The Fed’s Strong Dollar Policy

By: Peter Schiff, Gold Seek.

Ever since Robert Rubin began the tradition in the mid-1990s, it has been a significant element of the Treasury Secretary’s job description to continuously state that a strong dollar is in the national interest. It is widely regarded that such utterances, if repeated often enough, can constitute the sum total of what is still laughingly known as the nation’s “strong dollar policy.”

Over the past two generations, the American government has launched many failed campaigns. To name just a few, there has been the war on drugs, the war on poverty, and the continued attempts to improve education. But the strong dollar policy must be seen as the poster child for all failed Federal policies. However, many in the market took cheer that the policy is now being greatly expanded. In an unprecedented move, the Fed Chairman is now adding his voice to the chorus and using the same rhetoric previously used by Treasury alone. That’s two people saying the words…not just one. A double barrel strong dollar policy!

As the administration is so fond of saying, a nation’s currency reflects the underlying strength of its economy, and in that sense can be seen as a nation’s economic report card. In truth, a strong currency is in the interest of every nation, just as good grades are in the interest of every student. Using this basic analogy, a flunking student cannot improve his grades by simply telling his parents, teachers, and fellow students that he has adopted a “straight A policy.” If his words are not accompanied by a change in actual behavior, whereby he stops cutting class, and starts studying more, his new policy is unlikely to achieve results. So long as his bad habits persist, the policy will not be any more effective simply because one of his friends chimes in.

In his speech this past Tuesday, Ben Bernanke finally admitted that the weakness in the dollar was contributing to both higher inflation and elevated inflation expectations. This stands in stark contrast to his recent testimony in front of the House Banking Committee, where in response to a question asked by Congressman Ron Paul, he confidently declared that the weakness of the dollar only effected Americans who travel abroad. It is amazing how little attention this complete reversal received.

The media of course wasted no time in declaring that Bernanke’s speech heralded the opening of a new front in the campaign against the falling dollar. For example, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow proclaimed that Bernanke had endorsed “King Dollar” (someone needs to remind Kudlow that the king has long since abdicated his throne) and the network ran an entire segment on how to profit from the new dollar rally. All of this because Bernanke merely mentioned the dollar, acknowledged its effects on inflation, and expressed concern for its plight. As far as the media and Wall Street are concerned, words without action are enough. Too bad that’s not the way things work here on the planet Earth.

The real take away from Bernanke’s comment is not that the dollar is about to rally, but that it is now more likely to sink even lower. I believe the main reason Bernanke has refrained from mentioning the dollar in the past is that he did not want to be put in a position of actually having to do something about its decline. He is now so fearful of an imminent dollar collapse that he must have felt compelled to throw down the gauntlet despite his fear that someone might actually pick it up.

My guess is that currency traders will ultimately see this as an act of desperation. When the dollar keeps falling a chorus will swell to demand that the Fed put teeth in its new policy. If Bernanke does nothing the world will finally see a naked emperor and the dollar’s decline will turn into a rout. If, on the other hand, the Fed raises rates to defend the dollar, and only a short term bounce results, then all remaining confidence in the Fed’s ability to support the dollar will evaporate as well. This is probably Bernanke’s greatest fear and is likely the main reason he waited so long before mentioning the dollar. The fact that he felt compelled to do so now likely means he knows the game is coming to an end. Got gold?

Chemotherapy Causes Delayed Severe Neural Damage, Study Shows

Source: Science Daily.

Cancer treatment with chemotherapeutic agents is often associated with delayed adverse neurological consequences – an occurrence often referred to as “chemobrain” – that may compromise the quality of life of a proportion of cancer survivors. Now, new research demonstrates that treatment with a single chemotherapeutic agent, 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), by itself is sufficient to cause a syndrome of delayed degeneration in the central nervous system (CNS). 5-FU is a widely used chemotherapeutic agent that is employed, alone or in combination with other agents, in the treatment of cancers of the colon, rectum, breast, stomach, pancreas, ovaries and bladder.

