination, he made clear, was for white people, not subhumans, which is how he regarded non-white ethnic groups. This insult to the Japanese and the people of Asia would result in the disintegration of China, a number of colonial wars, World War II, and then more colonial wars, ending only when the British Empire, a bastion of autocratic governance unparalleled in history, ceded Hong Kong back to the nation of China.

Barack Obama, too, is better at speaking than at getting things done. That is probably a good thing, considering the blow back the U.S. is getting from his attempts to boss around Islamic people. If Barack does not get a second term, at least his acts are unlikely to cause as much damage in the 21st century as President Wilson did in the 20th.

Which brings us to Newt Gingrich. If you compare Newt to Wilson or Obama, he is clearly the more competent guy. Even though I disagree with his policies, his strategy and tactics in the 1990's were brilliant.

The problem with Newt is not that he does not know history. I grant him a knowledge of history. His problem is that his mind filters out all the facts that do not match his pre-determined conclusions about how America and the world should be governed.

He has not even learned the lesson of the Great Depression, and a whole string of forgotten depressions earlier in U.S. and world history: capitalism destroys itself, left unchecked. Another lesson: too much concentration of wealth leads to poorly performing national economies. Another lesson: empires that spend too much on their militaries suffer economic collapse.

I am forced to conclude that electing former professors to be President is not, in general, a good idea. There could be exceptions, of course, but neither Mr. Gingrich nor President Obama is one of them.

Deliberately Forgetting History

2011-11-26T19:19:00.000-08:00

In his Memoirs former U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote:

"Japan violently and fraudulently misrepresented the idea of the Monroe Doctrine, deliberately forgetting that that doctrine did not give us the right to conquer and occupy or dominate sections of the Western Hemisphere or close them off to the trade of other nations. And she ignored the basic concept of the Monroe Doctrine, which was to preserve the security and independence of the nations in the Western Hemisphere. Also, the Monroe Doctrine was designed to prevent foreign nations from making conquests in this Hemisphere, whereas the Far East was being threatened by no foreign nation whatever." [page 282]

As an example of corporate security state thinking, this is perfect. Cordell was writing about the situation in 1933 and afterwards [the Memoirs were published in 1948]. This same type of thinking infects America today and applies to such perceived enemy states as Iran, Pakistan, Palestine and Somalia, or any others that may arise.

Without in any way excusing Japanese militarism, lack of democracy, war crimes or crimes against humanity from that period, I want to focus on the American side of the war and peace equation.

In case you need a refresher, James Monroe was President when he issued his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823, part of which came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. It basically said we would not interfere in European affairs, and expected the Europeans to keep their noses out of North and South America. At the time, however, many nations in the Americas, including Canada, were still European colonies.

Hull's interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine is questionable, but then the Doctrine may be seen to have evolved over time. He says the doctrine "was designed to prevent foreign nations from making conquests." However, it does not seem to have been designed to prevent the United States of America from making conquests. Between 1823 and 1833 the U.S.A. conquered: a variety of Native American Indian nations; northern Mexico (now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California); Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. In addition we invaded various North and South American nations on a regular basis, and did our best to set up puppet governments in those that were nominally independent.

So really what Hull could have said, had be been franker, was that a Japanese Monroe Doctrine in East Asia was feared to be exactly like the actual practice of the U.S. under the Monroe Doctrine. Elsewhere in his Memoirs, Hull claimed to be a keen scholar of American history. He served (but did not fight) in the Spanish American war. So it was Hull that was deliberately forgetting.

Adding color, consider the source of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt family fortune [Roosevelt was President while Hull was Secretary of State. His uncle Theodore was the genocidal maniac who presided over the Philippines genocide]. On the Delano side it came from illegally running opium into China [See Warren Delano]. When China tried to stop the opium trade the result was the Opium Wars. Did the U.S. side with China against Britain in those wars? No. Britain grabbed Hong Kong and both the U.S. and Britain rewarded themselves with the de facto commercial overlordship of China. The U.S. even invaded China during the Boxer Uprising. U.S. gunboats ran up and down Chinese rivers bossing Chinamen around during the early 20th century, and were still there in 1933.

Hull was doing the classic "do as I say, not as I do" dance. He did not object to American, British, Dutch, or French colonies in East Asia. They already existed, and the horrendous treatment of the native peoples by those powers were of no concern to Hull.

It seems long ago now, but in 1933 two incidents in particular were fresh in Japanese memory. One was the U.S. conquest of the Philippines. Not the cowardly surrender of the Spanish garrison during the Spanish-American war, but the genocidal war against Philippine independence. The lesson some Japanese took from the Philippines was that Americans would kill hundreds of thousands of Asians to prevent democracy and self-determination of nations.

The other lesson was in treaty breaking. Hull says the Japanese don't honor their treaties. Putting aside the stretch of broken treaties made with Native Americans, there was the annexation of Hawaii. The U.S., France, Great Britain, and Japan had all signed a treaty saying that none of them would grab Hawaii, so that it would remain an independent nation. The U.S. annexed Hawaii in 1898. At the time the Japanese were the largest ethnic group living in the islands.

So it was the United States government that taught Japan that treaties are a convenience, to be scrapped when inconvenient.

Getting back to the Monroe Doctrine, a close look shows that the U.S. promises not to meddle in the affairs of nations outside of the Western hemisphere. It says we will recognize de facto governments. That means we won't try to overthrow governments, even if we don't like them.

Deliberately forgetting that policy, lately we have interfered in Palestine, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia.

Americans like to think that ours is an exceptional nation. If that means excepting ourselves from the ordinary rules of ethics and international law, we are correct.

Note that today's news that the U.S. attacked a Pakistan border outpost shows that my analysis in U.S. Close to War with Pakistan [April 23, 2011] was and is, sadly, correct.

Gang Rape of Somalia

2011-11-19T11:18:00.000-08:00

Somalia is being gang-raped. The attempts by the people of Somalia to establish their own independent government, culture and society have been repeatedly thwarted in this last decade (actually, since about 1500) by foreign invasions. In the current round the invaders are from Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Burundi. Other nations are thinking of jumping in. The United States of America is supplying funding and military training for the rapists, as well as attacking Somalis with armed drones. There are substantial rumors that the United States has, at least occasionally, put its own gunmen and spies on the ground. France too, has joined in, firing artillery from warships and providing "air support" to the invading troops.

The American propaganda campaign is running full tilt, with even National Public Radio (NPR) and the New York Times running extremely biased, anti-Somali "news." They do not even allow the Somali side of the story to be told. The new enemy, the de facto government of the people of Somalia, is simply described as an Al Qaeda affiliate. In other words, dreaded terrorists.

A bit of analysis reveals the cracks and crevices in the lying picture promulgated by the CIA and the U.S. government. Our puppet provisional government in Somalia admittedly, until recently, controlled only a few blocks of Mogadishu (the capital city) out of the entire nation, and that with the "help" of invading armies from Uganda and Burundi. Recently the de facto (real) government, usually referred to as Al Shabaab (but in fact a broad coalition of anti-U.S. Somali nationalists), pulled back its troops from Mogadishu. They were simply not strong enough to expel the U.S. financed government and the gunmen from the African Union, so they decided to cool the war and consolidate in the vast areas of Somalia controlled by the Somali people themselves.

Meanwhile, the U.S. (and probably France and maybe other traditional imperialist powers) paid Kenya and Ethiopia to invade. Kenya thought its professional, western-style army, complete with tanks and fighter-bombers, would quickly defeat the Somalis. Their army seems to be bogged down and probably would be wiped out if deprived of air support. To further enrage Somalis, who are mainly Islamic in religion and culture, mainly-Christian Kenya made a pact with Israel for weapons and training.

All of the invaders are largely Christian nations. This has become a religious war of the worst kind, and again Islam is the victim. How is it that Christians and Jews portray Islam as an aggressor religion when their has been no Islamic aggression (in the sense of nation invading) since the 1800's? When Jews have invaded Palestine, France and Britain invaded the old Turkish Islamic sultanate, while the U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and is threatening Yemen, Pakistan, and Iran?

And who is the gang rapist in chief? That would be none other than the President of the United States, Barack Obama, head of the Democratic Party. Americans are worried about their economy and have a simplistic nationalist outlook that makes them very gullible in matters like Somalia. They can't get accurate information, and even when they do are so trained in hypocrisy they don't apply ordinary rules of decent behavior to their own government.

Then there is the United Nations, which gives international weight to the imperialist slaughter of the innocents. The U.N. was created as an instrument for big power (notably U.S.-British) domination of the world. In its history it has never protected a small nation from invasion by the great powers. It is not a democracy with each nation of the world represented in proportion to its population. In its essence it is a dictatorship by the majority (Britain, France, and the U.S.) of the permanent members of the security council.

The only way to end the tragedy in Somalia is for all foreign powers to withdraw. But there is no force that can make them withdraw. The Somalis are not going to like foreign, Christian thugs running their country. So be prepared for a tragic, long, long war of national resistance.

Occupy Political Offices

2011-11-14T10:56:00.000-08:00

"Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose.
Anything goes."

When Herman Cain can put his hands upon
Any skirt that he should chance upon
Heaven knows,
Anything goes.

I chanced upon yet another ancient surprise this weekend, the Child Labor Amendment, proposed in 1924. Mostly child labor has since become illegal or highly regulated, but in 1924 children were still working under appalling conditions in a variety of industries. Not only was there not a federal law prohibiting child labor, but the Supreme Court had struck down, over the years, a number of state laws prohibiting or regulating child labor (just as they had struck down other labor laws.). For instance, in 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that even in the federal district of Washington, D.C., a minimum wage law for women and children was unconstitutional, in Adkins v. Children's Hospital.

The Amendment was opposed not just by the crueler members of the business community, but by the Catholic Bishops. In their wisdom they felt the amendment would lead, eventually, to government control of child rearing. In Catholic Countries they took a different attitude. There the Church used the Government to force Catholicism upon all children. That would be a central dogma of fascism in the next two decades, and in Spain until the death of General Franco.

Text of this amendment, worth considering (for style, not content) by those who are moving to amend the U.S. Constitution:

Section 1. The Congress shall have power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age. Section 2. The power of the several States is unimpaired by this article except that the operation of State laws shall be suspended to the extent necessary to give effect to legislation enacted by the Congress.

28 states passed the amendment before the drive petered out.

At least they needed laborers in the 1920s. The U.S. people had made out like bandits in World War I. In fact, the U.S. people acted exactly like bandits in World War I. We sold our excess products to the warring parties and loaned Britain and France vast sums of money. Then we entered the war at the last minute and helped Britain and France to loot Germany. Holding most of the world's money at the end of the war, and reaping interest and principal on the loans, enough trickled down from the big New York banks to allow the entire nation to have a party that included a real estate boom and a stock market anyone could get rich playing.

Then things fell apart. Capitalism fell apart without any help from government regulations. Don't forget that.

Occupy Wall Street and its spawn continues to evolve and exchange DNA with labor unions and political ideas and trends of all kinds. Can Occupy, or some related organization-like substance, do what the Tea Party did in 2010? Which is to say, convert ideas into practice.
That would take something the Left is very bad at: winning political offices. Winning here meaning elected our own people, and ones with backbone, rather than allowing career politicians to slightly change their election rhetoric and appear to be aligned with us.

We have a big disadvantage compared to the Tea Party: a lack of billionaires willing to fund our campaigns in the way necessary to actually win political elections. But we also have some serious cultural issues of our own holding us back. First, like the Tea Party, we mostly don't really like government. But, like the Tea Party, we should not let that stop us. We should capture the government that is there now and make it smaller. We should cut Pentagon spending and eliminate an entire branch of the armed services, the Marine Corps. We should minimize the DEA. We should abolish the system of farm subsidies. We should kill federal transportation dollars and allow the states to take care of their own highways.

We should also close all tax loopholes used by the rich. All capital gains in liquid assets (stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments) should be taxed at the regular income tax rates, with capital gains taxed the year they accrue (not waiting until an instrument is sold, as is currently the practice). The oil and gas industry should lose its subsidies and tax breaks. Once we start paying down the deficit run up by the Pentagon and oil companies, we can adjust tax rates to optimize happiness for the rest of us.

But to do all that, we need our own people in office. We need the kind of backbone in the state legislatures and Congress that the Tea Party has now. And that means pissing off the Democratic Party establishment. Pissing on them until they go away and we can occupy their old offices. Face up to reality: in the short run we can't occupy many offices held by Republicans. But we could occupy a significant number of offices held by establishment Democrats.

That means taking risks, just like the Tea Party took risks in trying to win offices from the Republican Party. The mainstream and Wall Street Republicans told the Tea Party that if they ran their own candidates in primaries, even if they won the primaries they would just lose the general elections and put more Democrats in office.

For decades I have heard the same argument from establishment Democrats: run your own candidates in the primaries, and even if they win, they would just lose the general elections and put more Republicans into office. We wouldn't want that, would we?

People are mad at incumbents, but they need some outside agitation to make offices actually change hands. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Now is the time to start organizing campaigns for 2012. It is not easy. The banks have robbed us, and the law allows them to give themselves bonuses. We are not allowed to rob banks to finance our campaigns; that would be against the gruel of law. But ways and means must be found, or America will become increasingly like a capitalist gulag for the vast majority of American citizens.

Federal Education, Cordell Hull, and States Rights

2011-11-09T14:40:00.000-08:00

I am reading Cordell Hull's Memoirs. This is the last major work I plan to take notes on before starting on the final draft of The U.S. War Against Asia. I knew little about Cordell Hull except that he was Secretary of State under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which meant he played a major part in the events leading up to the Battle of Pearl Harbor. This just illustrates how even history buffs like myself tend to think in terms of Presidents, when actually Congress is the body that is entrusted to govern our nation. Problem is, there is a lot of history, so it is a lot easier to remember the names and actions of a few Presidents, rather than the tens of thousands of citizens who have been elected to Congress since 1776.

Cordell Hull was from a Confederate family in the hills of eastern Tennessee, and he took an interest in politics from an early age. He reports:

"It was at that age, and at Celina, that I saw my first daily newspaper. This was the Nashville American. In that year, 1886, a Senator from New Hampshire, Henry W. Blair, introduced a bill for Federal aid to State education. That was the major issue in the 1886 campaign. I read about it avidly in the newspaper, and we discussed it among ourselves. The bill was considered to be an attempt to infringe on State rights and to give the Federal Government power to go down into the States and interfere with their education systems. The amount of Federal aid the Senator proposed was only nominal at the time, but the incident is illustrative of how serious such issues could be in those days." [Memoirs of Cordell Hull, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1948, p. 17-19]

The U.S. Constitution says nothing about education. It is a fair argument that for a very long time education was a matter reserved to states and localities. On the other hand, the Constitution says nothing about education. It does not explicitly say that Congress can't spend money on education.

I don't know the full history of federal funding of education. Aside from research grants to universities, I believe Head Start and the School Lunch program were among the earliest large scale programs. Head Start was authorized in 1964. But the School Lunch program was initiated much earlier, in 1946. Federal money for school lunches for children from poor families would not, in itself, have any effect on how local schools were run, like the curriculum or teaching methods. It was not even used as a wedge to desegregate (black and white) schools.

I was on a local school board for 7 years, and I can only describe federal funding of public schools as a mixed blessing. The amount of "paperwork" involved, mostly computer work now, was staggering. The federal money was not just targeted, in the sense that it could only be spent on one type of thing (hence the paperwork to prove that). It often brought rules with it that were really unrelated to the cause for which the money was given. This included the school lunch program. Do this, don't do that, or we will take the school lunch money away.

I'm not sure how effective the federal rules are, including No Child Left Behind. Intentions, I think, were good. It just is not possible to legislate good behavior of students, parents, or teachers (or school boards, for that matter). I used to joke that my School Board should just pass a resolution that "All children in the district shall behave all the time." Like that would put an end to our discipline problems. Behave, Suzy, or we'll send you to detention at the White House Oval Office. Fail to read at grade level, and the First Lady will read with you at night when you would rather be playing video games.

I believe that, on the whole, schools would be better off if they were governed by local school boards using local (including statewide) funds. Sure, some districts would be poorly governed, but most would not, and none of them would be stuck with federal paperwork and misguided guidelines. The main problem with the all-state and local solution is that not all states and localities have healthy economies that can easily support good schools. You can see how a collapsing rust belt city, or a poor rural area, would be unable to provide good schools with local funding. Worse, anti-tax states and localities might refuse to raise taxes needed to fund good schools, even though their economies were strong enough to support the additional taxation.
Leaving this educator, on the whole, feeling that we need a more pragmatic approach to funding.

Those who believe in the wisdom of a national education system should work for an amendment to the Constitution that would give Congress the power to run or at least oversee the public schools of the entire nation, using a federal tax base. Those who want a states-only education system should try to pass an amendment to forbid the federal government from interfering with state education systems.

The rest of us should aim for excellence and hope to muddle through. Send federal money, not a complex set of rules and regulations that take up too much teacher and administration time. Increase the local tax base for public education. Focus, district by district and school by school, on what (and who) works. Some things may work in every district in America, but a lot of actions need to be district specific, school specific, even child specific. Large bureaucracies can have their beneficial moments, but they are notoriously bad at dealing with rapidly changing specific situations.

Fred Koch, Stalin, and Social Security

2011-11-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

The Koch brothers, or the two of them that own Koch Industries, Charles and David, are now well known financiers of the Tea Party and, more generally, the movement to dismantle all social welfare programs at the international, federal, state and local levels. They are the main backers of Herman Cain [See Ready for a Caining?] and for that matter directly or indirectly fund a number of current candidates for the Republican nomination for President of the United States.

Charles and David Koch run a lot of industries. They are smart, competent guys. How did they end up with their current political ideology? Can the rest of us, who are inclined to like Social Security and Medicare, learn anything from the brothers Koch? I think we can learn a lot from examining the history of their father, Fred C. Koch, and his relationship with Joseph Stalin, who was the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) from the late 1920's until his death in 1953.

Fred Koch's father had immigrated to the United States after learning the printing trade in Europe. He owned a small town newspaper, the Tribune-Chief in Quanah, Texas. That means he was one of the chief citizens of Quanah, but in the American scheme of things was a hard-working member of the middle class. Fred's older brother, Anton, stayed with the family business, and thus remained in the middle class. Fred Koch was sent to college, graduating from MIT in 1922 as a chemical engineer. At some point he aspired to being more than middle-class. He became an petrochemical engineer and in 1927 invented a process that improved the efficiency of turning raw oil into gasoline. I count that as a good thing: if you are going to make gasoline, you might as well make it efficiently.

Koch then saw the mean side of monopoly capitalism. He licensed his methods to a number of (relatively) small, independent oil companies. The larger oil companies buried him in litigation, forcing him out of business in the United States. He had more success overseas, where the new Soviet Union became one of his large clients. Joseph Stalin had been Communist Party boss there since 1922 and was effectively dictator by 1928. Stalin decided to collectivize agriculture and at the same time push to industrialize the Soviet Union. While this forced industrialization was no more brutal in total than the capitalist industrialization process had been in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, it certainly was no less brutal, and served anti-communists with many propaganda points. More significant was Stalin's penchant for imprisoning and executing people (probably 800,000 in total, many of them Communist Party members, not counting those who died of hunger and disease), which was done on a scale that made rough forms of capitalist politics seem minimally violent.

Therein lies a contradiction: the Koch family fortunes are largely based on Communist money. Fred Koch, however, did not like Stalin's methods any more than he liked the monopoly tactics of the Rockefeller family. He became one of the founding members of the John Birch Society in 1958.

It has been a while since I studied John Birch Society doctrine, but my understanding is that, much like George Orwell (who was an anti-Stalin socialist), Birchers believed there was a conspiracy by some of the richest members of the ruling class to use the working class and impoverished non-workers as a weapon to take wealth and political power from the middle class, in particular from small private business owners. Thus to the Birchers communists like Stalin and monopolists like the Rockefellers were at least playing the same game against the middle class, and probably actually cooperating with each other. Recall that by the time the Birch society was founded in 1958 the Rockefeller family had turned liberal, at least by Republican standards. Liberal Republicans of that era favored civil rights, a progressive income tax, and social security. In that era too the conservative wing of the Democratic Party (mostly, but not exclusively, southern Democrats) was against civil rights for African Americans, but had come to accept social security and the income tax.

Fred Koch made his money honestly and made so much that later in life he was, by wealth if not by ideology, a certifiable member of the ruling class. His sons are made of different stuff, inherited money. Thus while Fred's political beliefs were pragmatic (if, as I will show, somewhat mistaken), Charles and David's are ideological, free of any meaningful real-world testing. This does not mean they are stupid or mean-spirited, but they were not able to get a clear view of political, economic and social realities because they were wrapped in a fog of great wealth since birth. They have become, in effect, the very type of capitalists who tried to destroy their father's early engineering business.

I have actually met a number of people who thought highly of Stalinism. Mostly they were either aging CPUSA (communist party U.S.A.) members who refused to believe in reports of Stalin's purges, or young organizers who were angry enough to rationalize killing (in a non-war, non-civil war situation) as a legitimate political tool. In the 1980's in the U.S. you could still find a few thousand such people in the U.S. Today, as best I can tell, they number in the hundreds at best.

It is not right to equate Stalinism with socialism. Before the Russian Revolution most socialists, including most Marxists, were Democrat Socialists. They believed the preferred method for reaching a socialist society was through organizing the working class to vote for socialist parties in free elections. The Bolshevik Revolution was actually a catastrophe for the global socialist movement. The Bolsheviks attacked and eventually destroyed the larger socialist groups (anarchists, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and others) when they consolidated power. According to anarchist thinking the Bolsheviks did not represent the working class achieving power, but the establishment of a new capitalist class that in effect made the state into one big oppressive industrial monopoly.

Outside the Soviet Union, communists worked as hard to destroy other socialist groups as they worked to actually overthrow capitalism.

