Jim Kunstler: Legitimacy Dwindles

From his blog, Clusterfuck Nation. Pretty humorous, although I disagree that any kind of revolution is on the horizon.

Zounds! Public sentiment toward the accelerating economic fiasco has shifted, seemingly overnight, from a mood of nauseated amazement to one of panicked grievance as the United States moves closer to an apparent comprehensive collapse — and so ill-timed, wouldn’t you know it, to coincide with the annual rigors of Santa Claus. The tipping point seems to be the Bernie Madoff $50 billion Ponzi scandal, which represents the grossest failure of authority and hence legitimacy in finance to date in as much as Mr. Madoff was a former chairman of the NASDAQ, for godsake. It’s like discovering that Ben Bernanke is running a meth lab inside the Federal Reserve. And out in the heartland, of course, there is the spectacle of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich trying to desperately dodge a racketeering rap behind an implausible hairdo.

What seems to spook people now is the possibility that everybody in charge of everything is a fraud or a crook. Legitimacy has left the system. Not even the the legions of Obama are immune as his reliance on Wall Street capos Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, and Larry Summers seem tainted by the same reckless thinking that brought on the fiasco. His pick last week for chief of the SEC, Mary Shapiro, is already being dissed as a shill for the Big Bank status quo. In a few days we’ll discover what kind of bonuses are being ladled out by the remaining Wall Street banks with TARP money and a new chorus of howls will ring out.

This is very dangerous territory. In dollar terms, the numbers being applied to the various problems are so colossal — trillions! — that the death of our currency seems assured. And in defiance of congress’s express intentions, none of the TARP “money” has been applied to its targeted purpose of buying up “toxic” (i.e. fraudulent) securities hidden in the vaults of banks, pension funds, and municipal portfolios.

George W, Bush’s personal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler is designed solely to postpone their bankruptcy and mass job layoffs until after the holidays. Otherwise, the $17.4 billion will probably be used by the companies to underwrite the extensive legal work required for the moment they must declare bankruptcy — when Mr. Obama is in the White House. Meanwhile, the President-elect has ramped up his job-creation target overnight from two to three million, and some observers are catching a whiff of Soviet-style economic engineering (“…we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us….”).

The years since Jimmy Carter have produced an astoundingly flaccid public, sunk in various addictions and distractions, but this is about to change. The darkling mood of political protest and violent activism that saturated my own young adult years is scudding up again on the horizon. Mr. Obama’s pick for attorney general, the mild-looking Eric Holder, may be the key figure in the early months of the new government. If he doesn’t commence some aggressive investigations and prosecutions — beginning with Henry Paulson for insider trading when he was in charge of Goldman Sachs and shorting his own company’s mortgage-backed securities — then the whole Obama enterprise could fall under suspicion of illegitimacy. The bums who ran the US banking sector into a ditch have to account for their turpitudes. They can’t be allowed to hide under a TARP.

Unfortunately, the legal system, and probably the legislative system, will be so buried in procedural bullshit from the unwind of countless enterprises and institutions, and the sorting out of the remnants, that it remains to be seen whether this generation of people-in-charge can even embark on a fresh start of anything connected to real everyday life in America. All this is starting to alarm the tattered residue of the middle classes, and from here it’s a very short path to them being really pissed off.

When legitimacy erodes, anything goes. Nothing is respected including rules and personalities. The center doesn’t hold and the new vacuum there is a tumultuous place. The same crisis of authority and legitimacy is spreading from nation to nation now. Soon, China will contend with a discontented army of the unemployed. Greece has been in an uproar for two weeks. Belgium’s government just collapsed. Trade barriers are going up. Exports are falling away. The world’s energy markets are not immune to these disorders. I would expect problems with the currently seamless supply lines that bring America two-thirds of the oil we use. Even a mild disruption of oil supplies could attach an anvil to the ankle of an economy already falling off a cliff.

Right now, the overwhelming sentiment is to get this country back to where we were, say, ten years ago, when everything was humming nicely: Clinton nostalgia. We’re definitely not gong back there, though. It’s an idle wish. And any set of policies designed to lead in that direction will prove very disappointing. Our destination is a land of much smaller-scaled local economies. We could retain our federal ties if the federal government can scale back appropriately from the bloated, feckless enterprise it has become. Otherwise, it might only get in the way and make matters worse, and the public in one region or another of North America might reach a decision that they are better off without it. That would be what’s called a revolution.