Little is known about the side-effects of chemotherapy on the CNS, despite their obvious clinical importance. Until now researchers have not fully understood the underlying biology, including whether these effects require: exposure to multiple chemotherapeutic agents; chemotherapeutic agents plus the body’s own response to cancer; blood-brain barrier damage; or inflammation. Clinicians have also lacked animal models to study this important problem.

Professor Mark Noble and colleagues of the University of Rochester Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Institute and the Harvard Medical School, Boston discovered that short-term systemic administration of 5-FU to mice caused both acute CNS damage and a syndrome of progressively worsening delayed damage. This damage was not self-repairing, and instead became worse over time. In addition, Noble and colleagues also demonstrated that treatment with chemotherapy also had delayed effects on the speed with which information is transferred from the ear to the brain.

Myelin sheaths are necessary for normal neuronal function. One key finding of the study was that clinically relevant concentrations of 5-FU were toxic not only for dividing cells of the CNS but also for the cells that produce the insulating myelin sheaths (non-dividing oligodendrocytes). The delayed damage the researchers measured was to the myelinated tracts of the CNS and associated with extensive myelin pathology. The findings regarding the speed of ear-to-brain information transfer may offer a non-invasive means of analyzing myelin damage associated with cancer treatment.

“Multiple clinical reports have identified neurotoxicity as a complication of treatment regimens in which chemotherapeutic agents such as 5-fluorouracil are components,” says Noble. “As treatments with chemotherapeutic agents will clearly remain the standard of care for cancer patients for many years to come, the need to better understand such damage is great.”

Professor Noble continues “These studies extend the field of stem cell medicine beyond the use of cell transplantation for tissue repair. It is our knowledge of stem cell biology that allows us to begin to understand some of the causes of this syndrome, as well as providing the means of preventing or repairing this damage.”

This research provides the first demonstration that delayed CNS damage can be induced by a single chemotherapeutic agent and also generates the first animal model of such damage. These studies further demonstrate that this syndrome differs from that caused by irradiation and thus may represent a new class of delayed CNS degenerative damage.

Journal reference: Systemic 5-fluorouracil treatment causes a syndrome of delayed myelin destruction in the CNS. Ruolan Han, Yin M. Yang, Joerg Dietrich, Anne Luebke, Margot Mayer-Pröschel and Mark Noble. Journal of Biology (in press)

Leaked Report: ISP Secretly Added Spy Code To Web Sessions, Crashing Browsers

By Ryan Singel, Wired.

An internal British Telecom report on a secret trial of an ISP eavesdropping and advertising technology found that the system crashed some unsuspecting users’ browsers, and a small percentage of the 18,000 broadband customers under surveillance believed they’d been infected with adware.

The January 2007 report (.pdf) — published Thursday by the whistle blowing site Wikileaks — demonstrates the hazards broadband customers face when an ISP tampers with raw internet traffic for its own profit. The leak comes just weeks after U.S. broadband provider Charter Communications told users it would be testing a technology similar to what’s described in the BT document.

The report documents BT’s partnership with U.K. ad company Phorm, which specializes in building profiles of ISP customers, then serving targeted ads on webpages the user visits.

From late September to early October 2006, British Telecom secretly partnered with Phorm to let the company monitor and track 18,000 of the BT’s customers. Phorm installed boxes on BT’s network that redirected web requests through their proxy server.

Those boxes inserted JavaScript code into every web page downloaded by the users. That script then reported back to Phorm the contents of the web page, which Phorm used to create ad profiles of a user. Additionally, Phorm purchased advertising space on prominent web sites, showing a default ad for a charity. But when a user who had previously looked at car sites visited one of those pages, he instead got an advertisement for car insurance.

The users were not informed they were being made guinea pigs for a new revenue system for BT and had no way to opt out of the system, according to the report. The JavaScript caused flickering problems for some users as the script reported back information about the content of the web page to a Phorm server. The script also crashed browsers that loaded a website that relied excessively on anchor tags. Additionally, the rogue JavaScript showed up unexpectedly in user’s posts to some web forums.

Despite these problems, the technical assessment concluded the test was successful and was largely went unnoticed by most users.

The operation of the system does have noticeable side effects, which included web-page tag insertion and navigation bar flutter.

From the postings, no user correctly determined the source of these effects and users did not post that the system was causing poor performance.