Socialism does not require a dictatorship. Socialist parties have come to power many times in democracies, and when the voters tired of the government, left power peacefully to become the opposition party. Judging all socialism to lead to Stalinism is like saying all capitalist rulers are just steps in the path to the type of regime General Franco ran in Spain. I may not like Bill Clinton, but I'll take him any day over General Franco.

Socialism can mean government ownership of industry, but how much government ownership of industry is there in the U.S. today? Very little. The Post Office and the TVA are the only significant examples [See Our Socialist Constitution Framers]. Social security is not an industry, it is a national pension system, and there are good reasons the government runs it. Only an ideologist would want to move America back to the days before social security. If you want to get rid of social security, why not get rid of the internal combustion engine, the printing press, and that newfangled Christian religion that vilifies the old fashioned religions of our ancestors?

The Constitution gives Congress the power to promote the general welfare. The most common abuse of that power is when a member of Congress uses that power as a cover to promote the interests of political donors, who are typically already very wealthy.

The idea that social security is a step on the road to socialism is disputed by the Marxists themselves. Most Marxists see the socialist revolution as most likely when the working class, and those unable to find work, are most miserable. Thus food stamps, welfare, Social Security and Medicare are seen as attempts to shore up capitalism. They are the modern equivalent of bread and circuses (we now let private industry take care of the entertainment fix), designed to keep the Democratic Party and its basically capitalistic, imperialistic, corrupt political machine in power.

I think most Americans should agree that freedom has many dimensions. Before the Civil War the slavery of many was the freedom of the few. We reject individual freedom when it is the freedom to take away the freedoms of the rest of us. We don't want the government running Wal Mart or the local bar, but we don't want private industry tearing pieces of flesh out of us like it would if it ran social security. Bad enough the banks are private. We are mostly tired of the medical insurance industry, and medical capitalists and even doctors, tearing more out of us than their services are fairly worth.

My basic conclusion is that it is a very bad idea to let people who are born rich run the government. It is as stupid as having whatever idiot a king has for a son become the next king. Not everyone who is born rich gets as out of touch with reality as the Koch brothers, but there are plenty of smart, hard working thinkers from the middle class who will take better care of our governance. That is as close to the Birch society as I am willing to get.

To the extent I believe in Americanism and the original Constitution, I oppose the existence of a titled nobility. We don't have a system of Sirs and Lords, but we have allowed the economic equivalent to take root. I would like to give the modern interpretation to this phrase of the Constitution [Article I, Section 10]: "No state shall ... grant any title of nobility." A reasonable interpretation of that is that, since great wealth is effectively nobility, no person should be able to accumulate great wealth in their lifetime, and no person should be allowed to inherit great wealth. As to how much wealth constitutes great wealth, I am willing to leave that open to debate for now.

Halloween Horrors from American History

2011-10-31T09:51:00.000-07:00

When people think of horrors rising from the grave at Halloween, if they think about American history the best they can come up with is usually Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. That just shows how well-built our mental defenses are against true horror.

Perhaps tonight some unlucky people will see the ghost of John Woods. His older brother had been conscripted into the Tennessee militia in the war of 1812. For reasons unknown John, who was just 17, took his brother's place in Andrew Jackson's army in February, 1814. They had been fighting Indians, and none too victoriously. "He made the mistake of arguing with the Officer of the Day outside of the General's tent. Jackson stepped outside and ordered: "Shoot him." Two days later, on March 14th, at 10 A.M. John Woods was shot dead by his fellow soldiers at Jackson's command. The General now believed he was ready to fight the Red Sticks again, with less insubordination from his underlings." [from Andrew Jackson Fights the Red Sticks]

John Woods was hardly the only victim of Andrew Jackson, a slaver who went on to create the Democratic Party and use it to make himself President, but let's make this a variety horror show. There were, of course, the natives. If every murdered American Indian showed up on Halloween, it would be a sight. Practically every major figure in American history up to the Civil War was an Indian killer of some magnitude. George Washington killed Indians, as did Thomas Jefferson, as did hordes of forgotten European colonizers. The rapid accumulation of wealth and establishment of a ruling class in the United States was largely accomplished by the murder of Indians and theft of their lands.

Ghosts of dead slaves, too, could put together quite a Halloween ball. Many died horrible deaths while in chains in Africa or on the ships that brought them across the Atlantic. In America the life expectancy, and living conditions, of slaves working at cotton or tobacco culture was nothing to sing songs to Jesus for the blessings of Christianity about. Again, the same names pop out of our history books, slavers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson not being particularly noted for their cruelty, but rather as the political frontmen for the owners of larger lots of expendable human workforce. Of course, even after the Civil War, the Democratic Party made sure that life for African Americans was halloween everyday in the former slave states.

White people, don't despair. Not all of our ancestors were Indian killers and racists. In fact, most white people who arrived in the colonies before the American Revolution came over as indentured servants, and their ghosts, in their millions, could tell some tales. While indentured slavery was for a period of time, usually 7 years, and many survived and went free, most were worked and starved to death by the end of their term, that being more profitable than turning free a healthy, well fed human being.

I cannot neglect to mention the foreign wars. There are too many ghosts and spooks to mention them all here, even in lumps, so a few must represent all. The Philippines War, an addendum to the Spanish American War, was carried on with the same principles of an Indian extermination campaign. No one knows how many Filipino freedom fighters and civilians died under the cheery tutelage of Theodore Roosevelt and crew, but rough estimates range from a low of about one-half million to a high of two million. The U.S. war to occupy Korea and the Vietnam War are worth an all-saints mention.

If you are looking for glow-in the dark zombies, perhaps you would enjoy the resurrection of the only large bodies of people killed by atomic weapons, the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The average American, who deserves to be haunted into an early grave, simply repeats the charming meme, "it saved lives of American soldiers." That the rules of war have always said it is not okay to kill civilians to save your own soldiers seems lost on people. That Science, which should be a beacon of light, was bent to this unholy purpose, makes it all the more criminal. President Harry Truman, the leader of the Democratic Party, made the decision to drop the bomb. The Democratic Party is the only party in history that has dropped atomic weapons on human beings. Had America lost World War II, or had a fair and impartial system of international justice been created, the Democratic Party would have been permanently banned, just like the National Socialist German Workers Party was.

For me, the horror is walking out into a world where a bunch of Democratic Party zombies grope about in continual denial of the reality of what their party has done, and what they have embraced by joining it. How many more people will die violent deaths at Democrats' hands before its reign of terror fades into history?

Our Socialist Constitution Framers

2011-10-24T19:34:00.000-07:00

The Tea Party clan has been infused with the idea that there is a Fundamentalist Constitution. They say this is the U.S. Constitution as understood when it was written, plus the Bill of Rights, which is its first ten Amendments. Tea Party types like certain of the amendments, like the part about citizens being able to own automatic weapons (and, arguably, artillery), and the one about powers being given to the federal government not being meant to infringe on the powers left to the States. To reinforce this position with metaphysics, most of them insist the Constitution (but not the later income tax or civil rights amendments) was written by God Himself, though apparently he forgot to sign the document.

Aside from having to ignore much of what was written about the Constitution when "the people" (rich white males, mostly) were thinking about whether to vote for it (a majority probably voted against it, but that is another story), there is a big problem with the Fundamentalist Constitution:

SOCIALISM

Yes, it seems our Founders wrote socialism right into the Constitution, and it has been a specter haunting America ever since it was sent out for ratification on September 17, 1787.

The Framers of the Constitution actually thought government, including the federal government, could do some things better than private industry.

Let us enumerate them (mostly from Article I, Section 8):
"Provide for the common Defense" and "raise and support armies" and "a navy" [rather than hire out the job to mercenary private businesses]
"Establish Post Offices and Post Roads" [rather than contract out the job]
"the erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards and other needful buildings," in the various States.

Let us call these things what they are: socialism. The government owning and running large organizations that are not essential to government itself. Anybody that thinks that our military is not a socialist organization has got a mental blind spot. Modern socialism of the authoritarian sort (Marxism Leninism) is largely modeled on military organizations.

But then, the real founding fathers had experienced and even studied reality, including the reality of mercenary armies. They were influenced by ideology (Thomas Jefferson more than others), but they were mostly powerful men, from powerful families, with plenty of school-of-hard-knocks experience. Think back to the Boston Tea Party itself. That gang of ruffians was not just protesting a consumption tax of the exact kind that Tea Party politicos like Herman Cain are proposing to burden us with. They were protesting against a private company, the East India Company. The tax was necessary, according to the British government, to pay off war debts. And what is our current vast national debt but a war debt?

Even in 1787 some things just made more sense to do through government, rather than through private industry. There are forms of Socialism that say a lot more should be owned and operated by the people through their government, and even forms of socialism that would have no government at all, but worker ownership of all businesses. I'm not saying any Framer was in that camp. They were, I repeat, pragmatic men.

Our Framers furiously debated the articles of the Constitution. Then the voters in each state debated whether to adopt the document. Socialism is not mentioned in the Constitution, but neither is Capitalism or the theory of free markets.

If some people, despite all the evidence of history, are against having a government that does its best to help its people cope with the difficulties inherent in reality, that is fine, we can debate that view.

Nothing they can do, however, can undo the fact that the postal system was a business specifically selected by George Washington and crew to be run by the government, for the people. That is not an all-encompassing system of socialism, but it is socialism as a pragmatic response to solving a particular human problem, the need for a postal system.

Kenya Invades Somalia: World War III?

2011-10-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, October 15, 2011, Kenya invaded Somalia. Earlier in the week President Barack Obama announced he was sending U.S. combat troops to Uganda [See Obama Sends U.S. Gunmen to Uganda]. Uganda and Burundi already have troops occupying part of Somalia. Meanwhile the U.S. occupation army has not quite left Iraq. The U.S. is now in an undeclared war with Pakistan [as I predicted in U.S. Close to War with Pakistan on April 23, 2011] and has operations in Oman and other nations. Iran, too, is on U.S. target lists.

Note that the United Nations (U.N.) is not going to protect Somalia. The U.N. does not exist to protect weak nations from invasions by stronger ones. The U.N. exists mainly to further the agendas of the Great Powers, and right now the only powers of any global importance are the U.S., Europe, and China. None of them care for the current de facto government of Somalia, the militia/political party Al Shabaab. Surprisingly the Kenya military did not announce it was "invited in" by the "provisional government" of Somalia, a hand-picked group of U.S. puppets backed by hundreds of genuine supporters and those Ugandan troops already mentioned.

Maybe the U.S. forgot to order President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed to invite in Kenya as an ally in the civil war. Don't forget the formidable Ethiopian army invaded Somalia in 2006, financed by the U.S., with the same purpose, with the brilliant result of destroying the moderate Islamic de facto government, leading to the rise of Al Shabaab as the dominant popular government. [Sharif Ahmed, now a U.S. puppet, was a leader of the regime destroyed by Ethiopia, the Islamic Courts Union.]

Sure, there are a lot of moving parts to keep track of, but this is really beginning to look like World War III, with the United States playing the role Britain played in World War II: an imperialist power about to be bankrupted.

Neither World War I nor World War II started on a single day. Both had their preludes and aftermaths. A smart and strong U.S. President could defuse the situation by withdrawing from Afghanistan, apologizing to Iran, Pakistan, and Oman, recognizing Al Shabaab, and recognizing the state of Palestine and the right of Palestinians to have their private property returned to them. Obama can't do that; he has become a subservient tool of the U.S. corporate security state, and was certainly vetted for that role before being allowed to become the Democratic Party frontrunner in 2008.

A single incident, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is said to have started World War I. More important than the spark were the stacks of powder kegs all around: the rivalries of the imperialist, industrialist powers, most notably between the British capitalists and their German cousins.

World War II is more instructive. It is generally marked as starting when German armies attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, or when Great Britain declared war on Germany the next day, escalating a regional conflict into a global war. But in East Asia the anti-imperialist war of Japan and its allies against the European colonialists had long been underway, and would last until the United States withdrew, defeated, from Vietnam in 1975. In Europe World War II probably became inevitable when Britain, France, and the United States refused to support the democratically elected government of Spain in its civil war with General Franco (with support from his fellow Catholics Pope Pius XI, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini), leading to Franco's victory in March 1939.

Al Qaeda is not a great industrial power that can have its factories bombed into impotence, as happened to Germany, Italy and Japan in World War II. The strategy of Al Qaeda has always been based on Osama Bin Laden's analysis of the fall of the Soviet Union. It was caused by a lopsided militaristic economy, aggravated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda's goal has always been to cause a similar collapse of the United States economy by irritating the U.S. into asymmetrical expenditures. It has largely succeeded. At this point the only way Al Qaeda can fail is if the U.S. severely cuts back its military and homeland security expenditures and starts taking care of its own people. Instead our leaders continue to fall into the Al Qaeda trap.

Al Qaeda, however, will not be the ultimate winner in this global contest. Al Qaeda has proven it knows how to fight, but not how to govern. When Germany and Britain fought for world dominance in World War II, it was the U.S. that inherited the earth. Who will dominate the economy and culture of the next century is not easy to predict, although the easy bets are on India and China. Hopefully no nation will be stupid enough, after the lessons of the 20th century, to try to become the global superpower. That is just a recipe for eventual bankruptcy.

The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, only two weeks after the German invasion (in fairness, Poland did not exist before the end of World War I, so both Germany and the U.S.S.R. claimed to be reclaiming lost territory). Yet the British Empire did not declare war on the U.S.S.R. Germany was seen as more of a threat to the British Empire, short run. Britain (and its ally France) was in no position to fight both Stalin and Hitler at the same time. So they chose to fight Hitler. Even that kind of pragmatisim did not save the British Empire (or the French, or Dutch empires) in the long run. When the French, after the briefest face-saving hint of battle, were brought over to the German side (by Marshal Petain, another Roman Catholic fascist), that should have meant global dominance for Germany. That, in turn, would have required more patience than Hitler had. The Catholic armies of Europe, instead of finishing off the British, attacked the athiest U.S.S.R., cheered on by the Pope. Everyone forgets that some 30 million athiests died before Hitler's Catholic hords were defeated.

If the United Nations were about peace, it would sanction Kenya and, if necessary, send in troops to expel the Kenyans from Somalia. Watch it do nothing, just as its predecessor, the League of Nations, consistently did nothing to prevent World War II. Again, there was a reason: Woodrow Wilson designed the League of Nations to be a racist, imperialist institution, and it stuck to that design.

President Obama sends Gunmen to Uganda

2011-10-15T14:06:00.000-07:00

The Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda are a nasty lot. Imprisoned, hanged, or shot dead in combat, it is hard to imagine anyone shedding a tear for them. What better excuse for his imperialist majesty Barack Obama to insert U.S. troops into east Africa. Apparently bribes and proxy troops are not getting the job done.

Most diplomatic and military analysts believe the U.S. military presence in Uganda actually has little to do with the Lord's Resistance Army. They are there to train the army of Uganda, and may use killing or "interrogating" any LRA soldiers they can catch as an exercise. Their real role is to reward Uganda for sending soldiers to act as U.S. proxies in Somalia, and to prevent the further spread of anti-Americanism in Africa. A look at the map of the region reveals the interlocking parts:

Note Uganda's proximity to the Republic of South Sudan, with its vast oil fields waiting to be tapped. To the east in Kenya, which is more of a region left over from Great Britain's imperial conquests than a nation. Kenya is a mostly Christian identified nation, but has substantial Islamic and (indigenous) pagan minorities. Further due east we have southern Somalia, including the "capital" Mogadishu, where Ugandan troops are stationed to prop up the unelected, corrupt and incompetent puppet U.S. "provisional" government. Note also Ethiopia to the north of Kenya. The U.S. paid Ethiopia to invade Somalia in 2006 and overthrow the Islamic Courts Union system (earlier referred to as the Islamic Justice Courts). While the Somalis eventually ran them out of the country, the peaceful and moderate backers of the Islamic Courts were radicalized by the struggle, leading to the emergence of Al-Shabaab as the most popular de facto government in Somalia (though it has done a lot since then to make itself unpopular).

So we can expect Barack Obama's soldiers to train the Ugandan gunmen who will be going to fight the people of Somalia. At the same time President-for-Life Yoweri Museveni's regime will be propped up. As leaders go Mr. Museveni started as a considerable improvement on his post-colonial predecessors. Somewhere along the way he decided that he was indispensable, and democracy had to play second fiddle (just like Franklin Delano Roosevelt). Instead of training and empowering the next generation of leaders, he is determined to take Uganda to the grave with him. In addition, he has supported harsh anti-homosexual laws.

Perhaps the Pentagon just wants to get in some real-life jungle training. American gunmen have a poor record in jungle warfare, as demonstrated by the Viet Cong. The Lord's Resistance Army might be easy prey, and then again they have already survived for a couple of decades and may be more adaptable than I, or anyone, expects. As to Somalia, only idiots like George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their brutish henchmen think that playground has room for anyone besides the natives.

Barack Obama Sanctions Assassinations

2011-10-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama yesterday announced he plans to impose sanctions on Iran for the alleged assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Adel A. Al-Jubeir. For all I know Mr. Al-Jubeir is a well-intentioned man, but he represents one of the most oppressive dictatorships on earth. Iran, on the other hand, is a democracy, at least as much as the United States can be said to be a democracy.

Note that President Obama is in no position to express moral outrage. Since bluffing his way into the office of President in 2008, Obama has become the number 1 murderer and war criminal in the world. Why anyone would expect anything less from a graduate of Harvard Law School, where the cooking the Gruel of Law is continually taught to the next generation of vipers, I don't know.

Democratic Party apologists (is there any other kind of Democrat Party activist?) say that Obama inherited his wars from President George W. Bush. They want us to forget that the Democrats won the 2006 congressional elections mainly by playing to anti-war sentiment. The war in Iraq was essentially over by the time Barack took office, but he escalated the war in Afghanistan at a time when it would have been easy just to pull out U.S. troops. Further, he has waged illegal wars against Pakistan and the people of Somalia, while U.S. assassins have murdered alleged U.S. enemies and innocent civilians in Yemen and throughout northern Africa.

President Obama said, "The second thing that we’re going to continue to do is to apply the toughest sanctions and continue to mobilize the international community to make sure that Iran is further and further isolated and that it pays a price for this kind of behavior."

This kind of behavior? Note a few facts: the Saudi ambassador was not harmed. It was a homeland security bureaucrat who actually planned to kill the ambassador. Homeland Security found an unstable, incompetent, greedy man, Mansour Arbabsiar, to claim to be the bagman for the plot. Can the U.S. manufacture evidence to implicate Iranians in the plot? Our physical manufacturing plants have mostly moved to China and Mexico and India, but one thing we can still manufacture is phony evidence. I think they teach that at Harvard Law, or maybe at Langley.

I agree that the ancient principle that all ambassadors are, in effect, sacred cows, is a good one. Peace emissaries would never be able to end wars otherwise. The pragmatic problem is that embassy personnel often use this fig leaf as a cover to commit a wide variety of crimes. The U.S. embassy in Iran existed largely to help murder opponents of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the self-styled Shah of Iran. Just like the employees of the U.S. embassy in South Vietnam existed to help murder opponents of the U.S. puppet dictators in the 1960s during the Vietnam war. And ... oops, this could easily devolve into the historic role of U.S. embassies and the CIA in murdering people who opposed U.S. imperialism. A subject for a 9 volume encyclopedia, not a blog posting.

War crimes are still war crimes even if you are POTUS and no one has the ability to try you and hang you like the Democrats used to hang unregistered potential Republican voters in the Solid South up until around the time Obama was born.

Barack Obama, and his top subordinates, should be tried by an impartial tribunal for each and every one for the numerous assassinations they have carried out in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and around the globe.

The American people should impose sanctions on the Democratic Party and Republican Party, the two greatest war crimes organizations in the world. Not one cent or one vote until both parties dry up and are replaced by a new politics of peace and prosperity.

See also: Saudi Arabia at Wikipedia

Barack Obama's remarks about Iran on October 13, 2011

small green gift ideas

2011-10-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

Anything you buy, from a stick of gum to a Prius, requires energy for its creation. The amount of energy required is usually proportional to the price tag. Those who support a Buy Nothing policy, I applaud. Despite that, I have found a few small items to really be worthwhile in terms of their providing comfort while lowering overall impact on the environment.

First and foremost are flannel lined jeans, and similarly lined pants. I like to keep my heating bills to a minimum. In my barn-style house that means cutting firewood for the upstairs wood stove, and minimizing electric space heater use for downstairs (which is where I work). I've tried many warm clothing items over the years with varying success. Last year I finally bought LL Bean flannel lined jeans. I typically buy regular jeans at Target for around $15, so these seemed expensive at $49.99, but they totally changed the warmth equation. They are a lot more comfortable than wearing long underwear beneath jeans. I see this year the price has been raised to $54.95. Land's End is selling a variety of lined pants (jeans, corduroy, and chino) for $69.50. Another choice is NorthernTool.com, where fleece-lined work jeans are $39.99 and flannel-lined dungarees are just $34.99. I'm sure there are other brands and vendors as well.

With my flannel jeans I like thick wool socks over thin cotton socks, a knit long-sleaved mock turtleneck basic layer, and a quilted flannel work shirt.

Then there ... truthfully, I can't think of anything else right now. I don't really buy anything for myself except food, clothing, and books. I still collect physical books.

Oh, I know, I get a lot of utility out of blankets, including an electric blanket I keep by my office chair. You can keep your house or office at 62 degrees F. if you have warm clothes and an electric blanket handy.

Need to give a special person a gift despite your anti-consumption ethic? Check out my wife's environment and peace oriented jewelry site, PeacefulJewelry.com.

Demands

2011-10-09T18:03:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to Occupy Wall Street, probably won't even make it to Sacramento (though it's tempting), but here are my five top demands (or fantasies):

Withdraw all U.S. troops and warships into U.S. territory. Allow no U.S. troops on foreign soil unless Congress officially declares war. Cut the military budget 80%. Educate the U.S. public about the history of U.S. war crimes, and allow for an international trial of our war criminals.