A Historic Moment: The Election of the Greatest Con-Man in Recent History

Source: James Petras, Information Clearinghouse.

“I have a vision of Americans in their 80′s being wheeled to their offices and factories having lost their legs in imperial wars and their pensions to Wall Street speculators and with bitter memories of voting for a President who promised change, prosperity and peace and then appointed financial swindlers and war mongers.” An itinerant Minister 2008

December 08, 2008 “Information Clearinghouse” — The entire political spectrum ranging from the ‘libertarian’ left, through the progressive editors of the Nation to the entire far right neo-con/Zionist war party and free market Berkeley/Chicago/Harvard academics, with a single voice, hailed the election of Barack Obama as a ‘historic moment’, a ‘turning point in American history and other such histrionics. For reasons completely foreign to the emotional ejaculations of his boosters, it is a historic moment: witness the abysmal gap between his ‘populist’ campaign demagoguery and his long-standing and deepening carnal relations with the most retrograde political figures, power brokers and billionaire real estate and financial backers.

What was evident from even a cursory analysis of his key campaign advisers and public commitments to Wall Street speculators, civilian militarists, zealous Zionists and corporate lawyers was hidden from the electorate, by Obama’s people friendly imagery and smooth, eloquent deliverance of a message of ‘hope’. He effectively gained the confidence, dollars and votes of tens of millions of voters by promising ‘change’ (implying higher taxes for the rich, ending the Iraq war and national health care reform) when in fact his campaign advisers (and subsequent strategic appointments) pointed to a continuation of the economic and military policies of the Bush Administration.

Within 3 weeks of his election he appointed all the political dregs who brought on the unending wars of the past two decades, the economic policy makers responsible for the financial crash and the deepening recession castigating tens of millions of Americans today and for the foreseeable future. We can affirm that the election of Obama does indeed mark a historic moment in American history: The victory of the greatest con man and his accomplices and backers in recent history.

He spoke to the workers and worked for their financial overlords.

He flashed his color to minorities while obliterating any mention of their socio-economic grievances.

He promised peace in the Middle East to the majority of young Americans and slavishly swears undying allegiance to the War Party of American Zionists serving a foreign colonial power (Israel).

Obama, on a bigger stage, is the perfect incarnation of Melville’s Confidence Man. He catches your eye while he picks your pocket. He gives thanks as he packs you off to fight wars in the Middle East on behalf of a foreign country. He solemnly mouths vacuous pieties while he empties your Social Security funds to bail out the arch financiers who swindled your pension investments. He appoints and praises the architects of collapsed pyramid schemes to high office while promising you that better days are ahead.

Yes, indeed, “our greatest intellectual critics”, our ‘libertarian’ leftists and academic anarchists, used their 5-figure speaking engagements as platforms to promote the con man’s candidacy: They described the con man’s political pitch as “meeting the deeply felt needs of our people”. They praised the con man when he spoke of ‘change’ and ‘turning the country around’ 180 degrees. Indeed, Obama went one step further: he turned 360 degrees, bringing us back to the policies and policy makers who were the architects of our current political-economic disaster.

The Con Man’s Self-Opiated Progressive Camp Followers

The contrast between Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his political activities was clear, public and evident to any but the mesmerized masses and the self-opiated ‘progressives’ who concocted arguments in his favor. Indeed even after Obama’s election and after he appointed every Clintonite-Wall Street shill into all the top economic policy positions, and Clinton’s and Bush’s architects of prolonged imperial wars (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates), the ‘progressive true believers’ found reasons to dog along with the charade. Many progressives argued that Obama’s appointments of war mongers and swindlers was a ‘ploy’ to gain time now in order to move ‘left’ later.

Never ones to publicly admit their ‘historic’ errors, the same progressives turned to writing ‘open letters to the President’ pleading the ‘cause of the people’. Their epistles, of course, may succeed in passing through the shredder in the Office of the White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.

The conjurer who spoke of ‘change’ now speaks of ‘experience’ in appointing to every key and minor position the same political hacks who rotate seamlessly between Wall Street and Washington, the Fed and Academia. Instead of ‘change’ there is the utmost continuity of policy makers, policies and above all ever deepening ties between militarists, Wall Street and the Obama appointments. True believer-progressives, facing their total debacle, grab for any straw. Forced to admit that all of Obama’s appointments represent the dregs of the bloody and corrupt past, they hope and pray that ‘current dire circumstances’ may force these unrepentant warmongers and life long supporters of finance capital to become supporters and advocates of a revived Keynesian welfare state. On the contrary, Obama and each and everyone of his foreign policy appointments to the Pentagon, State and Justice Departments, Intelligence and Security agencies are calling for vast increases in military spending, troop commitments and domestic militarization to recover the lost fortunes of a declining empire. Obama and his appointees plan to vigorously pursue Clinton-Bush’s global war against national resistance movements in the Middle East. His most intimate and trusted ‘Israel-First’ advisers have targeted Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine and Iraq.