However all postings suspected that their machines had a virus, a malware or a spyware infection.

Neither Phorm nor BT returned calls seeking comment on the document.

The U.S.’s fourth largest ISP, Charter Communications, is set to test out technology similar to Phorm’s in the coming weeks using a U.S.-based company called NebuAd. After Charter sent out notice of the test to customers, two influential members of the U.S. House of Representatives asked the company to postpone the test, citing possible violation of privacy laws.

Congressman Ed Markey, who chairs a powerful telecom oversight subcommittee, is planning to meet with company representatives next week, according to a spokeswoman.

Charter’s partner, NebuAd, claims to have have applied for a patent for its technology to let users opt-out of having their web sessions eavesdropped on and categorized, but the only patent applied for under its name is one that replaces ads on third-party websites with ads of their own.

BT’s secret test first came to light when one suspicious user contacted The Register about the problem. At the time, BT denied any involvement, though the company later admitted it had run a secret test and planned to expand the monitoring technology to its entire network.

The newly released documents confirm a further report in The Register in April about the extent of the secret test.

Chronology of a Lie: Iran and EFPs

Source: Gary Leupp, CounterPunch.

In his Antiwar.com columns investigative journalist and historian Gareth Porter has been doing a masterful job of exposing Dick Cheney’s relentless campaign to vilify Iran, build a case for an attack, bomb the country and produce regime change before the administration’s term ends. The campaign as many have noted parallels in several ways the propaganda blitz that preceded the War in Iraq. Cheney and his neocons cabal seek to skew the reports of mainstream intelligence agencies to confirm their allegations (in this case, the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program as an immanent threat to Israel and the U.S., Iranian Quds Force training of Iraqi “insurgents” in Iranian camps, Iranian provision of explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) to these “insurgents,” Iranian contacts with al-Qaeda, etc.). If they fail to do this, they circumvent the intelligence community and find ways of disseminating disinformation through their own announcements, editorials by their supporters, and stories planted in the corporate press. Since Cheney got Bush to sign an Executive Order giving his office the same powers to classify as the president has, his operations are shrouded in secrecy.

In his latest piece Porter follows the campaign to blame Iran for supplying EFPs to those attacking U.S. occupation forces in Iraq. In January 2007 some military officials asserted that EFPs that could penetrate U.S. armored vehicles were being manufactured in Iran and supplied to Iraqi Shiite militias by the Iranian government. They prepared a draft for a proposed military briefing to announce this claim, which then circulated in Washington and was leaked to the press. However, the document “met with unanimous objection from the State Department, Defense Department, and the National Security Council (NSC) staff, as administration officials themselves stated publicly.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley all wanted to build upon the negotiations with Iranian officials which had occurred in Iraq to that point. These had been based on the desire of both sides to support the Maliki government, which has warm ties with Tehran. The Cheney camp had opposed those talks.

In a press briefing on Jan. 24, 2007, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Department Spokesman Sean McCormack was asked if the government has any evidence for Iranian supply of EFPs to Iraqi forces. He answered indirectly: “You don’t necessarily have to construct something in Iran in order for it to be a threat to the U.S. or British troops from the Iranian regime.” He implied that outsiders might be instructing Iraqis on how to produce EFPs.

On February 2, Hadley distanced the National Security Council from the draft report. “The truth is,” he told reporters at a news briefing, “quite frankly, we thought the briefing was overstated. We sent it back to get it narrowed and focused on the facts.” Meanwhile the intelligence community was preparing a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that did not support the claim about EFPs but merely accused Iranians of training fighters of Mahdi Army led by Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiery nationalist who is not Iran’s favorite Iraqi politician although he may be the most popular man in the country. Rice and Gates both stated their expectation that the planned briefing on Iranian involvement in Iraq would reflect the views contained in the NIE.

Then Cheney made his move. On Feb. 9 presidential spokesperson Dana Perino was asked when the briefing would be held. “Decisions on that,” she replied, “are being made out in Baghdad.” Gen. David Petraeus (whom former CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon, a known opponent of an Iran attack, has described as an “ass-kissing little chicken-shit”) had just arrived to assume command of U.S. forces in Iraq. On February 11 three military officers in Iraq gave a briefing to the press in which they stated that the EFPs could only have been manufactured in Iran and were being supplied to Iraqi militiamen by the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards with the knowledge of the Iranian government.