Nationalize the 10 largest U.S. banks, not by giving the federal government ownership, but by giving an equal share to every citizen.

Amend the Constitution to give Congress the clear duty and power to protect the environment.

Restructure taxes. Raise the maximum income tax rate to 50%. Raise the estate tax on fortunes of over $10 million to 90%, to help prevent the rise of an entitled nobility, as the Constitution intended. Make customs duties a major source of revenue again.

Cut back the federal government in favor of the states, which being closer to the people are, or could be, more democratic.

For those of us who have seen how rigged the U.S. social and economic system is, the problem is not formulating demands, but achieving them. I certainly recommend that everyone leave the Democratic Party and Republican Party and back independent candidates or parties more to their liking. Outside electoral politics, a little study of the marxists, anarchists, and particularly anarcho-syndicalism might go a long way.

Herman Cain's Twisted Politics

2011-10-06T19:41:00.000-07:00

In the Republican presidential hopeful field, in which candidates rise and fall like so many prairie dogs, Herman Cain has recently risen to number two status. A business guy with no prior experience in political office (though he ran for Senator of Georgia in 2004), it is impressive that he has done so well. In fact, his entire life is impressive, if you don't think about it too much.

Mr. Cain can genuinely claim to be a rags to riches story. In contrast to President Obama, he came from a working class black family, growing up when being black was a serious disadvantage (he was born in 1945). Also unlike Obama, he was good at math, and so he received a B.A. in mathematics in 1967 and a M.S. in computer science in 1971. Thus he somehow avoided the typical fate of men of his age bracket: killing or being killed in the jungles and cities of Vietnam. He did work a bit for the Navy as a civilian before going to work as an analyst for Coca Cola.

So Mr. Cain is a smart guy, he dodged the draft and used his smarts to get ahead in business. Nothing wrong with that in so far as it goes. Any prol doing well in business is alright with me. He was no entrepreneur, to be sure; he was a corporate man. He was given increasing levels of responsibility at Pillsbury. They eventually made him President of their Godfather's Pizza subsidiary.

That is when Herman learned the lesson that he'd like to teach the entire nation. He took the over 900 stores of the money losing division and he made the division profitable. Did he do that by improving employee spirit, a clever advertising campaign, or inventing a better pizza? No. He made two lists: profitable stores and unprofitable stores. He closed almost 500 unprofitable stores. All the employees had to find new jobs. Herman's economic conservatism in largely colored by that success. He bought Godfather's from Pillsbury, using borrowed money. He was a king, the head of his own 400 store empire. The paupers who were his ex-employees should have taken more time with their math lessons; they deserved whatever fate awaited them.

Meet Herman Cain, the man who proved that hard work and business acumen and permission to swing an ax can make anyone a CEO multi-millionaire. The man who believes welfare and the laziness it inspires are what is keeping poor people down. The man who does not like government handouts, except when they are military jobs and contracts.

Get ready for a caining, or a caning, if you are among the irresponsibly unemployed. Herman Cain is the True Conservative who will cut, cut, cut government programs the way he cut Godfather's Pizza. He'll cut taxes too, those terrible taxes that slow the rise of bright fellows like himself up the social ladder.

Strangely, Herman Cain served on the board of the Federal reserve Bank of Kansas City from 1992 until 1996. How did he, with no banking experience, get appointed to a such a post? I suppose we'll have to read his new book, "Magical Me," to find out.

You would think that at least a slight understanding of macroeconomics would be required to be a Federal Reserve board member. Things that seem to work out on a small scale, say for an individual business, can become a disaster if done on a large scale. You may have noticed this in 2008, during the CEO panic. CEO's began laying off workers, even before demand dropped, even at corporations that were very profitable. Surprise, when enough CEO's had fired enough workers, we were in a severe recession.

While each individual termite benefits from eating the house, and the whole colony benefits for a while, eventually the house falls down.

When Herman takes away people's food stamps, he may think that will force them to go out and earn a living. Instead the corporate supermarket chains and mom & pop corner stores alike will go under. When he cuts back on funding for education, he thinks parents will pay for private schooling, but instead the streets will fill up with delinquents. When he takes away Medicare Social Security, he thinks seniors will quietly curl up in the streets and die. They might, but most of the nations doctors and nurses and biotechnology CEO's will be joining them in the streets.

After 4 years with Herman Cain, he'll probably just close up America, because the entire nation will be unprofitable.

I wish I could endorse a math guy for President, but it isn't how good you are with math, it's what you do with it. If you close your mind to the bigger realities of the world, and just use it to count and hoard beans as Herman Cain has, then math has been wasted on you.

Still interested? Herman Cain for President

Free Amina Farah Ali

2011-10-03T19:53:00.000-07:00

Amina Farah Ali is an American citizen living in Minnesota currently being tried for allegedly sending aid to al-Shabaab, a political group in Somalia that has been fighting (like pretty much everyone in Somalia) with the corrupt, cruel, unpopular U.S. sponsored puppet government there.

She refused to stand for the judge, one Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Davis. He has banned her from the courtroom. Apparently he thinks the traditional show of respect for the court is more important than following the U.S. Constitution, which states in the Sixth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights: "the accused shall enjoy the right ... to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have assistance of counsel for his offense."

The Constitution lies in shreds on the floor of Judge Davis's federal court, in more ways than this. While that has always been the way of our national government, while that is simply part of the gruel of law, it is always instructive to look at the details.

I don't see how any honest interpretation of the Constitution allows for Ms. Ali and people like her to be accused of any crime at all. The laws she is being prosecuted under are devoid of any basis in the Constitution. They violate international law and all all reasonable standards of ethical behavior.

In this supposed land of the free this law makes it illegal to send funds or supplies to foreign political groups the U.S. government does not like. You can, conversely, send funds and supplies to foreign political groups the U.S. does like. Even accepting, as I do, that Congress has broad power to do what is "necessary and proper" to carry out its Constitutional duties, this law makes a mockery of several sections of the Constitution.

It is also yet another instance of the U.S. government claiming jurisdiction beyond its own borders, a policy that has always infuriated the various nations we have interfered with and made war upon.

Did Ali, in raising $2,100 in pledges to send to Somalia to fight against a gang of thugs flooded with tens of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer provided "support", commit treason? This is the main question that needs to be asked. If she did not commit treason, then the law and the prosecution, in fact all the acts of Congress, President Obama, and their court system, are simply overreach.

The U.S. Constitution is very clear about treason (the Funding Fathers having just escaped with their lives from being treasonable to King George): "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." [Article III, Section 3] Note the word only. It colors the entire section.

Ms. Ali has certainly not levied war against the United States of America. Perhaps she gave aid and comfort to al-Shabaab, but al-Shabaab is the de facto government of Somalia, not the "transitional" U.S. paid puppet government. According to many treaties we have signed the U.S. is supposed to recognize de facto governments. Not hire thugs to set up puppet regimes.

Al-Shabab is certainly an enemy of the U.S.-made inflatable-doll "government" of Somalia, but anyone in their right mind in Somalia would be. Who wants to be bossed around by a government that you can't even vote for or against. By that, I mean the U.S. government. If Somalia is U.S. territory, shouldn't they get at least two U.S. Senators, a proportional number of Representatives, food stamps, and Social Security? I've noticed food stamps really cut down on opposition to the government.

Suppose I were elected President. No, I'm not running. But I would recognize the de facto government, maybe governments, of Somalia. That is the right thing to do. And suddenly Ms. Ali there is no longer aiding an alleged enemy of the U.S., but an ally.

Making list of enemies in foreign civil wars might seem necessary. I wish General Franco had been declared an enemy of the U.S. in 1936, then we probably could have skipped that entire World War II thing, and the Holocaust, and the occupation of Palestine by Israel. But the Catholic Church loved Franco and its adherents mostly voted Democratic in the U.S., so President Franklin Roosevelt maintained neutrality. So I admit there is a pragmatic argument to be made, but there is also a Constitution to try to keep out of the shredding machine.

Treason is a serious thing. Spying for a foreign nation might amount to treason, even if we were not at war with the nation spied for. But American citizens also have the right of free speech. The Supreme Court, in its wisdom, has declared that money is speech, at least when rich people and corporations corrupt the electoral process with it. If money is speech, then it seems to me Ms. Ali was engaging in speech, not treason. Of course you can expect the jackals of our Supreme Court to say that money is speech when they want it to be, and not when they don't want it to be.

We Americans are supposed to have a right to disagree with our government. They call that free speech. We also have a right to assemble with people who agree with us; that is the right to assembly.

If liking or not liking some political group in a foreign nation becomes treason, then free speech goes out the window. If Congress can declare foreign groups to be enemies for purpose of treason, what would prevent it from declaring domestic groups to be enemies for purpose of treason, except for decency, which is not something you want to rely on from politicians?

As far as treason goes, I think the only reasonable interpretation of the word "Enemy" is a nation with which we are at war. If the U.S. Congress had recognized al-Shabaab as the government of Somalia and then declared war on Somalia, I might not agree with them, but I could agree that once war is declared, the U.S. has a clear enemy, and it could be treason to aid them.

If al-Shabaab made an attack on or within U.S. territory, the Federal Government would have clear cause to deal with the crime, and with any American citizens aiding in the crime. You don't need to invoke the treason clause.

Neither of those situations fits the facts of Ms. Ali's case. She likes a particular "faction," really the de facto government, of Somalia. She sends them some help. Her actions are political, and do not constitute treason. American history is full of cases where our citizens, of their own initiative, have given verbal or material support to political factions outside the U.S. It is our right as human beings, and I believe it is a right covered by the Ninth Amendment (which is too little asserted):

"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Note: my defense of Ms. Ali's rights in no way is meant to endorse or support al-Shabaab or any other armed faction in Somalia. I think they should all declare a peace and organize their society in a peaceful, humane manner.

Immigration, the Economy, and Globalization

2011-09-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

I have been avoiding writing about the topic of immigration into the United States of America. I have found most political people, the kind who would be reading a relatively obscure blog like mine, have set views that they do not want challenged by the many facets of the issue. Left and right, people want a simple position they can get their emotions behind. To differ from your crowd risks social rejection. As we have seen in the recent federal funding debates, factions digging into their positions and not seeing an overview (which would give some validity to opposing views) leads to paralysis. Which is great if you want to be frozen into the dysfunctional status quo. I believe that truly understanding all aspects of an issue leads to the best possible (though not necessarily ideal) solutions. So here we go, starting with a legal dissection.

There are two types of immigrants into the United States: legal and illegal (allowing for a handful that occupy gray areas). While many anti-immigrant sentiments, and arguments, may apply to legal immigrants, most Americans seem to be okay with legal immigration, to the extent that it currently exists. Legal immigration can be addressed by Congress, and most people are willing to let the issue be fought out there. Illegal immigrants provoke different reactions. These two types of immigration get tied together when there are proposals to legalize illegal immigrants who have become long-term residents, something also in the power of Congress. I will start with an initial look at illegal immigration, since this is where greatest controversy has been.

One common attitude towards illegal immigrants, the welcoming one, is usually rationalized on a civil rights basis. If all people are created equal, as it says in the Declaration of Independence, then an illegal person is still a person, and standing on American soil should be treated as an equal person, with a path to official citizenship.

There are typically three main reasons many American citizens want illegal immigrants to be removed and to have no pathway to a legal status. One is economic: in effect such immigrants are scabs who lower wages and take jobs from citizens. The second is a dislike of the cultures (or ethnicity) of illegals. The third is based on the act of entering the country illegally: there are legal ways to enter, and illegal entry is a criminal act. This initial act of defiance of U.S. law puts them at odds with those who style themselves as law-abiding citizens.

For me only the racist or ethnic argument is easy to dismiss. I like for new spice to be added to the American melting pot. I don't like narrow-minded or racist culture. The other criticisms, however, are not so easy to dismiss.

There are two good, yet contradictory arguments about the economic effects of illegal immigrants. One is that they take jobs that no one wants, and like any other paid persons, spend their pay mostly on local goods and services and so help keep the wealth creation cycle intact. The others is that they lower wages and use taxpayer funded services to which they contribute nothing or little. I have seen that both of these phenomena exist (ideology bound thinkers refuse to notice one or the other), but the question is, to what extent? The reality is that no single snapshot gives the whole picture. The economic impact varies according to whether the U.S. is in a boom or a recession, and it varies by locality and economic sector. It can be subtle too: according to contractors, for the same rate of pay, many illegals will work harder, with fewer breaks. That benefits the construction corporations, but does it benefit the general economy is nearly-as-productive workers are idled?

To the extent that illegal immigrants do benefit the economy, the obvious solution would be to bring them in legally, either through temporary work programs or by expanding quotas. Then, to the extent that some people focus on the illegality of immigrants, that can be separated from economic impact arguments. The Republican Party has had quite a problem with this aspect of the immigration issue. Capitalists want cheap labor, and love the union-busting tendencies of illegal immigration. Rank and file conservative Republicans feel threatened economically and culturally, and so oppose increasing quotas and temporary work programs. Bachmann, Perry, Romney and crew have to balance the need for big campaign donations from their bosses against the need for the votes of the little people.

I am for maximizing economic benefits to the downtrodden American worker. That means I favor temporary work visas only when there really are no workers already present in this nation who want the jobs available. That means the law would have to be flexible, letting more workers in during booms, maybe excluding them during recessions. Also, such work should really be temporary. If a worker is needed most of the time for a period of say, over two years, they should be given the opportunity to choose to become first a permanent worker and then a citizen.

If this rational policy were followed, illegal immigrants would only be here for their own benefit. They have made a choice to not go through the quota system or temporary labor programs. They have, in effect, stolen someone else's place in line. I think the civil rights argument is inappropriate in this context. I don't believe scabs have a civil right to lower other people's wages or take their jobs. I want to emphasize that I admit to thinking narrowly here, within the context of a national economy box that I think is outmoded. My problem with applying the civil rights argument, in its present context, is that it provides a giant loophole for American capitalists to maximize their own profits while starving working people. We don't need that kind of help.

So far I have kept the argument in a national context, and I think that is part of the problem. We live in a regionalized economy where capitalists think nothing of packing up a plant in Rhode Island and reassembling it for production in Wuchou. NAFTA unites the economies of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, but our freedom to work where we choose in these three nations is excluded from the deal.

Mexico is the Godzilla of the immigration debate. Often illegal immigrant is synonymous with illegal Mexican immigrant. Anti-immigrant sentiment sees Mexico as a horde of people seething to inundate the U.S., held back only by immigration and anti-immigration laws.

This is absurd. Open the borders and there would be some brief acceleration of immigration from Mexico, but it has never been all that hard to get into the U.S., despite tragic deaths in the deserts near the border. There just are not that many people in Mexico. The population of Mexico is about 112,000,000. The U.S. population is about 312,000,000.

If anything, open borders would be a problem for Mexico. Remember, the Mexico used to include Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. American birth rates and illegal immigration into those states in the 1840s were a precursor of their theft by the U.S. government. I believe that given the lower cost of living in Mexico today, a lot more Americans would move there if they were free to come and go, buy housing, and work there. 10% of the American population moving to Mexico would have a far greater impact there than 10% of the Mexican population moving to the U.S. The failure of Canada and the U.S. to arrange for mutual citizenship is even more absurd.

What is true regionally is true globally. While I believe there would be enormous cultural and economic benefits to having global citizenship, to everyone being able to live and work where they choose, in the short run I would want the transition to be well-managed. The gates should come down slowly. If someone is coming to America, they should have a plan, basically a job lined up, and the same for Americans emigrating to greener pastures.

Another big context is overpopulation. I believe it is a fact that the world is overpopulated with humans. I believe the global number of humans needs to be substantially reduced over time if the environment that supports us all remains healthy. Therefore I support a two-child maximum policy in the U.S., and think that is appropriate in much of the rest of the world as well.

I don't think my immigration ideas are likely to be implemented by the U.S. anytime soon (even though they have been implemented within the European Union). To allow for mutual immigration between the U.S. and any other country, notably Mexico, I would like to require that the partner country recognize women's rights to birth control and abortions, and implement a two-child maximum policy. Of course if every nation did that, less people would feel compelled to emigrate from their native lands.

Recognize Palestine

2011-09-26T10:55:00.000-07:00

The United Nations (U.N.) is a funny place. And I don't mean ha-ha funny.

On the one hand it is as close as one can get to a recognizable global government. Therefore it makes sense for the Palestinians to ask the U.N. to recognize their existence as a nation.

On the other hand, it has most of the attributes of a bad government, and few attributes of a good government. Given its history, that should not be a surprise. The UN was, and remains, a profoundly racist institution, dedicated to maintaining the system of imperialist domination of the industrial, mainly "white race" nations over all others.

The UN had as its predecessor the League of Nations. In American history books Woodrow Wilson is almost always portrayed as the progressive peace-lover who worked to create the League of Nations, to promote world peace, only to see the U.S. Senate reject American membership in the body. That is not untrue. But Woodrow Wilson was one of the intellectual architects of racism in the United States, and the leader of the overtly racist Democratic Party. His Fourteen Points for world peace and international relations basically amounted to democracy for white people.

President Wilson effectively called for new nations based on ethnic majorities when those new nations had been part of rivals to the American, British, and French empires. For instance Poland, which did not exist as a state before World War I, was to be created out of parts of Russian and Germany. But he did not call for independent states to be carved out of any part of the American or British empire. Neither the Philippines nor Puerto Rico, both U.S. colonies, were considered nations capable of self-determination.

Japan was one of the few nations that had, at that time, escaped colonization by one of the imperialist nations (often referred to then as the Great Powers: the United States, Russia, Germany, France, the British Empire, and perhaps Italy). During negotiations Japan raised the idea that Asian peoples had a right to self-determination. That would mean the U.S., Britain, France and Holland giving up their colonies (Germany's were taken from it for losing the war). Woodrow Wilson, chairing the committee that considered that proposal, killed it. He really truly thought that only people of European descent were capable of self-government. Instead of a peaceful withdrawal of imperialists from Asia in 1920, the issue led to the Asian Anti-colonial War (always lumped by U.S. historians into World War II, to confuse the issue) and then to a series of national liberation struggles lasting into the 1970s, including the Vietnam War. [See also: The U.S. War Against Asia]

Palestine, after World War I, was not allowed national self-determination. It was removed from the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire and places in the British Empire. The British, in order to receive Jewish financial backing during World War I, had promised to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine (the Balfour Declaration). While there were (fluctuating degrees) of Jewish immigration into Palestine before World War II, the British never official created a Jewish state or region in Palestine.

The United Nations was a reboot of the old League of Nations, with most of its flaws. It did not call for the abolition of colonialism. It was designed expressly to give the appearance of global backing to the new British-American alliance. It was not democratic in any reasonable sense of the term, as the one-person one-vote guideline was subverted by the colonial system and other un-democratic structures. Where independent nations had been established in Asia, the UN allowed them to be re-colonized. In particular when Korea tried to become an independent nation (the Korean War) the UN voted to attack Korea. Similarly, in almost every case where it has been involved, the UN has helped strong nations attack weaker nations.

Meanwhile, back in Palestine, the Jewish section of the population threw out the British and established a state by force of arms in 1946 through 1948. Unfortunately, this was not simply a matter of making reality out of the Wilsonian rhetoric of national self-determination. It was largely a land grab and instance of ethnic cleansing, for the native Palestinians were largely thrown out with the British, by the mostly European jewish invaders. The new state of Israel made further conquests in a series of wars, leaving the Palestinians with no territory of their own. Although at first reluctant to back the tiny new state and anger the Arab states in the region, in the U.S. Jewish votes in the key states of Florida and New York, along with a vast corruption of government through election campaign donations eventually made the U.S. government the primary military and economic backer of the state of Israel.

Despite their troubles, the Palestinians have retained their national identity and have created a culture of resistance to Israeli tyranny. This week the Palestinian National Authority petitioned the United Nations to recognize the Nation of Palestine.

President Obama is too worried about getting himself re-elected with American Jewish money and votes to support Palestinian statehood. Given the anti-democratic structure of the U.N., that means the Palestinian request will be blocked by its Security Council. Based solely on a military alliance that existed during World War II, five security council seats have permanent members (the U.S., Great Britain, Russia, France, and China) with permanent veto powers. Basically, the form of the United Nations is an oligarchy bordering on dictatorship.

However, a vote in the General Assembly is likely to show that the majority of the nations of the world want to recognize Palestine as a nation, and that implies they want to see justice done for the Palestinian people.

Americans should support democracy and national self-determination, including for the nation of Palestine. The United States government should voluntarily relinquish its veto power in the U.N., along with the other permanent Security Council members.
Further, the United States of America should recognize the Palestinian state, regardless of the outcome in the United Nations. President Obama should be ashamed of his self-serving following in the footsteps of that architect of racism, Woodrow Wilson.

States Rights and the Federal Reserve

2011-09-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

"Such is the character of human language, that no word conveys to the mind, in all situations, one single definite idea; and nothing is more common that to use words in a figurative sense."

—John Marshall in McCulloch vs. Maryland, 1819

If your knowledge of American history is shallow enough, you might think that the question of states' rights was answered by the Civil War. The Republican Party opined that for a state to secede from the Union was an act of treason. A lot of people died to make the point. Yet states did not become mere administrators of Federal law. They retained important rights and duties.

Before considering how the Federal Reserve fits into our system of governance, it is worth a bit of review about the Bank of the United States. America had no banks at all in 1776, which at least proves it is possible to get along without them. Great Britain had a number of banks, including the Bank of England, which had been created by the British government, but which had not branches in the American colonies.

The first Bank of the United States was chartered by the first Congress under the new Constitution in 1791 for twenty years, based on a proposal from Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington. Like the Bank of England, it was set up as a private company that would hold federal funds, but act as a bank to commercial enterprises. From the beginning some political figures (anti-federalists) opposed it and believed that its creation was not a power granted to Congress by the Constitution. In 1811 Congress refused to recharter the bank (by a vote of 64 to 65). The War of 1812 created such financial chaos in the United States that the bank was issue a new charter in 1816.