“Cheney,” Porter writes, “had used the compliant Petraeus to do an end-run around the national security bureaucracy. Petraeus had already reached an agreement with the White House to take Cheney’s line on the EFPs issue and to present the briefing immediately without consulting State or Defense.” This circumventing of normal channels is of course Cheney’s modus operandi, as scathingly documented in the four-part series about Cheney in the Washington Post last July by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, stated that he could not “from his own knowledge” confirm that the Quds Force was providing bomb-making kits to Iraqis, and one of the officers at the briefing backed off the claim of Iranian complicity. Still, the story was “out there,” in the press, and as Porter writes, “Cheney now had a potential casus belli against Iran.” Or one might say, another one to try to foist upon an impressionable public. This, from the only top official who’s never backed off his claim that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11.

In September 2007, Congress passed the neocon and AIPAC-backed Kyl-Lieberman resolution designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. In October the Treasury Department designated the Quds Force “terrorist”—”for providing material support to the Taliban and other terrorist organizations.” Very creative thinking there. Iran’s religious leadership hates the Taliban and almost went to war with Afghanistan when it was led by the group in 1998. It supports U.S.-backed Afghan puppet president Hamid Karzai, who told the Washington Post in January 2008: “We have had a particularly good relationship with Iran in the past six years. It’s a relationship that I hope will continue. We have opened our doors to them. They have been helping us in Afghanistan. The United States very wisely understood that it is our neighbor and encouraged that relationship.”

On May 8 Los Angeles Times correspondent Tina Susman reported from Baghdad: “A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was cancelled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran.” Don’t you just love the matter-of- fact tone of that? They planned to lie, but somebody opposed to the lie and its consequences was apparently able to abort the effort. Isn’t it obvious that Cheney and the neocons in general believe it perfectly permissible to lie to the people in order to justify wars? And they just hate it when somebody gets in their way.

Remember how a member of Bush’s inner circle (Karl Rove?) told the New York Times’ Ron Suskind in summer 2002 the “the reality-based community” had it all wrong, that the world doesn’t “really work anymore” on the basis of “judicious study of discernible reality.” “We’re an empire now,” he boasted, “and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Combine that Nazi-like faith in the Big Lie; the liars’ smug confidence that the system will continue to protect them even as they’re exposed by the “reality-based” folks whom they find laughable; and the obvious fact that the Congress and media lack the will to call them on their lies. These evidences of system-wide bankruptcy are grounds for profound pessimism in the short term.

NBC’s Keith Olbermann last week talked with former Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan about the prospect for a U.S. attack on Iran. “So knowing what you know,” he asked, “if Dana Perino gets up there and starts making noises that sound very similar to what you heard from the administration, from Ari Fleischer in 2002, from other actual members of the administration and the cabinet, you would be suspicious?” “I would be,” replied McClellan. “I would be. I think that you would need to take those comments very seriously and be skeptical.”

We Americans are being hit by EFP (Extremely False Propaganda) designed to do much worse than penetrate the thin armor of our media-numbed and infotainment- conditioned brains. It’s designed to hurl us and our children into a Long War against the Islamic world. And those of us who are skeptical—or more than skeptical: aware, disgusted and alarmed—will I fear wake to the fait accompli of an attack before Cheney and Bush hand over power to successors who will patriotically go along with the program.

What we need is not mere skepticism, but the toppling of the liars.

Get ‘em while they’re hot — and free (donuts)

What’s interesting is the original donut recipe at the end of the article, which calls for lard. Now this is a donut I would eat! If you want to try this at home, be sure to get lard that’s not preserved. Most of the ones at regular grocery stores are.

Although some companies have removed trans-fats from their pastries, most still have a trace, or hide them in the ingredients mono and/or di-glycerides.

Source: Karen Datko, MSN Money.

Around here we think of every day as doughnut day, but those with more self-restraint know the real thing comes the first Friday in June – today, in fact.

The celebration was launched in 1938, in the depths of the Great Depression, as a Salvation Army fund-raiser honoring the volunteer “lassies” who served coffee and fresh doughnuts by the thousands to homesick soldiers in France during World War I.

To mark the occasion, doughnut purveyor Krispy Kreme is offering a free calorie bomb. No doubt you can find your nearest store in your sleep, but here’s a way to find one if for some reason you’ve awakened in a strange part of town. Wait for the “hot light” if you want one of their notorious melt-in-your-mouth glazed, but you can choose one (1) of any of their varieties at participating stores. Here’s a peek at their lineup.

No Krispy Kremes in your neck of the woods? Dunkin Donuts hasn’t ponied up any freebies that we know, but that’s no reason not to drop a couple of bucks on a cruller and a cuppa joe and think about Doughboys, doughnuts and the women who served ‘em up hot.

If you want to get all gourmet on us, Serious Eats offers a look at what makes a great doughnut and a honor roll of the shops that fry them.

And if you’re in Chicago, you can swing by the real Donut Day, which aims to raise money to fight hunger in the Windy City. As long as you’re being authentic, you might try the original Salvation Army recipe, too:

7-1/2 cups sugar
3/4 cup lard
8 eggs
3 large cans evaporated milk
3 large cans water
18 cups flour
18 teaspoons baking powder
7-1/2 teaspoons salt
8 teaspoons nutmeg

Cream sugar and lard together, beat eggs, add evaporated milk and water. Add liquid to creamed mixture. Mix flour, baking powder, salt and nutmeg in large sieve and sift into other mixture. Add enough flour to make e stiff dough. Roll and cut. Five pounds of lard are required to fry the doughnuts. Yield: approximately 250 doughnuts.

Rumors of War: Is Bush Gearing Up to Attack Iran?

I wonder if a False Flag operation is in the works, to drum up opposition to Iran.

By Conn Hallinan, Portside.

The May 8 letter from U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-MI), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, to George W. Bush, received virtually no media coverage, in spite of the fact that it warned the President that an attack on Iran without Congressional approval would be grounds for impeachment. Rumor has it several senators have been briefed about the possibility of war with Iran.

Something is afoot.

Just what is not clear, but over the past several months, a number of moves by the White House strongly suggest that the Bush Administration will attack Iran sometime in the near future. According to the Asia Times, “a former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community” said an air attack will target the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps? (IRGC) Quds Force garrisons. Not even the White House is bonkers enough to put troops on the ground amid 65 million Iranians.

There is a certain disconnect to all this, particularly given last December’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluding that Iran had abandoned its program to build a nuclear weapon. The NIE is the consensus view of all 16 U.S. intelligence services. At the time, the report seemed to shelve any possibility of war with Iran.

However, shortly after the intelligence estimate on Iran was released, the old “into Iraq gang” went to work undermining it.

According to Newsweek, during his Middle East tour in January, President Bush “all but disowned the document” to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. A “senior administration official” told the magazine, “He [Bush] told the Israelis that he can’t control what the intelligence community says but that [the NIE's] conclusions don’t reflect his own views.”

Neither do they reflect the views of Vice-President Dick Cheney or Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

In an interview with ABC during his recent 10-day visit to the region, Cheney downplayed the NIE: “We don’t know whether or not they’ve [the Iranians have] restarted.” Cheney also said Iran was seeking to build missiles capable of reaching the U.S. sometime in the next decade.

On April 21, Gates said that Iran was “hell bent” on acquiring nuclear weapons, and, while he was not advocating war with Iran, the military option should be kept on the table.

A month before Gates’ comment, the White House quietly extended an executive order stating that Iran represented an ‘ongoing threat’ to U.S. national security. The Bush Administration claims that the 2002 resolution that led to the war in Iraq gives it the right to strike at ‘terrorists’ wherever they are. Last September, the Kyl-Lieberman Sense of the Senate resolution designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a “terrorist organization.”

The Administration has sharply increased its rhetorical attacks on Iran in a way that is disquietingly similar to the campaign that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Take the current charge that the Quds Force is arming anti-American groups in Iraq and providing them with high tech roadside bombs and sophisticated rockets.