In 1818, to prevent the Bank of the United States from competing with local banks, the State of Maryland passed a tax on all banks not chartered by the State. The Bank cashier, McCulloch, refused to pay the tax. The Bank lost in the Maryland courts, but appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. By a vote of 8 to 1 the Supreme Court found the Maryland law to be unconstitutional. [See McCulloch vs. Maryland, 17 US 316 (1819)]

In the ruling John Marshall discusses the nature of the federal system at some length. He discusses how sovereignty can be shared or split by states and the federal government. He discusses the phrase "necessary and proper" at some length. He also splits the hair of the 10th Amendment by noting that it differs by one important word from the wording of its predecessor in the Articles of Confederation.

Even Marshall, the federalist, noted that the Constitution gives the Congress some responsibilities, and prohibits certain types of legislation, while reserving others to the states. Two basic problems remain, even if you are convinced by Marshall's reading of the Constitution. You may not agree with how the Constitution divides up responsibilities between the states and federal government. That could be fixed by amendments, although amending the Constitution is difficult, and what is already in place is favored.

The more difficult question arises when specific situations cross multiple issues, or when there are shades of gray within a single issue. The Supreme Court itself has often made differing rulings on the same subject during different periods of American history.

President Andrew Jackson did not like the Bank of the United States; he thought its powers exceeded those grantable under the Constitution. Jackson, like most Americans, wanted states' rights when he agreed with the states, and was against states' rights when he wanted to impose his ideas on the entire nation. When the people of South Carolina nullified an oppressive tariff (import customers duty), Jackson threatened to use military force. But when George asserted states' rights to evict the Cherokee nation, and the Supreme Court backed the Cherokee in Worcester v. Georgia (31 US 515), Jackson (and later President Van Buren) refused to use federal troops to enforce the Supreme Court's decision. In 1833 President Jackson took federal money out of the Bank of the United States, and its charter was allowed to expire in 1836.

The Federal Reserve was controversial when it was created in 1913 it was no less controversial than the Bank of the United States. However, it did not compete directly with private commercial banks, instead using its function as a reserve bank to maintain a money supply consistent with economic health. Recently the Tea Party and Republican presidential candidates have been attacking the Federal Reserve. Partly the attacks are pragmatic, partly they raise yet again the ancient question of what are the powers of the federal government under the Constitution.

Anyone can criticize the Fed on pragmatic grounds. Take your choice: the Fed created too much money, or the Fed created too little money. Heck, the Fed insiders debate that question among themselves.

Questioning the Federal Reserve's constitutionality is wacky, except perhaps as an academic exercise. The Tea Party has no good answers for the reasoning in McCulloch vs. Maryland. Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce and to establish a system of currency, both of which it chooses to do through the Federal Reserve. Congress has the power to change the Federal Reserve, to replace it with something different, or to abolish it outright.

Many in the Tea Party now hold there is an Original Constitution, written by God himself, and easily interpreted by anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of English and the Ten Commandments, the amount you would get from their home schooling program. For them it is simple: the Constitution does not mention the Federal Reserve, so having one cannot be constitutional.

The first Congress (admittedly a rogue's gallery of corrupt men) chartered the Bank of the United States, and it was signed into law by George Washington. Who do you think is in a better position to opine on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, the village idiots of the Tea Party, or the first Congress? The men who knew the men, sometimes even were the men, who wrote the Constitution, or Michele Bachmann?

We do not need to return to some mythic original Constitution. We need to amend the Constitution to bring it into line with what we, the people, have learned in the past 200 years. The problem with Congress is not that it has exceeded the power granted to it, though it probably has at times. The problem with Congress is that it has not done everything necessary and proper to "promote the general Welfare." Neither, for that matter, have the various state legislatures.

Tea Party Ovens

2011-09-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

A tea party sounds so nice, so elegant. Savor the pagan flavors of India sipped from pretty matching porcelain tea sets. Or perhaps you might like the romantic American patriot version: dress up like American Indians and dump British, privately owned tea from India as a protest against a tax that explicitly was to pay to defend American colonists from American Indians.

Yesterday the world, or at least the few people who were not already sick of watching Republican presidential candidates debate, got to see a darker sort of tea party. The kind where you are sipping your tea, hoping to get to know your host and suddenly your host sprouts fangs and tears at your throat. Fade to black.

I did not listen to the debate. My wife heard about the incident on NPR and, as she related it, which may not exactly correspond to NPR's report, the entire Tea Party audience (about 1000 people) at the Tea Party sponsored debate demanded the death of a hypothetical working guy, following a question about medical insurance put to Ron Paul, to be known henceforth as Uncle Death.

I found a replay on the internet easily enough. As far as I could tell from the audio portion, only three or four audience members were screaming "let him die" or "death". Ron Paul had a weasel answer. If a working guy has no private medical insurance and needs prolonged hospitalization, Ron Paul strongly recommended that he retroactively buy medical insurance. Pressed, he talked about the freedom to take on risk. Asked if the man should just be turned away to die, after the four idiots in the audience did their death chant, he talked about religious charities dealing with such cases instead of the government. He never really answered the question.

I agree with Ron Paul on a thing or two, like bringing U.S. troops home from our imperialist adventures. His attachment to the Gold Standard, however, distinguishes him as a nutter who has been unable to adopt to industrial, much less post-industrial, reality. But I never knew he was as dead, as cold at heart as old General Franco himself.

As Adolf Hitler showed, it is not much of a leap from allowing people to die from lack of medical care to putting people in ovens and gas chambers to save on the cost of bullets.

What was scary about the moment was not that four extreme libertarians expressed such an extreme every-man-for-himself philosophy at a public, televised debate sponsored by the Tea Party.

What was scary is that no candidate took the opportunity to distinguish himself or herself by scolding the deathers. Not one. They are cowards individually, and cowards collectively. Let me name them, in no particular order:

Jon Huntsman, coward
Herman Cain, coward
Michele Bachmann, coward
Mitt Romney, coward
Rick Perry, coward
Newt Gingrich, coward
Rick Santorum, coward

In particular, if Mitt Romney had jumped in and scolded the deathers, I think that might have put a damper on dominance of the political debate by Tea Party extremism. Moderate Republicans don't want obvious nutters like Bachman, Perry or Paul to lose an election against a vulnerable Barack Obama. But when they see even Mitt molded like plastic by a few Tea Party thugs, moderates get intimidated.

Clearly the tail is wagging the dog now. The thugs are in charge of the Republican Party nomination process.

Where Have All the Capitalists Gone?

2011-09-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

Gone to socialists, every one.

In our media saturated society anyone might think we are going through a major revival of free market capitalism. It is the Tea Party and Republican Party verbal remedy for all that ails American society.

Socialism and even just ordinary good government are anathema. You would think the government owns Walmart or General Electric, or the entire S&P 500, given the way the political candidates carry on. Even government regulations, like not selling poisoned food, are decried as socialistic.

The entire business community of America, and the workers who follow their leadership, claims to be against socialism. The capitalist spirit remains unbroken and ready to rumble despite decades of New Deal stimulus, Great Society redistributions and even ObamaCare.

Then there is reality. You remember reality. It is what videos are sometimes made from. It is what you have to drive through to get to work in the morning, if you have a job.

There is a litmus test. There is a way to see whether people with money, which is too say capitalists large and capitalists small, stand by their rhetoric.

Real capitalists put capital to work in business. On a large scale this is easy to quantify: most of America's capital at work in business can be measured in the stock market. Every public stock has a value called its market capitalization, and you can add all that capital up to see what the free market capitalists are doing business with.

Phony capitalists put their capital in government bonds. There really is nothing in our society more socialistic that a Treasury bill or bond. To buy a bond is to turn ones back on capitalism and free markets. To buy a bond is to believe that the federal government's ability to tax is sounder economics than a bet on a business making profits.

In case you have not been following the stock and bond markets, let me catch you up to date.

The stock market has been largely abandoned by investors. That happened in late 2008. There are still a few brave capitalists out there, and even some individual investors, but the market has been kept afloat, to the extent that it is afloat, by stock buy backs. That is, the companies are, by and large, quite profitable, and they use much of the cash they generate to buy their own stock, allowing the socialists to get out of their investment in capitalism.

The bond market, on the other hand, is stuffed to the gills with the money accumulated by socialist investors, mainly from selling stocks. These former capitalists love the taxing power of the government, which guarantees the safety of their "investment." They are happy to lend money to a money-losing government rather than risk it on money-making public companies.

It is time for capitalists to put a stop to this hypocritical behavior.

It is time for all Republican candidates to take a new pledge:

"I pledge all of my capital is invested in the stock market or private investments, and I have no capital invested in the socialist government bond market, and never will."

In fact, all Republicans should make that pledge and take action that aligns their investments with their capitalist rhetoric.

When will they ever learn?

Disclaimer: William P. Meyers has a retirement fund that is 100% in stocks and owns no government bonds.

Andrew Jackson, The Fundamentalist Constitution, and the Balanced Budget Amendment

2011-08-29T20:03:00.000-07:00

The idea of the Fundamentalist Constitution predates the Tea Party. In fact, it was one of the streams that swelled into the Tea Party a few years back. The basic idea is that the U.S. Constitution was written by God, is a continuation of the Hebrew Ten Commandments, and should be interpreted in a manner consistent with 18th century American religious thought. Those who subscribe to this view are also related to or known as "originalists" for the Original Constitution, or "tenthers" because they love the 10th Amendment, which of course was not even part of the original Constitution.

That view is easy to critique, yet is becoming increasingly popular because it fits well with the latter day fundamentalist Christian, free-market Money worshipping, God pits every woman against all approach to society beloved by Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and other patriarchs of the anti-federal movement.

I already wrote in The Fundamentalist Constitution, The Tea Party, and Federalist 62, that documentation from that era provides no support for the fundamentalist viewpoint. If anything, originalism in its current state makes a mockery of strict construction of the Constitution, which has always had its advocates and is supported, somewhat, in both the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers.

Reading President Andrew Jackson's first State of the Union address to Congress of December 1829, I found some compelling commentary. I am not a fan of Andrew Jackson.

I am writing my Internet Biography of Andrew Jackson mainly to show how unethical the man was, and how that lack of basic human decency has always been at the core of the Democratic Party. Yet politics makes strange bedfellows. Given enough political issues, I am sure to agree with almost everyone on a thing or two. Jackson told Congress:

"I consider it one of the most urgent of my duties to bring to your attention the propriety of amending that part of the Constitution which relates to the election of President and Vice-President. Our system of government was by its framers deemed an experiment, and they therefore consistently provided a mode of remedying its defects."

God, we are told by Creationists, always gets things right the first time. One creation, no experimenting with evolution. If President Jackson was correct that the framers deemed the Constitution, the blueprint for our system of government, an experiment, then the Fundamentalists have two choices. They can say that God foresaw the need for Amendments, as that would give politicians something wholesome to do. Or they could back off the God Wrote It stuff and argue from the traditional, conservative Strict Construction viewpoint, and so not reveal themselves to be lunatics.

Or they could argue that Jackson was wrong. But then they would have to explain why God let Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans and go on to become President.

While I frequently argue that Jackson was wrong on many issues (and a murderer, adulterer, thief, and yes, a man who made money pitting dogs in fights against one another), I would like to point out that, as a child soldier, Jackson fought in the American Revolution. It is what bent him so out of shape as a youth. When the Constitution was ratified in September 1788, young Andrew Jackson was twenty-one years old. He heard the controversy about whether or not to replace the Articles of Confederation with the new Constitution. He became a lawyer, and he came to know several of the Founding Fathers. Unless he had some reason for lying about it, he genuinely believed that Our system of government was by its framers deemed an experiment.

The experimental method has led to some improvements over time. I certainly don't agree with everything the federal government has done or is doing, but I think that abolishing slavery and giving women the vote were experiments that have gone well. As Jackson wished, after President for Life Franklin D. Roosevelt made a mockery of precedent, now Presidents are limited in how long they can hold office.

So I'm not against amendments. I am against a Balanced Budget amendment. Strangely, the originalists in the Tea Party, and most Republican politicians in the House of Representatives, don't like the fact that the Original Constitution does not call for a balanced budget. I guess God forgot to send a Hebrew accountant to the Constitutional Convention to explain the issue.

Instead, Alexander Hamilton got his foot in the door. The man understood high finance the way Ms. Palin understands sled dogs. The way the Bachmann family understands how to shake down the government for money to house orphans. He actually studied how the British banking system and government finance worked. Imagine that. He engineered a starting off national debt by getting the Revolutionary War debts of the States assumed by the Federal Government. They (the States, or at least their politicians) were happy not to have to pay those debts. They were happy to let the Federal Government impose customs duties and taxes on alcohol and tobacco to pay off those debts.

Nevertheless, Andrew Jackson wanted to pay off the national debt that existed when he assumed the Presidency, which was largely a legacy of the War of 1812 and the intervening recession. Fortunately, an earlier Congress had passed a tariff or duty on imports, providing plenty of tax revenue. The debt was under $50 million (that's right, not billion or trillion) at the time, and about $12 million was paid off in 1829.

When the economy is strong, the federal government should spend less than it takes in and pay down the national debt. During recessions the government should spend more than it collects in taxes. That helps balance the business cycles that result from free market capitalism, and yes, it provides pensions for old people and aid to the sick and disabled. Make that into an amendment, and you can have my support.

A Republican Hurricane

2011-08-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

Imagine what Hurricane Irene how would affect people if the Tea Party - Republican program for dissolving American government were in full effect.

First of all, most people would have had no warning that the hurricane was coming because the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would have been shut down. The Tea Party declared it a waste of taxpayer dollars. Sure, private weather companies could exist and tell their private clients that weather was about to go wild, and the Pentagon would continue to be well-funded and would have its own weather monitoring capabilities. But having a government service that efficiently serves everyone without charging ... that would be socialism.

For most people the first signs of Irene would be their cardboard boxes blowing away. The Republicans want to eliminate taxpayer-subsidized housing, Social Security payments, unemployment compensation, and Medicare. They do want to charge enough local taxes to pay police to keep the resulting 60 million homeless Americans out of abandoned structures, so boxes would be the new McMansions. You might think a family of four or even one would provide enough weight to hold down a box home against the wind, but you are forgetting that food stamps, a socialist evil, would have been eliminated. People would be too skinny to weigh down a box against hurricane force winds.

But why worry about the lazy socialist rabble? Republicans would be fine. The rich would have even more money because taxes would be even lower, and no government regulations would prevent them from industriously creating jobs for the unemployed people of India and Africa. Warned by their private weather services, the rich would simply fly their private jets to Texas to enjoy the Perry drought. If they lose a few servants trying to protect their mansions and yachts from the weather, they could be easily replaced.

Their are rich Republicans and their are religious Republicans; that is the alliance that has crushed (in our imaginary scenario) the socialist Anti-Christ. The Religious, non-rich Republicans who could still afford ammunition would be getting out their Vietnamese-made Kalashnikovs and perhaps a few still-functioning American made relics of when guns were still manufactured in the United States, before deregulation. You might think they would be protecting their homes against the 30 million homeless people in the path of the Hurricane.
No, they would be in a sectarian war. With church-state separation gone, inter-Christian tensions would have risen to unforeseen (except by me) heights. The hurricane would be the last straw. It would be clearly caused by a lack of appropriate prayer. The Baptists would accuse the Methodists and Catholics of praying wrong. As soon as the winds slowed the majority religion in each locality would go out armed and demanding conversion or death. Surviving Republicans would flee to their respective religious enclaves.

The economy would spiral into Depression that made the 1930's Depression seem like Happy Days. Even the U.S. military would eventually collapse, unable to pay its troops. States would secede from the union, and localities would secede from states.

It would be God's anarchy. Meanwhile, the socialist, religiously tolerant states of the world would get along just fine (as the Soviet economy did in the 1930s) and historians would write first drafts of The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.

Barack Obama Responds on Nuclear Dangers

2011-08-20T15:48:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama's nuclear nightmare is not that there will be a Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima in the United States during his presidency. He certainly is not worried that his encouraging the building of more nuclear plants will bring disaster in the future. I know, because the President sent me a letter.

This is the letter I sent to President Barack Obama, handwritten, by snail mail:

Dear President Obama,

Please don't wait for an earthquake.

Please order all U.S. nuclear reactors to be shut down as soon as is safely possible.

Sincerely,

William P. Meyers

This is the reply I received:

Dear William:

Thank you for writing. I have heard from many Americans who have been affected by natural disasters, and I appreciate hearing from you.

My administration is working every day to ensure our country stands ready to respond to any disaster or emergency. Our goal is a more resilient Nation, one in which individuals, communities, and our economy can adapt to changing conditions, as well as withstand and rapidly recover from a disruption of any kind. I encourage Americans who are directly impacted by natural disasters to visit www.fema.gov for up-to-date information and to access current response and recovery information.
Thank you again for writing.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama

Link to image of Barack Obama letter to William P. Meyers

In other words, he instructed his staff to duck the issue. The Obama administration is not just one in a long line of administrations that is desecrating American soil with nuclear power plants. By aligning the Democratic Party with the nuclear power industry, he has restarted the building of nuclear plants. What Obama fears is not a lack of support from people like me, but a lack of support from the corporate security state.

Failing to protect workers, extending a counterproductive foreign war, and rolling up his sleeves to help oil and nuclear power corporations destroy the environment, these are the legacies of the Obama administration.

The only real hope within the electoral system is the Green Party. The Green Party of California is launching a registration drive and fundraising drive right now. I'll admit we are weak, but that is because you have wasted your time and donations on the Democratic Party. If those of you who see the solutions to our problems join us, we will be strong. Together we will stop and reverse the damage to the environment. We will create a strong and just economy. We will withdraw from the imperialist system and enjoy the benefits of a peacetime economy.

And we will definately close down all nuclear plants and store all nuclear material in the safest manner scientists can devise.

Note: Nuclear mishaps occur more frequently than most people realize. See List of Civilian Nuclear Accidents

Taxes, the Tea Party, and the English Civil War

2011-08-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

The Boston Tea Party of 1773 is celebrated by American historians, and more recently stamped into our minds by the cavorting of our contemporary Tea Party. While certain citizens of Boston in 1773 believed that they could be taxed only by their local representatives, our Tea Party believes, essentially, that all taxes are bad. In effect the Tea Party is a group of right-wing anarchists, for without taxes it is hard to maintain any sort of government whatsoever.

Of the multiple causes of the American Revolution, taxes were important but probably not paramount. National sentiment and desire for self-government were large factors. But there was a fundamental shift in the attitudes of America's elite between 1770 and 1776. Naturally conservative, in 1770 they mainly wanted to be represented in the British Parliament and perhaps even to be blessed by a knighthood. By 1776 the slave masters of the southern colonies did not want their colonies to be on British soil because slavery had been recognized as a fundamental violation of human rights in the ex parte Somersett ruling in English courts. The New England elite, involved in trade and manufacturing, did not like the limits the British Empire set on their business activities.

Whenever there has been taxation, there has been anti-tax sentiment. Many ancient historical texts mention taxes as a cause of rebellions. In the New Testament the Pharisees speak against Roman taxes, but Jesus refutes them. In English history the Peasant Rebellion of 1381 started when a man refused to pay the head tax. Even in Marxism one of the main talking points is that the Capitalist system has an inherent tax on labor (capitalists expropriate the value added by laborers) that can be eliminated by the proletarian revolution.

As precedents for the Tea Party revolt I would submit the events of the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651, which, along with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, was also the main precedent for the American Revolution. I do not mean to imply that the Tea Party will use violence to achieve its ends, though I cannot rule that out.

The English Civil War is often cast as a battle between the mainstream Anglicans, backed up by Roman Catholics, and the Puritans. Leaving that aside, it is cast as king and nobility versus the House of Commons, shortened to Parliament (which also includes the House of Lords). It also is used as an example of a people's revolt turning into a dictatorship, that of Oliver Cromwell.

Consider how all that reflects the changing economics of the 1600s. The hereditary nobility had prospered and become corrupted with greed and gluttony. Attracted to the Puritans were "the soberer part of the nobility ... with the merchant class and the smaller landowners." [1] Their early embrace of thrift and free market economics was reflected in their Presbyterian disdain for religious authorities, Catholic Pope and Anglican bishops alike. Despite the wealth and power of the nobility, many had mismanaged their inheritances, and tended to live on credit. King James I hated both Presbyterian doctrines and the idea that money could be earned by a man's actions, rather than simply inherited.

James I and his son King Charles I asserted the old Catholic idea of the Divine Right of Kings. This was not just a religious idea, but a rational for absolute power. He handed out monopolies in a variety of goods to the king's friends, causing the goods to cost far beyond what they would have been in a free market. Thus the hard work and thrift of the people was eaten up by the monopolies, taxes, and debauchery of the King and Lords. King Charles had originally called the Long Parliament in 1640 specifically to raise more taxes.

When this civil war began, after a long, complex political struggle, all thought it would be decided in a single battle. The first real battle of the war was Edgehill on October 23, 1642. The forces of Parliament did not win a final military victory until 1651. Even then, the Monarchy was restored in 1661.

Every new government finds itself in the position of needing to collect taxes, if only to pay the police and military needed to exert its own authority. Any money the Tea Party saves by dismantling Social Security, food stamps, and other forms of welfare would simply be replaced by the need to pay an army to suppress the hungry and impoverished population.

Even the creation of the U.S. Constitution was primarily about giving the emerging national ruling class the power to collect taxes. To the extent the Tea Party is not just recycled robber baron rhetoric, they should be attacking the Constitution, not waving it like a flag. The Articles of Confederation are much more anti-tax than the Constitution.

To some extent the Tea Party is a political awakening that has been partially diverted to support the corporate security state program. I am glad that Americans are reading our Constitution. It is a short document, more easily read than the Federalist Papers or Anti-Federalist Papers that provide so much context. At the same time, we are no longer a rural nation governed by an aristocracy of slave owners. If anything, we need to amend the Constitution to align it with our modern reality.

1. Locke, J. Courtenay, "Cromwell and the Puritans", chapter 130 of Universal World History, Wm. H. Wise Co., 1937, page 2153.

China, Aircraft Carriers, and U.S. Bonds

2011-08-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

Before getting to the Chinese aircraft carrier issue, let me point out one very important thing missed by almost all commentators.

Osama Bin Laden triumphed, even though he was dead. His secondary goal, after helping to defeat the old Soviet Union, was to defeat the United States. He never expected to invade the U.S. and force everyone to wear beards and turbans. He used his followers' minimal resources to cause an economic and military collapse. The downgrading of U.S. debt (bonds) by Standard & Poor's was a public assessment of the success of Al Qaeda. Americans spent too much energy on global military dominance, too little energy on building a sustainable national economy. We lost, and everyone intelligent now knows we lost. We could still retrieve the situation by using our democratic system to take power away from the ruling corporate security state, but it looks like we are too stupid and lethargic to even do that. So, on to Chinese aircraft carriers.

The cry babies at the Pentagon, led byLeon Panetta, don't want the Chinese navy to have any aircraft carriers. In their minds Chinese aircraft carriers would shift the balance of power in the China Sea and require a buildup of the U.S. Navy in the Western Pacific. Which would require a bigger Navy budget.

The real question should be, given the history of China and aircraft carriers, why don't the Chinese already have a half dozen aircraft carriers? The answer is that China has not been a global military aggressor [Yes, I know, Tibetian nationalists and Vietnamese would disagree]. Of course, any country with a military is in some danger of becoming a military aggressor, but the Chinese Communist Party has a much better history of restraint than the United States Democratic Party does.

China, in the later 1800s and early 1920s, was being torn apart by the Great Powers. In 1914, During World War I, a Japanese proto-carrier, the Wakamiya, lowered 4 seaplanes in the sea, which then attacked German forces in Tsingtao (Qingdao), a German colony in China. No matter how you define the term "first aircraft carrier," by the 1920's these ships were being built by all the great powers, including the United States, Britain, Japan and France. By World War II naval battles were largely won or lost by aircraft launched from the carriers. The Barbaric U.S. attacks on Vietnam were also largely carrier-based.

The United States has been bullying nations with its aircraft carrier based terror bombing for closing in on a century now. Who are Barack Obama and Leon Panetta to tell the Chinese they can't have their own aircraft carriers for defense?

If Chinese aircraft carriers are not for defense, why should U.S. aircraft carriers classified as "defensive?" Aren't they inherently aggressive vessels, used only for war crimes? Including the current war crimes in Afghanistan?

If Panetta and the corporate security state he so proudly serves had half a brain left, they would negotiate a global treaty to decommission all aircraft carriers. Then China would not need to build new ones. Then the U.S. might have some money for schools or to invest capital to create jobs. Or to pay off those bonds that Standard & Poor's and others have suggested are less than sterling investments.

See also: history of the aircraft carrier

Republican, Democratic and Tea Party Debacle

2011-08-03T11:40:00.000-07:00

The rhetoric was shrill, but in the end there was much to do about nothing. The federal government has no plan for reviving the economy, and it has no plan for not going bankrupt down the road a few years. But consumers, business decision makers, and bankers were filled with terror throughout July, making the economy worse, not better. A worse economy results in lower taxes and bigger federal deficits, the opposite of what the Tea Party claims to want.

In yesterday's Disecting the Bull blog, Plenty of Stimulus, intended primarily for investors, I argued that the federal stimulus, on the whole, is plentiful.

Unfortunately, Congress and the President, as a whole, have their priorities screwed up.

Military and homeland security spending were exempt from cuts. There are economists who will tell you that military spending creates jobs, but so does make-work spending. The finished goods from military spending create no value. Also, much of the spending goes to troops garrisoned in our overseas empire, rather than into the American economy. Military and homeland security spending do not help the U.S. compete in the international arena against export powers like Germany, South Korea, and China.

Research and development, science, and education are being cut. Can you spell s-t-u-p-i-d? Sure, education money could be better targetted. We have too many English and film majors, not enough people learning technical, business, and science skills. We have way too many high school drop outs.

Regulatory agency budgets are prime targets for cuts. A lot more Americans are going to die because of lack of enforecement of safety rules than could possibly be killed by international terrorists. Banks won't get examined, impure foods will make it to supermarket shelves, passenger planes will crash in mid-air. Thank the Tea Party for that.

What is truly amazing, though, is that nothing is being done about the families being devastated by long-term unemployment. True, at least until the end of 2011 the federal government will continue to extend unemployment benefits to 2 years (most state allow for 6 months, which is fine in a normal economy or mild recession). Unemployment started rising in 2007. Of course there are food stamps, homeless shelters and Medicaid, but unemployed people are economically unproductive. Talent is being wasted when we need to be competing vigorously against the Chinese and Germans. The Republicans pray to their Holy Trinity, gold, free markets, and capitalism, but while the price of gold is up (don't worry, it's a bubble, it will fall again), our free markets have been rather lax at creating jobs.

It CEO's won't hire, government should take action. Here's what an activist President and Congress would do: impose a 95% income tax rate on CEO's of profitable companies that fail to grow their workforces. Include stock options and other benefits when calculating the tax. My guess: full employment by the end of 2011.

Get the housing market started again by allowing the Federal Reserve to loan directly to credit-worthy home buyers at the same interest rates it charges banks. Oh no, that would be socialism! Better depression, suicide, homelessness, riots, and chaos than a bit of healthy socialism.

You can talk about economics, but in the end an economy is just the aggregate of a bunch of human decision makers. You don't want people to be overconfident, or you get bubbles, but you don't want them to be overly cautious either.

The July Debacle did anything but inspire confidence. Hey hey, ho ho, the Tea Party has to go.

Republicans, Loaves and Fishes

2011-07-31T11:39:00.000-07:00

It's one of the those rare moments when I find myself in (temporary) alignment with Wall Street. A bunch of crazy Republicans with guns want to kill the Government so badly they are willing to take the whole economy down with them.

Wall Street Republicans have always been aligned with Main Street Republicans, but the corporate assault on Main Street thinned the ranks pretty well. At some point Wall Street strategists (of course I'm generalizing here: some, not all of them) and conservative corporate strategists decided they needed reinforcements if they were going to run the nation to their liking. Those reinforcements came mainly in the form of Conservative Christians. This started in the 1960s, and would be more important in the long run that The Beatles or LSD.

The alliance went pretty well (for Wall Street) for a few decades. Wall Street and the corporate elite supplied the money. To the Christians they offered rhetoric about abortions and prayer in public schools. The Christians got to worshipping Free Market Capitalism almost as if it came out of the Bible. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush illustrated how well the system could work when it was working.

But as deluded as Christians are, they are not quite unthinking zombies. They have lively egos, and many started thinking they should actually be in charge, not the Wall Street boys. They are pushing economic ideas that would have seemed primitive to Jesus himself, like returning to using Gold as money.

They tend to be Old Testament guys, because the New Testament contains a lot of messages they don't want to here. Like loving people [John 13: 34], paying your taxes [Luke 20: 25], wolves in sheep's clothing [Matthew 7: 15] and holding all things in common [Acts 4, 32].

In short, they forgot the Loaves and Fishes [Luke 9: 12-17]

But he said to them, "Give them more to eat". They said, "We have no more than five loaves and two fishes." ... For they were about five thousand ... He took the five loaves and two fishes, and looking to the sky, he prayed over them, and broke them, and gave to the disciples to set before the multitude. And they did eat, and were all filled.

Medicare and Social Security are the loaves and fishes of modern America. If you can provide them, you can get by with all kinds of other kinds of business and government folly. You can talk up the Republican God, Free Market Capitalism, all you want, but people want jobs with good pay, homes, and a safe environment. Republican experiments this last decade with free markets have led to homelessness, joblessness, and hopelessness.

Having forgotten to bring out the loaves and fishes, Republican politicians, and particularly Tea Party pea brains, will be abandoned by the crowds, and crucified in the next round of elections. I am guessing they will lose ten seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in California alone in 2012, the way things are heading.

Hopefully the Republican Party will implode. If America remains a two party system, hopefully the new 2nd party will be based on sane, pragmatic, modern thinking. We still have to save the environment, which is going downhill at a rapid pace. We have to make things right for ordinary working people. That means disassembling the corporate security state and the concentrations of wealth that have emerged since President Kennedy started cutting the top tax rates on the wealthy back in 1962. We would not need to tax the rich at such high rates if they used their profits to hire more workers at better pay, but they have shown over and over again that they (as a class) are incapable of behaving responsibly.

Somalia Famine: There's a History

2011-07-20T19:36:00.000-07:00

I read an article today at the Christian Science Monitor, U.N. Declares Famine in Somalia: How to Help. While Somalis may need some help, the article claims in the drought region "Somalia is worst-off because of perpetual government instability and the threat of [the] Islamist militant group Al Shabab." That is probably believable to people who read only U.S. propaganda, which is most Americans.

Somalia was not a nation in 1400, but it was a prosperous area with many wealthy, high-civilized city states. Roman Catholic pirates from Portugal began destroying those cities after Vasco da Gama discovered them in 1498 [See also Portuguese Catholics destroyed peaceful Islamic societies in eastern Africa in 1500's].

Intermittent warfare between native freedom fighters and their Portuguese would-be masters lasted for centuries, with the Portuguese often enslaving port cities. In the later half of the 1800s the British tried to add Somalia to their vast empire of slave nations in Africa. Muhammad Abdullah Hassan rallied the Somalis against the British, but in 1920, when his Dervish state collapsed, it was fascist Italy that turned northern Somalia, or Somaliland, into a colony. As usual, the Somali peoples resisted, the Italian armies sometimes suffered heavy casualties, and the British held southern Somalia more in name than in substance. When World War II began the Italians conquered British Somalia, but the British won it back in 1941.

After World War II the victorious nations gave part of Somalia, Ogaden, to Ethiopia. The U.N. gave Somalia back to Italy in 1949! After all, Catholic Italy was now an ally against the atheist Communist block of nations.

Finally, in 1960, Somalia was granted independence. But the lines had not been drawn around a nation, but around a diverse group of people. In 1969 a coup installed a socialist president and declared an end to "tribalism, nepotism, corruption, and misrule." The regime eventually made itself unpopular and finally fell from power in 1991. The United Nations, led by the U.S., invaded in 1992, only to face fierce resistance and withdraw in early 1995.

Since 1995 there has been anarchy, that is no central government that ruled the entire country. While life went on, American presidents and the CIA plotted. They really, truly hate people they cannot control. At one point the Somali people themselves set up a judicial system, the Islamic Courts Union. It seemed to be working well, bringing peace and justice, ending war between clans. That really ticked off the U.S. corporate security state. So the U.S. paid the government of Ethiopia to invade Somalia and destroy the Islamic courts in 2006. A lot of people died, the economy was again destroyed, and a U.S. puppet government was again established. The Somali people, at first overrun by Ethiopian tanks, drove the invaders out by 2009 (See War in Somalia, 2006-2009).

Not happy with that outcome, the U.S. government paid the African Union to invade Somalia. The actual troops were mainly "donated" by the nation of Uganda. That did not work either. The U.S. puppet government and the AU troops typically control little except themselves, though they do divert aid money sent to Somalia into the hands of their leaders.

So how can you help with the famine in Somalia? You can donate money for food, or for medicine (which I do through Doctors Without Borders), but the real problem is the leaders of the United States of America. Which means the real problem is the people of the USA. We are responsible for the leaders we choose. We are responsible for allowing them to bankrupt our nation with vast military expenditures and schemes to put and keep puppet governments in power.

If anyone running for office does not pledge to withdraw all U.S. troops to back inside U.S. territory, don't vote for them. Don't worry about their other campaign positions, which tend to be lies anyway. If they aren't for a peaceful America, they are war criminals, and should be imprisoned, not elected.

When the GOP Was Still Grand: the Republican Platform of 1884

2011-07-17T18:58:00.001-07:00

"The Republican Party has gained its strength by quick and faithful response to the demands of the people for the freedom and equality of all men; for a united nation assuring the rights of all citizens; for the elevation of labor; for an honest currency; for purity in legislation, and for integrity and accountability in all departments of government, and it accepts anew the duty of leading the work of progress and reform."

That is from the opening of the 1884 Republican Party Platform. It might be dismissed as rhetoric, except that the Democratic Party, in opposition, was doing its best to relegate African Americans to renewed slavery. The Grand Old Party (GOP) still was dominated by men who had fought for the Republic in the Civil War. The farmers and working men far outnumbered the business men, and the men with small businesses outnumbered the genuine capitalists in the party.

They weren't the bitter, tiny-souled Republican leaders of today who would allow most Americans to starve rather than make the rich pay taxes or cut the bloated military and homeland security budget.

Let's return to the Grand Old Platform:

"We therefore, demand the imposition of duties on foreign imports shall be made, not for "revenue only" but that, in raising the requisite revenues for the government, such duties shall be so levied as to afford the security of our diversified industries and protection to the rights and wages of the laborer, to the end that active and intelligent labor as well as capital may have its just reward and the laboring man his full share in the national prosperity."

My god, isn't that ... Socialism? The government protecting industry and workers? Were the conservative Republicans of 1884 to the left of not only today's Republicans, but to the left of today's Democrats? But there is more ...

"The principle of the public regulation of railway corporations is a wise and salutary one for the protection of all classes of the people, and we favor legislation that shall prevent unjust discrimination and excessive charges for transportation, and that shall secure to the people and to the railroads alike the fair and equal protection of the laws."

OMG, when something went wrong with the economic system, the GOP dared to use the federal government to do something about it. They took on the most powerful capitalists of their era, the railroad barons.

The Republican Party Platform of 1884 also called for federal civil service reform, for "the establishment of a national bureau of labor, the enforcement of the eight-hour law, [and] a wise and judicious system of general education by adequate appropriation from the national revenues wherever the same is needed." It called for legislation to "secure to every citizen, of whatever race and color, the full and complete recognition, possession and exercise of all civil and political rights."

But we live in an age of ignorance. Basic lessons in good government and economics have been forgotten. Congressmen (and women) spout an economic faith that is as lunatic as medieval physics, biology, and theology. Republicans do not know their own history (neither do Democrats). They believe that Moses wrote the Constitution and that free market capitalism is based on the Ten Commandments. The only thing they are experts at is taking money from rich donors and using it to manipulate the equally ignorant.

When the Republican faithful are taught to treat Mitt Romney as a left wing nut case, there is something seriously wrong. A tragedy is unfolding. What Al-Qaeda did to the American people is nothing compared to how we have been done in by our own corporate security state. Our only hope is that the tragedy will shake the lethargy of good, ordinary people, and that they will aspire to a government by political parties and independent politicians that truly represent their interests.

Saint Peter Died in Beijing

2011-07-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

Chinese scholars announced that Saint Peter, the leader of the 12 Disciples of Jesus Christ, ended his life in Beijing. A tomb containing his bones and a manuscript with the story of his life was unearthed during an excavation for a new skyscraper near the old royal palace. "It dated to approximately 85 A.D., when Beijing would have been the stronghold of a local warlord."

Christian scholars have always suspected that the idea that Saint Peter died in Rome was a 3rd century fabrication by the bishops of Rome. There is no record in the New Testament of the apostle Peter ever visiting Rome. The only letters in the Bible purported to be written by Peter were written from Babylon, which is a few days journey from Jerusalem. Acts of the Apostles has Peter living in Jerusalem long after the Christian religion had spread to other cities in the Roman Empire.

The Life of Peter, now being prepared for publication, appears to have been partly written in his own hand and partly written by an assistant who joined him in his trip. It records his three years with Jesus, then several decades of living in or near Jerusalem. Finally Peter decided to take the word of Jesus East. He stayed for two years in Babylon, then traveled through India, stopping and founding Christian communities which later disappeared. Finally he sailed to southern China, then worked his way up the coast to Beijing, where he died of natural causes. His assistant arranged with the local rulers for his tomb.

The Vatican immediately called the Chinese scientists and scholars, "A bunch of liars. The timing of this hoax, when the Church is trying to exert control over Chinese Catholic bishops, is particularly suspicious."

The Catholic Bishop of Beijing said it is too early to declare himself Pope. "We will need further confirmation by a wider team of archeologists and specialists in ancient languages. However, if God puts this responsibility on my shoulders, I will accept His burden."

Hillary Clinton reacted strongly to the news. "It's as if someone claimed Jesus, after he rose from the dead and departed Jerusalem, came to the Americas and preached among the Indians. If is just a fabrication to assert Chinese Communist power in the religious sphere."

Professor Moriarty, speaking for the Southern Baptist Convention, said "of course our scholars would be interested in anything that sheds light on the early Church. However, it has always been the position of Protestants that the Church should be governed by its members, not whichever anti-Christ happens to be Bishop of Rome at any given moment."

Capitalism Death Watch

2011-07-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

The Republican Party Faithful are doing their best to stop the government of the United States of America from functioning. They believe the government deducts from their prosperity by taxing, spending, and borrowing. The problem is they have a simplistic view of capitalist economics that is out of touch with the real world.

Already in the 19th century a number of economists noted free-market capitalism's self-destructive tendencies. Their theories were based on observations of capitalist accumulation (of money and property in the hands of ever fewer people) and cycles of boom and bust. There are other factors in business cycles, but it was apparent to anyone looking objectively at the data that letting capitalism run wild created booms followed by depressions, of which there were a number of between 1850 and 1940.

Let me repeat: experimental evidence showed that unregulated capitalism tended to destroy national and global economies. The reason we have only had one Great Depression is one was enough for most people: government intervention is required.

Of course, you can also have too much government in specific cases, and counter-productive programs, but I've noted that Republicans are just as resistant to killing their pet government subsidies as Democrats are, maybe more so.

What happens if the Congress, a combination of Republicans and Democrats, fails to raise the debt limit? Capitalism dies. The U.S. will go down, and we will take the whole world with us, even China.

A little sense would go a long way here. Congress could wait to cut spending until, say, U.S. unemployment drops to 7%. That would reassure just about everyone, and save our regulated system of capitalism.

If the U.S. government stops paying its debts, in August, the economy will start falling. There will be nothing and no one capable of breaking the fall. We are in a slow upward cycle, but will be thrust into a rapid downward plunge. Tax revenues will decrease, making it even more difficult to achieve a balanced federal budget. More layoffs will mean less consumpition, meaning evern more layoffs. Bonds will become worthless unless taxes are greatly increased or the whole government (except of course, homeland security and the military) is shut down to make the escalating interest payments.

If the debt limit is raised (substantially) but with no tax increases, no cuts in military spending, and major cuts in future payments to seniors and other low-income persons, the outlook is grim, but the economy might muddle through.

Here's the deal: truly free-market capitalism concentrates all wealth in the hands of a few people (in a nation of over 300 million, that might be about 3 million). No one else has money to spend, so demand drops, the economy collapses, and people realize how dumb they have been and elect a government that resistributes wealth. Then we rebuild, and ideologs eventually forget the facts of life.

I hope the Congress is really just bluffing. I hope the debt limit is raised, but that federal spending is gradually reduced until we can repay some of the national debt. But I fear a lot of stupidity has been concentrated in Congress right now. The death of capitalism might offer the hope of a new social order, but it could be a very, very unpleasant transition.

Where are the Jobs?

2011-07-10T18:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a friend called up, highly distressed. Her last short term job had been as a census worker in 2010, and her jobless benefits ran out this May. She is about to become homeless, although that probably means she will start couch surfing, not living in the street. I know she has not been diligent looking for work. Like some of my acquaintances, she enjoys a prolonged, taxpayer-funded vacation from the stress of work. Nevertheless, she has done some looking, and if jobs were more plentiful here is California, she would probably being going to work on Monday instead of facing an eviction notice.

Multiply that by about 14 million, and you have a nation filled with capable people who are not employed. The lucky ones are getting unemployment compensation. State benefits typically last six months; the Federal government extends that to a full two years during times of high unemployment.

There is no one cause of unemployment, but there are a few key factors at play. There are two big holes in the economy right now. One is construction, with its attendant employment of realtors and of workers that produce products that normally go into building like wood, cement, glass, and metal.

The other is government, particularly state and local governments. Ever since the economy turned up from the depths of the recession, private employers have been hiring, if not as quickly as we would like. June brought another wave of layoff notices for public employees like teachers, bureaucrats, and police. The net has been very few jobs.

In 2008 the Republicans and Democrats united briefly to save Wall Street, the banking system, and the big American automobile manufacturers. That done, they fell to quarrelling. The Republicans quarrel among themselves, Tea Party people against the old school. Almost no one listens to Barack Obama, whose lack of leadership qualities were disguised by his rhetorical abilities until he actually became President.

But high unemployment is not Barack Obama's fault. It is not anybody's fault. It evolved over time, and our politics have not yet evolved to the point where we can deal with the new reality.

Let's start by putting on our thinking caps. Why not use the money that is paid out in unemployment to pay people to do real work? In the most appalling cases, public school teachers are laid off, so they can sit on their butts for two years while the few remaining teachers take on ever more students. Can you spell S-T-U-P-I-D? But the same is true in the private sector. Some people get worked to death during a depression and almost wish they had been lucky enough to be aid off.

The problem is that our economic rules and regulations, and even business culture, are "fighting the last war." That is, they were designed to fix problems that might be the same on the surface, but that have different causes than in the past. So the fixes don't work any more, at least not as well as they should. We are feeding leaded gasoline to cars designed for unleaded, then acting surprised when the engines die.