General David Petraeus, the new head of Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “special groups” are “funded, trained, armed and directed by Iran’s Quds Force” It was these groups that launched Iranian rockets and mortar rounds at Iraq’s seat of government” in the Green Zone.

Patraeus replaced Admiral William “Fox” Fallon, who had openly opposed a military confrontation with Iran.

But the U.S. has never presented any evidence to back up those charges. U.S. officials say the rockets pounding the Green Zone have Iranian markings on them, but they have yet to show any evidence to that effect. And, as for the special roadside bombs, or explosively formed penetrators (EFP), the evidence is entirely deductive.

The U.S. argues that the copper cores used in these bombs requires using a heavy machine press and that Iraq has no such presses. But before the invasion, Iraq was the most industrialized Arab country, with a sophisticated machine tool industry, and a study by Time magazine says the cities of Basra, Karbala and Najaf “may indeed have such presses.”

The Time article, “Doubting the Evidence Against Iran,” concludes, “No concrete evidence has emerged in public that Iran was behind the weapons [EFPs]. U.S. officials have revealed no captured shipments of such devices and offered no other proof.”

The lack of evidence has hardly cooled down the rhetoric. President Bush said in a speech at the White House that “two of the greatest threats to America” were Iran and al-Qaeda.

U.S. preparations for war, however, have been more than rhetorical.

According to the Israeli website, DEBKAfile, Cheney’s trip to the Middle East in March was seen in the region as a possible harbinger of war. “The vice-president’s choice of capitals for his tour is a pointer to the fact that the military option, off since December, may be on again,” DEBKA concluded. “America will need the cooperation of all four [countries he visited] – Oman, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey.”

There has also been a steady build-up of naval and air power in the region. A new aircraft carrier battle group has been assigned to the area, Patriot anti-missile missiles have been deployed, and U.S. naval forces in the Eastern Mediterranean have been beefed up.

What would likely happen if the U.S. did elect to attack?

Militarily there is little Teheran could do in response.

Iran’s army is smaller than it was during the Iran-Iraq war, and in a recent ’show of force’ its air force mustered a total of 140 out-of-date fighters. It navy is mostly small craft, and while it has anti-ship missiles, Teheran would probably think twice about trying to shut down the Gulf. The current regime depends on the sale of oil and gas to shore up its fragile economy.

While the White House portrays the militias in Iraq and Hezbollah as Teheran’s cats’ paws, that is nonsense. The militias in both countries will act on the basis of what is in their interests, not Iran’s.

There is talk that Iran might target Israel, but the Israelis have made it clear that any such attack would be met with a massive retaliation, probably nuclear. “An Iranian attack will prompt a severe reaction from Israel,” National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Elizer warned, “which would destroy the Iranian nation.”

In any case, it is far more likely that Israel would attack Iran than vice versa.

Any American attack would further isolate the U.S. in the Middle East. Ethan Chorin, of the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies, says U.S. threats against Iran are running cross current to efforts by other nations in the Gulf region to establish a détente with Teheran. “The U.S. seeks to defend the Arabs from Iran, but they are increasingly trying to defend themselves from the U.S. efforts to defend them against Iran,” he wrote in a recent commentary in the Financial Times.

All the war talk, says Chorin, “is translating into increasing open sympathy on the part of many Gulf Arabs for Iran and increasing skepticism about U.S. efforts to isolate the country.”

A U.S. war would deeply divide Europe as well, and might lead to a German withdrawal from Afghanistan. What Russia’s, China’s and India’s response would be is not clear. China and India are major clients for Iranian natural gas.

Domestically, the Bush Administration may see this as its only opportunity to hold on to the White House. The Republicans know they are going to lose seats in the House and the Senate, but at this point the race for the presidency is still tight. Might a new war against the demonized Iranians make voters stick with ‘war hero’ John McCain? It’s a long shot, but this administration has always had a major streak of riverboat gambler about it.

All this talk of war, of course, could be sound and fury signifying nothing. But it might also be the run up to a limited conflict, maybe one set off by a manufactured incident.

Once unleashed, however, no one controls the dogs of war. As hard as it is to imagine, war with Iran might top the Iraq War as a foreign policy disaster.