Most of the programs we now have to deal with recessions and unemployment were initiated during the Great Depression (with bipartisan support, I might add. Go look at the Congressional Record if you don't believe me). Some pre-date that, like the Federal Reserve System. The Great Depression itself had no one cause; it was the perfect storm of changes in the global economy and American culture and politics. Hoover did not have the tools in place to deal with it, and even the New Deal did not work well. If Hitler had not started World War II (causing everyone to start ordering arms and grain from the U.S.), the Depression might have lasted even longer than it did.

Some people thought that war spending was the ticket, after that experience. The problem is that while the U.S. benefited economically from the war, the economies of Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, China and Japan were essentially destroyed. The U.S. make out best when other nations fight. Other nations make out best when they remain neutral and the U.S. fights the evil villain of the decade. The only defense spending that really helps the U.S. economy is when it is just a fig leaf for civilian spending, like the Federal Defense Highway System. Built to move tanks around the nation quickly and make road contractors rich, that defense effort is now what we call Interstate Highways.

Some people think China is to blame (two decades ago they said the same about Japan). As late as 1750 China had the world's largest economy, then it was ripped to shreds by the Great Powers (including the U.S.) and had a third world economy by 1950 when the Communists took over. I don't see how we can honestly blame China for unemployment in the U.S. In fact, if not for China buying U.S. products, we would have even more unemployment. China would buy more products if we produced them. We don't produce more products because over 10% of our workforce are loafing when they'd be willing to work if they were offered a job and their unemployment checks were cut off.

Unemployment insurance was designed to provide temporary relief to workers, allowing them to find new jobs and stay productive. During recessions it also answers as a counter-cyclical measure, keeping demand up until the business cycle gets going again. It is not a jobs program. We had no real jobs programs during the Great Recession. Some extra money was spent on infrastructure, but infrastructure work is highly mechanized and the money goes for cement and diesel fuel for bulldozers and cranes. Only a fraction is used to hire workers.

Aside from government stupidity, which is ageless and unlikely to change, the root cause of joblessness is inefficient allocation of capital, which is a function of capitalist stupidity. Let me be clear: American capitalists are rapidly becoming world class idiots, and I don't just mean Donald Trump. Not all of them are dysfunctional, there is a spectrum, but a significant proportion of our capitalist class are seriously screwing things up for all of us.

There have always been some stupid capitalists, in particular heirs to capital have a way of regressing towards not being much smarter than the average joe. Over time that sort of ordinary ineptitude sorts itself out, as their heirs of the Carnegies and Fords lose their dough to the up and coming Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs.

Nevertheless, the American capitalist class as a whole has seriously ossified during the last 30 years. They want sure things; they are risk averse. Hiring people for existing businesses is a risk. Starting a new business is very risky. Sure there are people who still do that, like venture capital firms, but they are the exception.

Government could do something about joblessness, but won't. It isn't that the Republicans are standing in the way of the Democrats. Ever since George McGovern failed to get elected President the Democrats have been quite capable of standing in their own way.

The good news is that we are still at the beginning of an economic up cycle. As the economy improves, our capitalists will feel safer, and want to use their money to make more money, rather than just hoarding it. To do that, they will have to hire more store clerks, maybe even begin making housing loans again, and paying workers to repair homes so people can move back into them.

If the capitalists were really smart, they would fire their $10 million + a year corporate CEOs and hire equally competent, probably more competent men at a fraction of the cost. The fact that they can't be bothered to do that shows just how bad they have become at allocating capital.

Crazy Republicans with Guns and Presidential Aspirations

2011-07-03T16:01:00.000-07:00

The right to own a gun (rifle or handgun) is a perennial favorite talking point of political candidates. The Democratic Party was founded by a gun enthusiast, Andrew Jackson, who began life a child warrior. To the extent that the Republican Party, founded in part by pacifists who wanted to abolish slavery, might have been less gun-happy, that went out the window when the Civil War began.

Of the Republican Presidential candidates, without a doubt the best shot is Sarah Palin, who could doubtless outgun Annie Oakley, were such a match up possible. Michele Bachmann, however, favors the heavy firepower of the fully automatic Uzi, which she learned to strip and reassemble blindfolded as a teen in Israel. Unlike President Jackson, however, neither of these candidates has actually shot anyone, unless it was covered up. The most recent shooting of a human by a near-President was in 2006 when Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney shot Harry Wittington. Cheney favored a shotgun, which is fine for certain types of hunting and which Michele recommends for brushing back juvenile delinquents in the home.

Of course many former U.S. Presidents besides Andrew Jackson had experience in the military or actual wars.

We have to go back a bit in history, however, to find the best example of a crazy Republican with a gun and Presidential aspirations. His name was Charles Guiteau. He receives little attention in standard U.S. history books because his actions cut against the current of U.S. propaganda.

Charles was born in 1841 but apparently managed to avoid serving in the Civil War, in which the Republican Party defeated the slaver masters of the Democratic Party. He pursued religious writing and journalism, then became a lawyer. He was a Republican, and when 1880 rolled around he supported the comeback of former President Ulysses S. Grant. At the time the Republican Party had two factions, the "Half-Breeds" led by James Blaine, and the Stalwarts led by Roscoe Conkling. The Half-Breed favored filling civil service positions based on non-political criteria. The Stalwarts wanted to continue to use civil service positions to reward supporters.

Presidential candidates of political parties were not chosen in primaries back then, but at party conventions dominated by elected officials. The Republican convention of 1880 saw a standoff between supporters of Blaine and of Grant. Finally, a compromise was reached, with James Garfield, a moderate Half-Breed nominated for President and Chester Arthur, a moderate Stalwart, nominated for Vice President.

Given the lack of ideological differences between the factions, you would not think anyone would get too worked up about the compromise. Charles Guiteau supported Garfield, giving speeches in his favor and even handing out copies of the speeches. When Garfield won, Guiteau thought he would be rewarded with a civil service job.

Garfield, however, had no office he wanted to give to Guiteau (who wanted to be an Ambassador, but probably would have been happy to be appointed a Postmaster or Customs official, those being the only major national bureaucracies back then). Thank God for the Second Amendment. Charles went out and bought a handgun, then practiced up. He shot President James Garfield twice on July 2, 1881.

Garfield probably would have lived, the wounds being serious but probably not deadly, but doctors intervened and he died on September 19th.

At his trial Guiteau's defense lawyers argued he was insane. Charles Guiteau considered himself a hero of the Stalwarts and began to plan a campaign to be President. "Guiteau went so far as to ask all those who had benefited politically by the assassination to contribute to his defense fund." His aspirations were cut off by a hangman's noose on June 30, 1882.

So please, no more lefty complaints that the current crop of Republican candidates are crazy. I don't care if Michele Bachmann thinks God created the world in 1776 or that Sarah Palin believes she shot Bigfoot or that Mitt Romney swears he emerged from Massachusetts untainted by liberal ideas. Those thoughts are no more crazy that the Lefty idea that we can all collect disability and be artists if only taxes on CEO pay were higher. Republican Presidential aspirant ideas may not match up to reality very well, but we are talking politics, the art of telling voters what they want to hear, their own crazy ideas. As long as the Republicans don't start shooting at each other, our republic survive despite whatever the politicians throw at us.

Looking Forward on the Fourth

2011-07-02T10:12:00.001-07:00

I have not posted much to my blogs lately. Yesterday, though, I turned in an index for a technology book. Now I am looking forward to enjoying the Fourth of July in Point Arena, while fitting in the usual accumulated errands like taking out the trash, watering the garden, and cleaning up a bit.

You can look forward to my writing more this next few weeks. I have a bunch of ideas for this blog. I'll be commenting on Norman Solomon's run for congress at Mike Thompson Watch. I have some overdue things to say about machine understand. If you care about the economy, I'll have a bunch of new material over the next few weeks at Dissecting the Bull. Of course I also plan to keep adding chapters to my Internet Biography of Andrew Jackson, which is about half complete at this point.

But today there is the Fourth of July Parade in Point Arena. I am looking forward to the Golden Retriever Peace Walk and other favorite groups. No Poodles for Peace this year, but Hugo (actually, a Mexican Water Dog) and other poodles will be joining the celebration. Have a great long weekend.

Obama Withdraws Slowly from Afghanistan

2011-06-25T19:04:00.000-07:00

Ah, to relive my youth, when President Richard Nixon slowly withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam.

The Bush-Obama plan to impregnate Afghanistan with American values has failed, at least in the short run. No one in Afghanistan cared much for industrialism, capitalism, Christianity, free public secular education, or pork hot dogs. Most of the nation will go back to lamb, poppies, pomegranites, and melons. Why go through industrialization when it's just the painful, pre-apocalypse phase before non-mechanized agriculture?

Once the troops are gone, most Afghanistan families will remember one thing: their dead relatives. The carnage was fantastic. Towards the end Obama's weaponized drones attacking weddings, funerals, and hash fests gave the nation a real Terminator 3 feeling.

Why the slow withdrawal, with its implied ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity? Did anyone tell President Barack Obama that the Nobel Peace Prize medal is not a get out of war crimes trials free card?

The slow withdrawal is Obama's trademark. He has always been a politician without substance, ever since he first ran for office backed by the Democratic Party of Chicago. Like most politicians, he knows he can't please all the people all of the time, and if he took solid positions on important issues, he'd displease most of the people some of the time. He is an artist, for sure, at saying what swinging voters want to hear. "You never wanted me in, baby? Why didn't you say so? I'm pulling out, but slowly, because I don't want it to hurt."

His core Democratic Party voters have been against the war in Afghanistan since at least 2006. He has to withdraw to please them if he wants a second term as President. But he does not want to p.o. the corporate security state people who really run things now. Those drones will be used against the American people, I guarantee you, but not until they are fully tested in Afghanistan. So instead of getting the hell out, which is what most people thought they were electing Barack to do in 2008, he rammed the U.S. in even further during his first two years in office.

Now he can pull out a few troops. The war is over! We won! Stop that media coverage! Barack Obama is both the Victory President and the Peace President.

The truth is in 2012 there will be more U.S. troops (and paramilitary types) in Afghanistan than there were when George W. Bush left office in January 2009.

What could be sicker than that? "Progressive" Democrat Party activists. They will repeat the mindless slogans of the corporate security state as long as there is a Democratic administration. They will do anything for a Democratic Party electoral win. They are a herd of ... I don't want to disgrace any mammal species here ... canaries that sing of disaster in their gilded cages, but just keep going along with the program.

When Nixon withdrew from Vietnam, he was afraid of revolution in the United States. The left in 1972 did not mean the middle of the Democratic Party. To be on the Left in 1972 you had to be at least in Democratic Socialists of America. Preferably you were an Anarchist. If your personality was bent out of shape enough you could be a Marxist, Trotskyist, Maoist or even Stalinist or SLA. We have no significant equivalent to that "New Left" of the 60s and 70s today. Maybe that is just as well, all the groups were too dogmatic to be much good at revolution, much less actual governance. But they made you feel like there were alternatives to snakes like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

Then again, we can always hope that between the idiot Republicans and idiot Democrats the U.S. government will reneg on its debts real soon, and implode. I'm sure the corporate security state has its contingency plans for that situation, but they probably won't need them, because the real plan is to order the right people to make the right compromises and muddle through a couple more years of American capitalism in decline.

Chaos in California: Brown Vetoes Democratic Budget

2011-06-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

It almost defies parody. It is like trying to do a parody of a nuclear disaster or of a mass murder.

The Democratic Party members in the California State Senate and Assembly put together a budget without Republican help. The Republicans wanted to help by pitching welfare babies in the street and closing the public school systems. Or maybe charging tuition to attend.

I don't like to say nice things about Democratic Party politicians in the legislature. They have mainly helped bring California to the brink of disaster. Yet since I complained in the past about budgets not being passed on time, I have to say: they got it together and passed the budget on time. It is not the budget some might like, but that is the fault of the business situation in the state. Demand is low; people are not working; tax revenue is not sufficient to give folks on disability and welfare a truly middle class lifestyle. Given that a bunch of people had to agree on the budget, even if they are all Democrats, it is miraculous they forged one, and on time.

But Jerry Brown vetoed it. He wants to extend some taxes that were put in as emergency fundraising measures during the late recession. He would use those taxes to either (depending on your point of view): pay off the all-powerful public employee unions or help the kids get a better education.

Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would have signed the budget, even though he was a Republican and not a single Republican elected official voted for it.

But not Jerry Brown. This is madness. This is not what people thought they would get when they voted for the guy last November.

Despite California's still high unemployment rate, the economy has been slowly recovering from the depths of the recession. Tax revenues should be up significantly in 2011 over 2010. Throwing the government into chaos is not going to help anyone right now. Muddling through is what is needed right now. Taxes should grow in 2012, too. Eventually we might restart the construction industry. Then the revenue would roll in and a lot of public service workers could be rehired. Soon workers would be sought after, new cars would roll off the lots, and we the taxpayers could even afford to give the disability fakers another $50 a month for their drug habits. Which adds to the colorfulness of California, brings in federal dollars, and makes it a tourist mecca.

But maybe this is what Brown planned all along. Maybe he really is one of those Earth First! type environmentalists who want the economy to collapse so people abandon California and let the Redwoods grow and the salmon run again.

Recall, anyone?

Yet the War Goes On

2011-06-15T13:32:00.000-07:00

It is a strange day when the leading contender for the Republican Party nomination for President puts himself firmly to the left of a Democratic President on the issue of national security. In yesterday's Republican debate Mitt Romney did just that. Of course he hedged a bit, saying that the war was expensive, we had killed Osama bin Laden, and not exactly calling for a total, immediate withdrawal.

Big Brother is indeed watching, and laughing. In 2006 the Democratic Party captured control of the House of Representatives largely by pretending to be against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the war went on. In 2008 the housing bubble popped, so in the election that year the economy was the central issue. Barack Obama won, playing the typical politician who implied he was against the war without saying so. In the meantime President George W. Bush's troop surge in Iraq did have its intended effect, allowing a basically democratic government to function their. President Obama was able to withdraw troops from Iraq, forgetting to give the ex-President credit for the situation.

Attention centered on Afghanistan in 2009, and Obama decided to try his own troop surge their, largely using veterans of the Iraq war. The Taliban has been beaten back in some areas, only to pop up in others.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has a little debt problem on its hands. Between the Bush Tax Cuts (supported by most Democrats in Congress back then, though they would like to only remind their wealthiest donors of that fact), the economic suicide after the bubble burst, and the ongoing hundreds of billions spent on wars, the U.S. has become the world's beggar.

Some Republicans (and here I even include some Republican politicians, for instance Mitt Romney) realize there is a relationship between war spending, national debt, and their own fortunes. Only a few months ago they thought they could just cut back on services (welfare, food stamps, Medicare, Social Security) for Democratic Party constituencies and achieve a balanced budget. Now they are looking at two formerly untouchable gods: taxation and defense spending.

It is simple. Mitt Romney is no pacifist. He is no Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern. But he would rather cut military spending that raise taxes. The easiest way to cut military spending quickly is to get the hell out of Afghanistan.

If the vote were today, I'd vote for Romney, not Obama. I know Romney might be lying, he might continue the war if elected President. But Obama has already shown himself to be a liar, a fraud, and a war criminal.

Hopefully a strong Green Party or Independent contender will emerge, because Romney is far from my ideal candidate. Or maybe there is a Eugene McCarthy out there somewhere, and Barack will get what he deserves: a one term Presidency.

Prairie Dogs and Global Warming

2011-06-13T09:01:00.000-07:00

I just read a great article in the February 2011 issue of Earth First! Journal. It is by Lierre Keith and it is called "It takes a Village to Raise a Prairie."

Unfortunately the Journal does not seem to have a copy of this article up at their web site. Lierre's web site seems almost non-functional. But wait, a search reveals that it can be read here: It Takes a Village to Raise a Prairie. That is at Mother Earth News.

Lierre calls for whole villages of eco-friendly people to take over the prairie regions. She claims that "Grass is so good at building soil that repairing 75 percent fo the planet's rangelands would bring atmospheric CO2 to under 330 ppm in 15 years or less." Remarkable, if true.

This made me think of the importance of sequencing in the processes of creating complex things, and of dismantling them. Pick the wrong sequence for a project and the project may never get done.

I was looking at a giant sequoia (not a coast redwood, though some are nearby) in my back yard yesterday, wondering how much carbon is holds. When I arrived here is was about 1 yard in diameter; now it is approaching 2 yards in diameter. Does that make up for all the driving, using fossil fuel, my family does, living at such a remote place? I don't know.

Can 7 billion people live on this planet without destroying it? I think not. But dismantling the situation in a humane manner is no easy task. Sure there are ways to discourage reproduction, but the political will is not there, not yet. As Warren Buffet said, (but not about population) we have a global "political system that rewards legislators with reelection if their actions appear to produce short-term benefits even though their ultimate imprint will be to compound long-term pain."

Writing about Andrew Jackson

2011-06-11T13:49:00.000-07:00

I have not been posting as many blog entries as I might lately because I have been writing the Internet Biography of Andrew Jackson. President Jackson's life has been divided into web page sized chunks, beginning with his life as a child-soldier.

Today I posted Andrew Jackson for President, Act I. This was a crucial point in American history, as it marks the inception of the Democratic Party (not called that quite yet) and the modern two-party, one oligarchy system.

That puts me more than halfway through Andrew's life, but he does not become President until 1828, and of course his presidency will take up much of the biography.

Tomorrow on my to do list is writing up the draft results of the political redistricting process for California. That will be in my California Democracy blog.

Afghanistan War Loses Support in Congress

2011-06-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

“If we’re going to cut programs for children who need milk in the morning, if we’re going to cut programs for seniors who need a sandwich at lunch, if we’re going to cut veterans benefits, then, for God’s sake, let’s bring back our troops from Afghanistan.” Thus said Representative Walter B. Jones in a recent speech in Beaufort, North Carolina. Jones is not a Democrat. He is a Republican, and a very conservative Republican on most matters. His district is likewise very conservative, and includes one of America's largest Marine Corps bases, Camp Lejeune (where I was born and raised).

Congress is beginning to rebel in earnest against Barack Obama's war policy in Afghanistan. Recently Jones and Democrat Jim McGovern of Massachusetts sponsored an amendment to H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal 2012, to speed the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region. The vote on H. Amdt. 344 (follow the link to see how your Rep voted) to require from the President "A plan and timeframe on accelerated transition of military operations to Afghan authorities." That is pretty tame by my we should have never gotten in standards, but 8 Democrats joined 207 Republicans to vote against it. 26 Republicans and 178 Democrats voted for it. The amendment failed.

What is going on? Why is the Community Organizer President wasting U.S. blood, and $10 billion a year or so in taxpayer money, on occupying Afghanistan? Why are otherwise ideologically pure Republicans turning against the occupation?

I have observed that whether people are left, liberal, moderate, conservative or right-wing, some reality will seep in through ideological filters some of the time. Mostly people buy into ideological and (filtered) factual bundles because they have limited time and knowledge; it is the easy way to go. But push their noses close enough to manure, or roses, and most people can tell the difference, regardless of ideology.

Right-of-center is a bundle of people, but beware of over-generalizing. No every right-of-center person fits the leftist view of being a biblical fundamentalist war mongering anti-immigrant anti-environment racist. Very few, in fact, fit that description. Avoid talking about the Bible and even the fundamentalists can be pretty astute about real world issues.

The people of the United States of America has been in a new world of hurt since the Great Recession began. A good many people who were middle-income learned suddenly what it is like to be at the bottom. To want to work, but to have not jobs available. To need to patch something, but be unable to afford the patching material. To lived crowded in with relatives that, truth be told, they would just as soon see once a year at a family reunion.

The Afghanistan war never made sense to me and my peace movement friends. The U.S. could have saved over $100 billion and many lives by sending in the CIA, not the Marines. In the end it was the CIA that got Bin Laden.

So what is wrong with President Obama? We aren't in community organizing mode anymore. Barack is now in the eye of the corporate security state. He has not visited the grieving parents of the children the U.S. military has "accidentally" killed in Afghanistan. He has not stood as a soldier and watched people watching him, hoping he would step on an IED. He lucked into the Presidency without having any real accomplishments before arriving in that esteemed office. He wanted to be President, and for that he was more than happy to become the most important piece on the military-industrial complex chess board.

Community Organizer has lately shown willingness to take lunch away from American children to appease two bullies, the Pentagon and the super-rich Americans who are happy to deduct heavy taxes from their employee's payrolls but don't want to (and mostly don't) pay taxes on inheritance, dividends, and capital gains.

If you can't smell what's happening here, you have lost your sense of smell. In a contest between Barack Obama and Walter B. Jones, I'd vote for Walter. Hopefully more Republicans will join Jones in the next vote on funding Afghanistan that comes before Congress. After all, the Constitution says Congress is supposed to make policy. The President is only supposed to carry out the laws and policies enacted by Congress.

See also the NY Time article, An Antiwar Republican, No Longer His Party's Pariah

Entangled in Spooky Science

2011-06-02T10:23:00.001-07:00

Spooky science sells better than serious science, especially when science requires mathematics beyond 99% of the population's knowledge. The June 2011 Scientific American issue includes an article by Vlatko Vedral, Living in a Quantum World, that emphasizes one spooky corner of reality, quantum entanglement. This is also a favorite topic of New Age purveyors of spooky religious viewpoints, as if it might provide a physical basis for ESP and other tricks of the trade.

We are spooked by the unfamiliar. Familiar things that should be totally amazing, like transistor radios and lasers, which rely on quantum mechanical effects, don't faze us at all these days. We don't have to understand new technologies to stop being spooked by them, we just need to see them in action for a while.

I would argue that quantum physics has few new philosophical implications. It is no where near as revolutionary as what we now call Classical physics.

Classic is one of those words we need to be careful about. It used to allude to the culture of the ancient Greeks and Romans, let's say from 500 B.C. to before the Christ cult took over in the 4th century after Augustus Caesar. In physics it means, roughly, how the world was conceived of by scientists from the era of Galileo and Copernicus until Albert Einstein's four famous papers of 1905.

Classical physics was pretty darned spooky stuff. Not really believable, unless you looked at nature with a great deal of care. Before classical physics there was ordinary human intuition based on experiences in the world, and there was the physics of Aristotle and his cohort of Greek geeks. Today seven year olds know about dinosaurs and galaxies, but no one knew about them in 1400. Except for a very few people who studied the Greek classics (and the equivalents of other civilizations, notably the Arabs, Indians and Chinese), experience was limited. Water flowed downhill, the seasons were reliable, the stars rotated around Polaris, and no one had built a decent sewer system since the fall of the Roman Empire.

For Aristotle objects moved only when under the influence of a continuous force. People familiar with Newton's first law of motion (previously stated by many others, especially Islamic scientists), that an object's velocity remains constant unless acted on by an external force, may laugh at Aristotle. But in the everyday real-world Aristotle is right and Newton is wrong. Aristotle correctly believed there is always friction; he argued that vacuums, required for friction-free maintenance of velocity, cannot exist. The best modern car running on a flat road need gas, and the force from its engine, to maintain a constant speed to overcome friction. For Newton's version of the law to work you need essentially imaginary conditions: a perfect vacuum, which you can't find even in inter-galactic space.

The idea of continuing motion without a force behind it was spooky; it still is if you think about it too much. But it was not as spooky as the revelation that the earth revolves on its axis. We seem to be relatively motionless, hugging mother earth, but we are not.

Electricity and magnetism are part of pre-1905 physics. Talk about spooky. Both were believed by religious types to be the physical basis for ESP and hypnotism (called personal magnetism). Both exerted force at a distance. It took decades of experimenting and thinking to figure out their basic laws. But people got used to them. They got used to the telegraph, electric lights, and telephones.

Other people, including scientists, had trouble with Albert Einstein's work on relativity. Einstein himself had lots of trouble with the concepts of quantum physics, even though he was one of the inventors of the inventors of the field. He called quantum entanglement "spooky action at a distance." This from a guy whose father and uncle had a successful 19th-century electromagnetics business. (Which is why doing well in elementary school was not all that important to his future success.)

Context is as important in the natural sciences as it is in philosophy or dealing with various human cultures. Vedral's "Living in a Quantum World," makes the case that quantum effects can show up in our macro world. In particular he wrote about quantum entanglement. It is interesting stuff, and I applaud those who have figured out how to extend our knowledge of this subtle phenomena. But be forewarned, this is the stuff New Age con artists use to bamboozle their soft-brained victims.

Beware of physics writers over generalizing. Vedral uses the phrase "Quantum mechanics says ..." Quantum mechanics does not say anything. Physicists say things, and they often disagree with each other, especially about quantum mechanics and its philosophical interpretations. As a group they like to say that quantum mechanics has a long history of making correct predictions as verified by experiments. But in fact, as illustrated in, for instance, Abraham Pais's Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, quantum mechanics has a long history of missing on as many predictions as it hit. Today's quantum mechanics is not the quantum mechanics of 1940. The math has often been fudged after the experimental results were known. That is fine, fixing a theory is part of the process of science.

It does not serve science, however, to pretend that a theory developed in the 1920's accurately predicted all the results known today.

Beauty Queens, Heroes, and Presidents

2011-05-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

I have changed my mind about what would be the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution, were it possible for me to obtain such a boon. I'd amend it to lengthen election cycles. Let the House of Representatives be elected every four years, and the President every six years, with Senators staying at six. Elections under our current corporate security state system seldom change anything meaningful, but they waste a lot of time. Politicians are distracted from governance, while the entertainment value to the public is minimal.

In my Internet Biography of Andrew Jackson I am about to write the first chapter in which he is being taken seriously as a candidate for President. Back then, in 1821, owning and trading slaves, fighting chickens and dogs, and shooting acquaintances when they won't apologize for alleged slights to your honor were not considered to be disqualifications for the Presidency. Especially when you were the general who won just about the only American victory of any importance in a war in which basically the British kicked U.S. ass from Canada to the Carolinas. Even so, Jackson did not win the office until the election of 1828.

The last war heroes to win the office of President of the United States were Dwight David Eisenhower and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Eisenhower, like Jackson, had been a general. Kennedy had been a mere Lieutenant, but he made getting his ass kicked (but not killed) by the Japanese seem romantic and heroic.

Since that time heroes have been out of style. Jimmy Carter had been a submarine officer, but joined up after World War II ended and never saw combat. John McCain, the Republican Party nominee in 2008, had been a war hero of sorts (shot down while bombing North Vietnam in an illegal and undeclared war), but he was beaten by Barack Obama, who grew up between wars. George W. Bush was elected despite dodging the dangers of the Vietnam War.

Nor are heroes lining up to run in 2012. The closest thing is Sarah Palin. If she did not serve in the U.S. military, at least she braved beauty pageants and a husband crazy about snowmobiles. She is not as pretty or as smart as Michele Bachmann, but while both are from the frigid northern regions of our nation, Sarah is about as civilized as Genghis Khan. Elect her President and we might just end up with Canada and Mexico both.

While hardly heroic, current President Barack Obama is still the odds on favorite. His famous lack of political backbone has not prevented him from toughening up since 2009. He increased troop levels in Afghanistan and does not seem to mind killing civilians in that undeclared and illegal war. He has kept military spending up. He even bravely challenged the progressive wing of his own party by keeping taxes on the richest Americans at their lowest level since the Great Depression.

Most of the time a Presidential election is a beauty contest. The corporate security state does not care, very much, who they break bread with. A woman in the White House would be a novelty, but I doubt that would bring any fundamental changes in policies.

Hitler, Obama, and Netanyahu

2011-05-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama's call for a Palestinian state based on pre-1967 borders provoked an infantile response from Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. Republican politicians, always eager to snatch Jewish political donations from the hands of Democrats, frothed at the mouth against Obama's message as if they were getting ready to develop land in the West Bank themselves.

That is the way the State of Israel and its Jewish supporters in the United States have always (since 1946) worked. No American taxpayer subsidy to the wealthy Jewish settlers in Palestine is every enough. No peace is possible. The Jewish state of Israel will not be complete until the (probably imaginary) vast empire of King David is restored.

The goal of Israeli policy is simple: no Palestinian state.

Hitler is the model for all modern Israeli right-wing politicians. Of course he hated Jews the way they hate non-Jews. There the dissimilarity ends. Screaming and frothing at the mouth is a given. Taking Palestinian private property is no different than Hitler's taking Jewish property in his day. Nazi's beating up Jews is no different than Jews beating up Palestinians.

There are Israeli Jews and American Jews who see that in asking to be treated respectfully themselves, they are obligated to treat Palestinians with respect. That includes returning to them that which has been stolen since 1946. That includes land. If someone has land returned to them, they should have the option of living on it, without further harassment. If they are residents, they should have full citizenship rights, regardless of their religion and ethnicity. Any backing off these basic principles amounts to endorsing crimes.

The Republican Party likes to proclaim that it upholds private property rights. It should uphold the private property rights of Palestinians. The Tea Party in particular should uphold the private property rights of Palestinians. Instead, in response to President Obama's remarks, have said that Israel's borders have been set by the right of conquest.

What is the right of conquest except the "right" to take private property by force? What distinguishes the Republican Party from organized crime, or Hitler's National Socialist Party, when they promote such ideas?

Barack Obama's position is only a baby-step in the correct direction. If the State of Israel does not agree to a Palestinian state soon, the U.S. at the very least should cut off all funding to Israel.

Jews should have the same civil and property rights that every human person in the world deserves. They should not have ever had to move to Israel to feel safe. But if they want respect, they should respect other people's rights as well. If Jews want to settle in the West Bank, they need to let Palestinians settle on the East Bank. That is what is fair and just.

Bribes, Corruption and Lost Wars

2011-05-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

Corruption, the taking of bribes by politicians and government employees and the theft of public funds, is a nearly universal practice. But it is also a spectrum, with come governments having very little corruption, and ranges to governments that exist almost exclusively. South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam) during the 1960s is noted for its high degree of corruption. It is generally agreed that government corruption was one of the main reasons the government eventually collapsed and the south was unified with North Vietnam, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

I am reading Understanding Vietnam by Nilm L. Jamiseson and a section on the cultural aspects of corruption in Vietnam explained what happened in a way I had never considered. This contrasts with other histories I read that described the corruption, but implied it was simply due to defects in human character. This new understanding also sheds light on the collapse of the Chiang Kai-Shek regime in China in the late 1940s. It also explains a lot about many of today's regimes, including, on a smaller scale, the behavior of all too many individuals in local government in these United States of America.

It fits in too with what one of my political science professors told me about the Rhode Island state legislature, back in 1974. He said the salaries of the legislators were kept low so that only wealthy businessmen or corrupt political hacks could afford to hold office. To be a full time politician, to server the people full time, elected officials needed major supplements to their incomes. Those could only come from illegal donations, diversions of campaign funds, or outright bribes.

In Vietnam (I will call South Vietnam just Vietnam from this point forward) traditional status was highly dependent on wealth. However, leaders were supposed to show their wealth by providing feasts for their villages, and through other forms of ostentation public distribution of their wealth. In a village economy men competed for status by sharing with the less fortunate. Their families had priority, of course, but it was not too bad of a system.

When the U.S. invaded (invited by puppet governments) in the 1960s the shock to the Vietnamese economy was profound. Government employees, including military employees, changed in a few years from being highly respected and decently paid members of a mainly traditional society to among the poorest citizens.

American privates had higher salaries than Vietnamese generals. For that matter, call girls whose clients were American enlisted men made more money. The influx of American money drove inflation, but while America paid for military supplies and all sorts of economic programs, no one thought to make payments to the Saigon regime to increase the salaries of soldiers and bureaucrats. High-ranking military officers would moonlight as taxi drivers to try to make enough pay to keep their families from losing face due to poverty.

Their wives came to the rescue, and that was also due to cultural traditions. In Vietnam women had traditionally done the marketing and small scale craft making that kept families afloat. Men, mostly, did not engage in business. While men went about their hierarchically controlled, government-dictated lives, women had to do more than make ends meet: they had to maintain their family's status in society. "During the late 1960s and early 1970s it was often impossible to be a dutiful and virtuous family man and a dutiful and virtuous military officer or civil servant ... his womenfolk kept reminding him that prices were up again in the market and the children needed new shoes." Women ran the free market show, which largely consisted of diverting American-donated goods into the black market. "As Madam General called Madam Colonel who called Madam Head Clerk ... the daily flow of money and of goods throughout the country was anticipated and careful plans were formulated for diverting some percentage of this bounty."

This looking deeper contrasts with A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan, which is better at providing insight into the American side of the war. Americans were concerned about the corruption of Vietnamese officials and military men, but their answer was classroom training about the importance of good governance standards. That they paid their girlfriends more than they paid men they expected to die fighting communists did not seem to cross anyone's mind.

In America now there is an argument that public sector workers are paid too much, particularly because they get pensions and medical benefits far more generous than those most ordinary workers get. I think it comes down to individual cases. We want government employees to make enough money to motivate them to come to work every day, work effectively all day, and be immune to bribery. We want there to be enough employees so that the work gets done. Such a system cannot be perfected, only worked toward. We need to keep pay fair. Some want it on par with the private sector, but in the private sector fairness is not an issue. The system favors underpaying those lowest in the hierarchy and overpaying those highest on the corporate ladder. It all comes down to specifics, which vary by locality and job title.

Corruption has its own cultural momentum. Simply raising pay is not a sure way of stamping out corruption. Lowering pay somewhat is not likely to cause most honest civil servants to suddenly be selling their souls. Nevertheless, poor pay in the long run does breed corrupiton and incompetence.

A single word, corruption, encapsulates a wide variety of social pressures. Americans thought that the corruption of Vietnam was due to weak ethical values in the national culture. American soldiers did not need to steal food from peasants to fill their bellies. Their corruption was at a higher level, the corruption of an entire nation by wealth from industrial production and imperialist domination.

That era of American global economic supremacy is coming to an end. The corruption (lack of self-control and external control) of the banking sector and Wall Street almost brought the entire nation to its knees in 2008. The same gang funded Barack Obama's presidential campaign, just like they funded Clinton and Bush before him. So we have had much talk of reform, but very little reform.

Millions of people died violent deaths in Vietnam during the French and American interventions and civil war. Corruption was problem, but it was also a symptom of the larger problems of that era. The problem now is we still have an American economy and government built for imperialism. The cracks in that system will continue to widen as the imperialist overhang continues to crumble.

Extradition, Canada, and War

2011-05-07T12:27:00.000-07:00

Maybe the U.S. won't go to war with Pakistan, maybe we will be too busy in our war with Canada.

The pretext for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was that the government of the country, controlled by the Taliban, refused to extradite Osama Bin Laden when the U.S. government demanded that after the successful al-Qaeda attack on September 11, 2001. I don't believe refusing to extradite a criminal is grounds for war, but the United Nations failed to protect Afghanistan from U.S. aggression, or even to condemn the U.S. Thus the de facto standard for international relations seems to have become that refusing to extradite is an act of war.

Given that, expect war between the U.S. and Canada soon. According to the Associated Press, on Friday the Canadian Court of Appeal confirmed a lower court decision to not extradite Abdullah Khadr to the United States. Mr. Khadr was wanted on the same charges as Osama Bin Laden, terrorism, specifically supplying al-Qaeda with weapons used to fight U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Of course, the U.S. will not actually go to war with Canada over the issue. Nations refuse to extradite people to other nations all the time. It usually is no big deal. The United States itself harbors many people convicted of crimes in other countries. Some times we extradite them, some times we don't. For instance, if some one had been found guilty in Iraq of murder, but the murder had been an act of resistance to the Saddam Hussein regime, the U.S. would certainly have refused to extradite.

If if refusal to extradite a government's allies is not a pretext for war (my position, and seemingly one in accord with international law), then there was no legitimate pretext for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. George Bush and crew, and Barack Obama and crew, are simply war criminals.

If it is okay to fly a few troops into Pakistan to capture a criminal wanted in the United States, why was that tactic not used in Afghanistan in the first place? The CIA could have located Osama while the U.S. engaged in endless negotiations with the Taliban. Then would could have grabbed or killed Osama. We would have violated international law, and the Taliban would have been mad, but we would not be in an endless ground war in a nation not worth conquering.

We went to war against Afghanistan because we are ruled by a cabal of people who profiteer from war. George W. Bush was a failure as a manager of an oil company, but by attacking Afghanistan while most Americans were too emotional about the September 11 attacks to think clearly, he made himself popular. The price paid by the American people was the destruction of America from within by greed running out of control. We did not pay the price until the economic collapse of 2008.

The last time we fought a war with Canada, in the War of 1812, Canada was part of the British Empire, and we lost the war. We lost it rather badly, truth be told (see Life of Jackson: Battle of New Orleans). We launched the War of 1812 with the idea of grabbing Canada and Florida to add to the United States.

So the real question is, does the U.S. ruling class want Canada at this point of our history. If they do, the Abdullah Khadr decision can be used as a pretext for war. Otherwise, it will simply be forgotten.

One Less Terrorist in The New World Order

2011-05-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

Imagine if Russia, when it was still the Communist U.S.S.R., had sent a couple of helicopters with commando teams into U.S. territory to capture or execute a couple of U.S. sponsored "terrorists." That is, violent anti-communist militarists, which the U.S. harbored and trained on a regular basis during the Cold War. That would have been considered an illegal act of war by the U.S. It probably would have started World War III. The communists, of course, trained their own "cadre" of criminally violent political opperatives.

Symmetry, who framed thy unlawful impertinence? But even if the U.S. raid on Pakistan was illegal under international law, I see no reason to weep for Osama Bin Laden. He was a practitioner of total war, where nothing, not even the lives of women and children, was sacred. I note that total war addicts are not rare in this world. They included U.S. illuminaries such as former Presidents Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. If one war criminal kills an opposing war criminal, I don't see much bad in that.

Alas, Pakistan is not a symmetric power versus the U.S. It is a semi-dependent state in the U.S.A.'s global empire. They did not attempt to defend Osama. They would probably have captured him and sent him to the U.S. for trial if asked. The problem for the Obama administration was not that Pakistan could not be relied on. We long ago sorted out who we can and cannot rely upon to betray Pakistan if the U.S. asks. The problem was Osama Bin Laden might have decided to talk. Imagine the embarrassment for oh so many powerful families and institutions if Osama testified at his own trial, or even in depositions made available to the public.

It is arguable that Osama won before he died. How do you defeat an empire like the former U.S.S.R. or the U.S.A. if you can only lead a bunch of impoverished, poorly armed citizen soldiers? The answer was never simply to force an imperialist power to withdraw its military from the isolated failed state known as Afghanistan. The U.S.S.R. collapsed because its culture and economy collapsed. Its military was still strong when the empire crumbled. In fact, spending too much on the military and not taking care of ordinary citizens was one of the causes of the collapse of communism.

Corporate security state spokespeople like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have already made it clear that the U.S. ruling class intends to make the same mistake the U.S.S.R.'s rulers made. They are not cutting military spending now that Iraq is pacified and Osama is dead. They are not cutting back on internal security measures that feed the corporate security apparatus and starve schools, hospitals, workers and even the managerial class.

In four or five years no one in their right mind will be willing to loan the U.S. government any more money. Osama may have been a madman when it came to religion, but he grew up in the same economic circumstances of a Kennedy or a Bush. He understood business and economics. He understood bankruptcy. A bankrupt company is a powerless company, and a bankrupt nation is a powerless nation. A thousand bases scattered around the world won't be able to keep the locals in line once the money is coming from China, India, or Europe. The rulers of the British Empire learned that lesson after World War II. They should have learned it after World War I, but the British were led by obtuse people from an inbred ruling class.

Supreme Court: No Right to Class Action

2011-04-30T08:27:00.000-07:00

The gruel of law is getting ever thinner for poor consumers. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled on April 27, 2011, in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Conception et ux., that businesses (mostly corporations) can protect themselves from class action lawsuits and arbitration by simply including a clause to that effect in contracts they force consumers to sign.

Justices Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito voted for AT&T, while Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan sided with consumers on this issue (5 to 4 in favor of corporations v. real people).

What does this mean? It amounts to a license to steal, if by "steal" one means to take unjustly, rather than to take illegally.

Here's how it works. You want to buy a product or service, but Xample Corporation, like all corporations, requires you to sign a Supreme-Court approved contract to make the purchase. The contract says you cannot sue, you must arbitrate if you have a complaint, and you must arbitrate alone. You cannot join in a class action arbitration to spread the costs of an attorney over a large number of your fellow customers of the Xample Corporation.

Xample has your credit card, and you discover that Xample has charged it $30 more than you thought you were supposed to be charged. You complain to Xample, but they refuse to refund the $30. Your option under the gruel of law? You can call the police, but they will judge this a civil, contractual matter, because the criminals at Xample got incorporated before they over charged you.

You can fire bomb Xample corporate headquarters, but that seems extreme over $30, it does not get your money back, makes you a criminal (the police react differently when they get a call from Xample about trouble makers), and could get you killed.

You can report it to the Better Business Bureau, who will listen to you and then find Xample is in the right. When other people look up Xample at BBB, they will see that "all complaints have been resolved" and Xample gets their highest rating.

You can hire a lawyer. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses later, you might get your $30 back. On the other hand, you might lose in court (after all, its the same court system headed by the Supremes), and be ordered to pay for Xample's army of lawyers, which almost certainly include former DA's who should have protected you in the first place.

Or you can eat it. 99.9% of consumers will eat it. A smallish local business that rips off 1000 customers this way will net $30,000. They might be held in check by the idea of 1000 local people angry at them.

But suppose you are a cellular telephone company and you did this to say, 10 million people during the course of a fiscal year (maybe tucking in $3 or so per monthly bill). That is a tidy $300 million in profits handed to you by Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito. Send the boys a gift basket. Xample stockholders will be happy, and the CEO will get a $45 million bonus for his efforts.

What should be the rule of law is really the gruel of law, and it is getting thinner all the time.

So be careful what you buy, and what contracts you sign, and if you want the full protection of the Law, and something better than gruel to eat, be sure to be born into the ruling class of these United States of America.

U.S. Close to War with Pakistan

2011-04-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

Recently the government of Pakistan asked the government of the United States of America to stop making remote-guided drone bombing attacks within Pakistan's borders. Friday, April 22, the U.S. defied the Pakistan government and launched an attack that killed 23 people in North Waziristan, including five women and four children. Thus in one stroke President Barack Obama and his administration committed war crimes by becoming (again) an aggressor nation and by targeting civilians.

Ostensibly Pakistan is still a U.S. client nation, but the region is in rapid flux, and likely a covert war between the U.S. and Pakistan has commenced. Neither side will want to declare war at first. The U.S. almost never declares war because it is almost always an aggressor and only Congress can declare war, where one or two Senators are likely to oppose a declaration, and give good reasons. For Pakistan to declare war first is to invite both the destruction of its economy by bombs dropped by the U.S. Air Force, and possibly invasion by India. Neither nation will want to go to the United Nations (U.N.) either. The U.N. was set up to be an instrument of American (and originally, British) imperialism, but the U.S. would certainly get some sound criticism there.

Pakistan was carved out of the Indian subcontinent by the British when they could no longer maintain their empire. By setting up a primarily Islamic state in Pakistan and Hindu state in India, the British maintained a divide-and-conquer strategy. Since India set itself up as neutral but friendly to the old Soviet Union, the U.S. chose Pakistan for a client state. Also troubling was Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan. The border, also established by the British, did not run along tribal lines, instead splitting several large tribes in two (tribes large enough that they would allowed to be nations if they were white Christian tribes in Europe). Throw in Kashmir, with its Islamic majority and Hindu overlords, and the whole area has always been what is euphemistically called geographically unstable.