10 Times the Price and 10 Times Crappier

By SHARON ASTYK.

http://www.alternet.org/story/83555/?page=1

Chalmers Johnson is one of my favorite thinkers, so I link to his article for the sheer pleasure of introducing him to anyone else who doesn’t know his work. But I also mention it because it got me thinking. Now we all know the statistics – you know, the ones for things like fact that the American military budget is 10 times the budget of the next biggest military power, China, or that we spend much more than all the other countries put together. But somehow seeing the number laid out in Johnson’s analysis led me to a new thought – the 10 Times More = 10 Times Less Rule.

What is this rule? Simply this – if we in America use 10 times as much as another country, or spend 10 times as much on something, not only will we use more and pay more, but we’ll get less. What we get will, inevitably be at least twice as crappy as the much cheaper model, and often as much as 10 times worse.

Is this really a rule? Well, let’s start with the military budget. Look, I’m a lefty and no big fan of our invasions, but my feeling is if we’re going to spend 10 times more in our military budget than our nearest threat we should be a lot better than everyone else – that is, we should be able to crush anyone we want like flies. Again, I’m not saying I’m for this fly crushing thing, just that spending that much should pay off. Instead, we keep discovering the same freakin’ thing – that people who want you out of their country are way more passionate than 20 year olds who just want some bucks for college, and that a 2 million dollar tank can get its ass kicked by a 300 dollar IED. So the tanks end up lying on their sides along a road, and we end up paying trillions for an expensive exit strategy, which is a polite way of saying “we got our ass kicked and wasted lives.”

Or what about our food? The average bite of American food takes 10 calories of oil to produce a single calorie of American food. The average Indonesian’s dinner comes in at about 1 a calorie of oil (this all assumes that the average Indonesian can get food, but let’s assume they can). And let me clearly reassure you that the average Indonesian’s cheap-ass bowl of laksa – noodles, broth, coconut milk, maybe a piece of fish – taste 100 times better than a Big Mac or a bag of Doritos. That is, we put in all this oil and what comes out – food that tastes like crap, is really awful for us, and can’t even remotely approach the quality of the street food you’d find in almost any third world country on earth.

We only spend twice as much on medical care as most Europeans, but we report that we’re four times as unhappy with our healthcare system, so I bet if we worked on getting our spending up, we could be 10 times as unhappy with our medical care. One of the largest studies of end of life care in American history discovered that 65% of Americans die “in debt, in pain and alone.” Now I don’ t know about you, but that sounds pretty much like everyone’s worst nightmare. The same study found that many other nations do a vastly better job of simply making sure you don’t hurt and you have someone there. But here, the suffering costs extra.

The good news about the 10 times more = 10 times less rule is this – if true, we could actually get our usage of many resources back down to a level that might let us go on from here. Our goal when Rioting for Austerity was to get down by 90% in all 7 categories. At the end of the project’s first year, we’re down by at least 75% in all 7 categories, and to 90% in food, garbage and consumer goods. We should hit our goals in heating oil and water in this coming year, as some of our infrastructure changes begin. Including the allotment for working at home, we came in just short of our share of electricity, and gas is one we’re still struggling with. But we’re using 78% less gas than the average Americans (except Eli, who is using 69% less, because of his school busing) .

Were we less happy? No, not at all. In fact despite the fact that I was nuts and agreed to write two books in 15 months, I’d say we were happier. Not 10 times happier, but maybe half again as much. Maybe even double – we saved a ton of money, we had a ton of fun, we found a new community, we had more time. What’s not to like?

The thing is, right now, using less energy and having less money is making a whole lot of people less happy. The reason, of course, is that we aren’t thinking it through – this isn’t a managed decline, and with the media telling us that the crisis was over yesterday all the time, most people are sitting tight, waiting for the good times to roll again. The great news is that using as much as 10 times less in many areas won’t hurt – but only if we think it through. That is, you can’t magically get to a diet of great low energy, low cost sustainable food simpy by taking the oil out of the supply chain. You have to work it. But it can be done, and helping millions who have no choice do it is going to be a big – and fascinating – project.

Sharon