Both India and Pakistan now have nuclear weapons, but India is a wealthier, more populous, more technologically advanced nation. India has drifted into the U.S. camp during the past 20 years, what with Russia turned capitalist and the vast and rapidly growing Indian-American business community. That has left Pakistan the odd man out, with poor choices all around. China has grown to be more of an ally, but it also is anti-Islamic, and is a dangerous business rival. Afghanistan would make a good ally, but it brings its own problems, including its American puppet government.

Internally Pakistan is in turmoil. In addition to its tribal and class divides, it is in a cultural crisis. It is close to being a modern, technologically (and academically) sophisticated nation, but it also has a majority of people who subscribe to various Islamic fundamentalist sects. Over time it might have undergone more cultural modernization, but the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (and crimes against Palestine, and Iraq), and the association of the U.S. with Christianity (an even older and more absurd religion than Islam) have done much to revive religious fervor.

Pakistan has a democratic government, and that means you can have factions in power that are pro-Taliban, or pro-U.S., but almost everyone considers themselves a Pakistani nationalist. Given past patterns, the U.S. will now try a variety of tactics. The CIA will undermine, or even attack or assassinate, Pakistani politicians, soldiers, and cultural leaders who are seen as too pro-Taliban (or pro-Chinese). The U.S. will accidentally bomb some Pakistani Army regular soldiers, just to give the generals a taste of what a real war could be like. The U.S. may bribe India to initiate a few skirmishes at the border.

In turn, Pakistan will provide better support for the Taliban. They will let arms and money flow into Afghanistan, and perhaps provide even more advanced weapons. When those weapons hit U.S. troops, the Pakistan military will claim they were stolen. The U.S. will then upgrade bombing runs to include destroying Pakistani army military dumps anywhere near the Afghan border.

After that, everything depends on the political situations in each nation. My guess is that since Barack Obama has entirely alienated the peace voters in the U.S. since taking office, he'll choose to look tough going into the 2012 elections. He can't afford another quagmire in Pakistan, so he'll probably open up unrestricted bombing, just as the U.S. started bombing Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War.

As primitive as the Pakistan military is compared to the U.S., it has proximity to its advantage and is several of cuts above the Taliban. The Pakistani Army could be in Kabul in two weeks (after sufficent preparation). Since they would be invited by and welcomed by the Afghani people, they would not be engaging in an act of aggression. Maybe that would be best for everyone, if the U.S. had the wisdom to mind its own business for a change.

Good Friday, Socialism, and Acts 4

2011-04-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

Even the heathen readers of my blog probably at least know that Good Friday is the day Christians around the world remember the death of their Lord Jesus of Bethlehem by crucifixion, the death penalty being carried out by Roman soldiers. According to the Christian Bible, two days later, on Sunday morning, this same Jesus rose from the dead.

Protestant Christian sects, once there were some that were not murdered by the Catholic Church, hold that the Bible is the best guide to Christianity. Fundamentalists hold that the Bible is literally true. Given all that, be sure to memorize the following passage. Feel free to recite it at Republican Party and Tea Party meetings, where Bible quoting is generally considered a good thing.

It is Acts of the Apostles, chapter 4, verses 31 to 37 (Acts 4:31-37). I quote from the Authorized King James Version, lest anyone accuse me of using some liberal translation of the Greek.

"32 And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.

33 And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all.

34 Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold.

35 And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

36 And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation,) a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus,

37 Having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet."

If that is not socialism, it is communism. It certainly is not the free-market capitalism of the Christian Right. It looks like a welfare state to me. Those with property are taxed 100% and that money is used to take care of "every man according as he had need."

There have been a number of Protestant Christian sects that have tried to implement this Bible-mandated system, but apparently the Devil has whispered his free-market system in the ears of most Christian leaders. Political Christianity is nothing new. The Protestant movement was highly intertwined in the politics of the past. In the Middle Ages the economy was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church holdings and the landed Aristocracy. Starting in the 15th century Protestantism appealed to the merchants and manufacturers, who were growing in economic power and sought higher social recognition and political say.

In the struggle between those Protestants who wanted to re-create primitive Christianity, including Acts Chapter 3, and those who wanted to mold the Bible to support their own ambitions, the latter won out. Peasant rebellions (like that of 1381 in England) tended to focus on Acts Chapter 3, but peasants never gained social or economic power. Just as today Fundamentalism is obscured by the greed of those who want the literal Bible to not interfere with their hatred of immigrants and hopes of joining the billionaire boys club. (Speaking of which, read on to Acts Chapter 5).

Good Friday, too, has always been a problem for Christians. What kind of Dad has his son Crucified? Even the evil old Jehovah, tribal god of the Jews, did not make Abraham actually kill his own son Isaac. The sadomasochism of the Catholic Church, the tendency toward a homosexual priesthood, and the love of cruel punishments for heretics (especially female heretics) all. feed on the Crucifixion.

Perhaps the lesson of the Crucifixion is that Death is no big deal. For all its proclaimed Jewishness, the early Christian cult seems to have gathered more from pagan resurrection cults than from the Torah. Life and death were known to be part of a cycle. Living things must die so that other living things can eat. Life dies back in winter and returns in spring. To seek immortality is to wreck what Fate has ordained. And so Jesus is supposed to have risen from the dead, but then he vanished into thin air, like a ghost, but with the promise of returning in the spring like the daffodils.

Perhaps He never came back because Christians never took his communist social system to heart. Perhaps only when Acts 4 is instituted on a global scale will we see the true return of the god of Spring, and the establishment of the true Zion.

Me, I'll stick with the more modest democratic form of socialism. I like my liberty, but I'm willing to temper it to a reasonable degree for the general good. Maybe Jesus would not have liked that, but then while I might take his advice into consideration, I don't feel at all bound by it.

On the other hand, since the Bible demands that we hold medicine in common, I think a little preaching might turn the corner in favor of Universal Health Care.

Quacks, Priests and Politicians quote

2011-04-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

Came across this in The University Encyclopedia (of 1902). Showing humans have not changed so much:

"Quack Doctors

... The sad part of the whole matter is that mankind never seems to learn by experience; no new methods of deception are introduced, no real originality or inventive enterprise is ever shown by quacks; they rely on exactly the same old artifices as their predecessors did, and generation after generation are duped by them just as surely."

Since 1902, while politicians and priests have changed little, there has been a series of innovations in medical quackery. When radioactivity was first discovered it was promoted as healthy, and people were burned or even killed by excessive doses. Even before 1902 electromagnetism was promoted as a cure-all; at least it was usually less harmful than radioactivity. Now we give people blood tests and set the parameters narrowly so there are always plenty of people with results outside the parameters, in need of prescription drugs.

The U.S. still has the same two lying, thieving major parties it had in 1902, the Democrats and the Republicans. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Conservative by Nature

2011-04-17T14:21:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about a facebook post I saw that accused Department of Education Assistant Deputy Secretary Kevin Jennings of advocating men forcing themselves sexually on boys. It was based on Fox Network false reporting as usual, but what concerned me was that someone, in fact probably a lot of people, were perpetuating this kind of lie on facebook. Kevin Jennings has spent his life advocating against the bullying of children who are or appear to be homosexuals. Fox and doubtless a coterie of pedophile priests and ministers are whipping up their anti-homosexual base. They can't be honest and say "but we are bullies, we think it is good to beat up on homo children." Instead they attack by making false claims about Jennings. And they congratulate themselves for being good Christian people. The sort who would throw stones at whores and homos, which I guess Jesus spent a good deal of the New Testament advocating for. [If you don't get the irony here, you might want to spend a few hours reading the Gospels]

But I have a problem with putting all conservatives in a bundle and tarring them with being hateful people. Fox gives conservatives a bad name, and encourages our worst behavior.

People really can't help but be conservative. The reality is there is almost nothing new under the sun, so aside from the latest tech gadget burning a hole where your pocketbook should be, it is just a matter of picking what sort of conservative you are.

Marxist used to think they were radicals. At best they are following a 160 year-old system of thought (actually, it goes back to the beginning of human society). Many of the splinter Protestant groups of the U.S. are far younger than that. Even if you accept their Bible-based claims to conservatism, the New Testament is still less than 2000 years old. Protestantism is a mere 600 years old. Is that radical or conservative?

Our genes, our DNA, are very, very conservative. We still have many genes that function the same as bacterial genes that are a billion years old (or 5000 years old if you believe God created all of Nature recently, and did the trick partly by using what programmers call object oriented, re-usable code).

Some members of every generation of young people try to break with the conservative mold. They reject their parents' and society's values and set themselves apart as a youth cult. The general term for that is bohemianism. Actually, it is a form of ultra-conservatism. It almost never drives culture forward. Youth rebellion usually seeks an even more conservative past when people were not so uptight and rule-bound. They pick a different flavor of conservative and call it "our generation."

To really be a religous conservative, you would have to become either a pagan or an atheist. Christianity is an innovation, and a poor one.

As to homosexuality, it appears to be as ancient as mankind. The radical new document called the Old Testament mentions it. The ancient Greeks, or some ancient Greeks, once things got urbanized and class-stratified, believed it was a superior form of love, above that of a man for his wife. It tends to be associated with cultures that make women inferior. Once you have declared women to be inferior (no females in the hierarchy of priests and ministers), and hang out mostly with men, homosexuality is only a kiss away.

As to myself, I believe in conserving as much of the natural world as possible. The mountain-top coal removers and the nuclear power plant builders, they are the radicals. They are the ones that need to be stopped.

Before homo sapiens split off from other apes on the tree of evolution, there were bullies. Now we have a wider variety of bullies: physical bullies, intellectual bullies, social bullies, cultural bullies, economic bullies. In a class-stratified society like ours much bullying is institutionalized. People don't even realize they are engaging in it. It is part of the upper classes protecting their privileges.

Still, it is good to try to minimize the bullying of children by adults, and of children by other children. Gay boys and girls should be treated with the same respect that all children should be treated with.

The difficult part of the equation is dealing with the adult bullies who don't see themselves as bullies. They see their actions as "helping" children. Helping them to obey all orders from authority figures, no matter who stupid. Helping them to conform to the gender roles of the adults' subculture. And the problem is deeper, because children do need help. They do need to pay attention in school; they really would benefit from doing their homework. So we need to be able to distinguish between arbitrary authority and good leadership.

And some children, maybe most children, will conform. But many will just harbor resentment and try to survive until the day they are adults and can get out from under their parents' authority, and maybe move to some place where there are more nice people around, like California.

Creationism and Free Markets

2011-04-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

Religion and politics can make even stranger bedfellows than politics alone.

One of my favorites is the Free Market and Creationism combo of the Christian Right. But then wasn't it transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds?" The inconsistencies between free market ideology and creationism are seldom examined, but require a very, big mind to have room to keep them separate.

The benefits of free markets were first described by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations. He showed how men and women, each individually selfish, could compete with each other in producing (and consuming) goods in an unregulated market. The result would be an improvement in the overall good of the community, just as if the individuals had been acting out of community spirit. This non-obvious result, that selfish behavior could have a positive result for the whole community, was called the Invisible Hand.

Right wing Christians, or at least pundits who pretend to be Christian, love free markets. They love private wealth, and their basic Christian doctrine can be summarized as "every man for himself." Out of the random transactions of free markets is born capitalism, and from capitalism comes everything good in the lives of free market pundits, Christian and pagan alike. They hate central planning by governments. They hate the strong-arm five year plans of the old Communist regimes. They even hate the gentler planning by Democratic governments that seek to ameliorate some of the situations where the Invisible Hand has not worked out quite so well for a few ten millions of American citizens.

Not all right-wing economic commentators are Christian, or even Creationists, but plenty are or pretend to be. Creationism is the opposite of free market ideology. Its mildest form, Intelligent Design theory, states that complex things, like the earth and its creatures, must have been created by an Intelligence, i.e. God. It rejects the scientific observation that complex things can be created over time by natural processes, also known as the theory of evolution (by natural selection).

The more fundamental Christian belief is that the world was created exactly as described in the Old Testament of the Bible: a particular God (not Allah or Zeus, or even Gunputty, mind you) created the world and all of its creatures in seven days. Since this has no basis in science, or even in pragmatic observation, Intelligent Design theory was designed to offer an alternative to the theory of evolution in U.S. public school system biology classes.

The difficulty of applying the Creationist mindset (the need for a dictatorial controlling intelligence to get anything done) to the economic system of the United States of America is a blessing. Things seem to happen in the economy without God sticking his nose into our business.

Adolf Hitler did not like quantum physics, but he was okay with natural selection. Hitler was Roman Catholic, and he did like controlling Germany's economy. I think the mutual hatred of Catholic and Communist leaders in that era had much to do with their mutual desires to run command economies. All the Catholic dictators of Europe of the 1930s and 40s, Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Philippe Petain, and Hitler ran command economies, just like Joseph Stalin did in the U.S.S.R., then the only communist nation.

Protestant Christianity, in its diversity, has a long historical association with the merchant class. The Catholic Church mostly sided with the aristocracy during the formative centuries of the modern epic. The merchant class does not like to be dictated to. Hence its ideology of individualistic interpretation of the Bible and support for republics or, if necessary, democracies.

The divide, then, is not so wide. Creationism is an assertion of Biblical authority. Protestantism is associated with the idea that the business of Christianity is business. Christian businesses (including preachers and pundits) need to appeal to their target market. So they promote Creationism to further their own self interest. Free markets also promote their self-interest because the people with the most money to give (buying advertisements to sell over-priced gold on radio shows, for instance) are still mostly from the merchant (business people) class. It is all about self interest. If there were gods, they would probably want nothing to do with it.

Democracy with Imperialism: the British Empire

2011-04-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

In 1500, when the Turkish Ottoman Empire and China were the world's greatest powers, before Spain had established its empire in the Americas and while the Portuguese were still pirating their way around Africa to Asia, the English were a backward and unimportant people. They had a king, Henry VII, who had come to power through violence. There were no pretensions to having a democratic government run for the sake of the people; holding Parliaments was an ancient but seldom-honored tradition.

What was the evilest empire in the history of the world? The Mongols? The Romans, the Ottomans, the Nazis? For my money it was the British Empire. Which did not exist in any meaningul sense in 1500.

We are not supposed to think that way in these United States of America. The British are supposed to be a good force of history, the main source of the American ruling class and culture, nice people who brought civilization to half the world.

Sure, that is how it must have gone. Hi, would you like to trade almost all of your land for some lessons in how to drink high tea? Welcome to English civilization.

The Brits were a brutal lot. For centuries they just fought each other or, after the Norman conquest, tried to conquer another lot of civilized brutes, the French. United, they conquered Wales, then Ireland. They fought with the Scots for centuries, too, before the two clans were united by royal marriage.

Even before the unity known as Great Britain (or United Kingdom) was formed, the English began mixing trade with piracy. Their royally sponsored pirates became national heroes and provided much of the capital for both colonialism and modern capitalism. The British Navy and Army, working with missionaries, businessmen, and diplomats, became a rather efficient imperial machine. They never did the grand invasion routine beloved by conquerors from Darius the Great to Napoleon. They used political and economic leverage quite effectively to eat the Indian subcontinent bite by bite. They would graciously accept a colony or two from bankrupt Eurotrash kings they had loaned some money or troops to for local wars, or who had lost to the tyrants backed by Britain.

It was a centuries-long process, but over time the people of the British empire murdered millions in war and in cold blood, stole half the world's real estate, and destroyed most of the native economies of their colonies. You might also ask the Irish about how civilized British rule has been.

Which brings us to the issue of democracy. During the development of the British Empire the "middle class" (here I use older, more accurate sense of the term, those above the working class but below the aristocracy) struggled for power with the kings (really Emperors) and their aristocratic inbred idiot relatives. Guess who won? Over the centuries Parliament became stronger, and the House of Commons came to prevail over the House of Lords. Eventually even ordinary, lower-class British men got the vote. Socialist parties and then, more successfully, the Labor Party came to play an important role in politics. By the 20th century, we are supposed to believe, democracy was triumphant in merry old England.

Look at World War I. We are taught in American schools that the U.S. was a democracy and fought with France, Italy, and Britain, collectively the Democracies, against Germany, Austria, and Turkey (still then the vast Ottoman Empire), the Monarchies. That is a load of swill.

Almost no one in the British Empire could vote to elect politicians to set its policies. Only those living in the British Isles could vote. Africans could not vote, nor could Indians or Burmese or the Chinese in Hong Kong. Even the Canadians and Australians could not vote for members of the British Parliament (as white neo-Brits they did have their own Parliaments).

Is that democracy? A billion or so people, and less than 100 million have a say in governance.

I think not. I somehow doubt the citizens of the Indian subcontinent would have voted to have themselves shot when they demanded independence or self-rule.

In Iran (then Persia) they still speak of the nefarious British. They have better memories than Americans, or perhaps less reason to forget what actually happened over the past five centuries.

Class room exercise questions:

Are there any parallels between the British Empire and some other benevolent empire closer to home?

If a minority like the Irish within a political empire vote for their independence, but are voted down by the English majority, is that democracy? Is majority rule the sole test of democratic governance?

Michele Bachmann's Bad Divorce

2011-04-04T11:19:00.000-07:00

I had not paid any attention to Michele Bachmann, a Republican Congressperson, until I started seeing her mentioned as a potential nominee for President of the United States. Apparently that is because I don't watch TV. She has become quite a star for the Tea Party movement, although she began her political career long before the Tea Party was organized.

Turning to Wikipedia, I found that Congresswoman Bachmann is very close to me in age, just a little over a year younger, born April 6, 1956. I always wonder with ultra-conservative people in my age cohort how they missed the basic lessons of their childhood, of the 1960s, of peace, love, and understanding. What jumped out at me in her mini-biography is that her parents were divorced and her father moved to California; she stayed with her mother. My parents did not get divorced. Perhaps because they were Catholic and the Bachmann's were Lutheran.

Divorce is still controversial in some circles. It is another of life's double edged swords. For women, without divorce there can be the pain of being stuck in an unloving, perhaps even brutal, marriage. On the other side of the blade is that with divorce a man can make promises, have children, and then, on a whim, go off cavorting with another woman. Leaving a lonely, angry woman to raise children, and like as not trying to instill in those women a hatred for their fathers and anything to do with them. David Amble, Michele's father, moved to California (where I now live).

Michele grew up in tiny Anoka, Minnesota, essentially a suburb of Minneapolis. I grew up in the suburbs of a big, but much more conservative, city: Jacksonville, Florida. If geography means anything, I should have turned out conservative and she liberal.

Another reason for the different directions was that we were on a cusp. When we graduated from high school, I in 1972 and she in 1974, the sixties were over. Some of the energy of the sixties was still present in radical politics, in music, and in art. Feminism was really just starting to get going. I felt repressed by my parents and schools, so I wanted to taste the counterculture even if it was already in decline. By 1974, combined with hating her father and divorce, probably Michele was willing to take the opportunities now afforded women, but rejected the broader implications of ideals like freedom, equality, and mutual cooperation. After graduating from a state college she headed off to Oral Roberts University, where the miraculous is real and real problems are sins.

Finally, it would be foolish to neglect my struggles with the idea of being drafted in the U.S. military and being sent off to kill the good people of Vietnam. Michele did not have to worry about that.

Obviously Michele is smart, hard working, ambitious, and loving in her own way. On the other hand, how smart can you be and pretend that there is a God, he is male, he had only one son, he crucified his own son, and he has had writer's block since he finished penning out the New Testament? Of course, religion these days is just a fantasy-role playing game. Most people who aren't insane know that it is just make-believe.

It is too bad that the political principles of the right wing of the Republican Party and especially the Tea Party are not examined rationally, but instead are colored with religious emotionalism. Unlike my mostly lefty friends I agree about some of the economic symptoms. I see the causes differently, however. We, Americans, are in a post-imperialist decline, much like England between World War I and World War II. We benefited, from about 1938 to about 1970, from national prosperity based partly on hard work and creativity, but juiced by the super-profitability of imperialism. Our industries did great because we had the whole world for a market: every other industrial nation's factories had been extensively bombed in World War II. The economic pie was growing so fast that the rich did not fight all that hard to prevent the middle class, working class, and the poor to share in the feast.

Now we waste our money on the military aspects of imperialism, but it is an economic drag on the homeland. Our capitalists wanted and got Free Trade, which was not really about trade, but about moving American factories to Mexico and China and Central American dictatorships. Now American workers are global citizens, and they don't like it.

The pyramids of business have gotten taller. A business owner with 10 employees seldom can pay himself more than 10 times what he pays an individual employee. A global corporation with 100,000 employees can easily pay its top management 1000 times what it pays basic employees, and the stockholders can still pocket plenty of loot. For Americans in the global elite, Free Trade has been a shower of gold.

We could try, again, to divide up the pie more fairly. The easiest way to do that is to increase taxes on people with high incomes, and on capital gains and dividends. Then use that money for infrastructure (including education) that benefits everyone. It could even be used for infrastructure that would make building new factories in the United States attractive to the greed-heads who control international capital. But just dividing the pie more fairly is not going to be enough [pay attention, lazy socialist friends]. Even cutting back our military establishment 90% won't be enough. IF we are going to keep a pleasant standard of living for most Americans we need to be competitive with China and India, Brazil and Peru, Europe and Arab Emirates. That means we have to upgrade our work skills and habits, especially at the low end. The idea that the state can guarantee (what would be in the developing world) a middle-class lifestyle, is not going to be viable. With the trends coming down the road the state will be lucky if it can guarantee that if you don't work you won't starve or freeze.

I certainly think we can do better than Michele Bachmann for President. But whoever is elected, the trend lines won't change unless concerted efforts are made to change them. President Obama has increased military spending at a time it needed to be cut back by 90%. He approved an extension of the rich-ride-tax-free program of his predecessor. Except for rhetoric (aimed at voting bases) and fringe issues, I see little substantial difference between Bachman and Obama. I'm not excited about either. I hope some more exciting candidates enter the race.