Obama’s Economic Con Game

Then there is the contrast between the trillions Obama will shower on the financial swindlers (and any other ‘too big to fail’ private capitalist enterprise) and his zero compensation for the 100 million heads of families swindled of $5 trillion dollars in savings and pensions by his cohort appointees and bailout beneficiaries. Not a cent is allocated for the long term unemployed. Not a single household threatened with eviction will be bailed out.

Obama is the trademark name of a network of confidence people. They are a well-organized gang of prominent political operative, money raisers, mass media hustlers, real estate moguls and academic pimps. They are joined and abetted by the elected officials and hacks of the Democratic Party. Like the virtuoso performer, Obama projected the image and followed the script. But the funding and the entire ‘populist’ show was constructed by the hard-nosed, hard-line free marketeers, Jewish and Gentile ‘Israel Firsters’, Washington war mongers and a host of multi-millionaire ‘trade union’ bureaucrats.

The electoral scam served several purposes above and beyond merely propelling a dozen strategic con artists into high office and the White House. First and foremost, the Obama con-gang deflected the rage and anger of tens of millions of economically skewered and war drained Americans from turning their hostility against a discredited presidency, congress and the grotesque one-party two factions political system and into direct action or at least toward a new political movement.

Secondly the Obama image provided a temporary cover for the return and continuity of all that was so detested by the American people – the arrogant untouchable swindlers, growing unemployment and economic uncertainty, the loss of life savings and homes and the endless, ever-expanding imperial wars.

Featuring Paul Volker, ‘Larry’ Summers, Robert Gates, the Clintons, Geithner, Holder and General (‘You drink your kool-aid while I sit on Boeings’ Board of Directors’) Jim Jones USMC, Obama treats us to a re-run of military surges and war crimes, Wall Street banditry, Abu Ghraib, AIPAC hustlers and all the sundry old crap. Our Harvard-minted Gunga Din purports to speak for all the colonial subjects but acts in the interest of the empire, its financial vampires, its war criminals and its Middle East leaches from the Land of the Chosen.

The Two Faces of Obama

Like the Janus face found on the coins of the early Roman Republic, Obama and his intimate cronies cynically joked about ‘which is the real face of Barack’, conscious of the con-job they were perpetrating during the campaign. In reality, there is only one face – a very committed, very consequential and very up front Obama, who demonstrated in every single one of his appointments the face of an empire builder.

Obama is an open militarist, intent by every means possible to re-construct a tattered US empire. The President-Elect is an unabashed Wall Street Firster – one who has placed the recuperation of the biggest banks and investment houses as his highest priority. Obama’s nominees for all the top economic positions (Treasury, Chief White House economic advisers) are eminently qualified, (with long-term service to the financial oligarchy), to pursue Obama’s pro-Wall Street agenda. There is not a single member of his economic team, down to the lowest level of appointees, who represents or has defended the interests of the wage or salaried classes (or for that matter the large and small manufacturers from the devastated ‘productive’ industrial economy).

The Obama propagandists claim his appointments reflect his preference for ‘experience’ – which is true: his team members have plenty of ‘experience’ through their long and lucrative careers maximizing profits, buyouts and speculation favoring the financial sector. Obama does not want to have any young, untested appointees who have no long established records of serving Big Finance, whose interests are too central to Obama’s deepest and most strongly held core beliefs. He wanted reliable economic functionaries who recognize that re-financing billionaire financiers is the central task of his regime. The appointments of the Summers, Rubins, Geithners and Volkers fit perfectly with his ideology: They are the best choices to pursue his economic goals.

Critics of these nominations write of the ‘failures’ of these economists and their role in ‘bringing about the collapse of the financial system’. These critics fail to recognize that it is not their ‘failures’, which are the relevant criteria, but their unwavering commitment to the interests of Wall Street and their willingness to demand trillions of dollars more from US taxpayers to bolster their colleagues on Wall Street.

Under Clinton and Bush, in the run up to the financial collapse, they facilitated (‘deregulated’) the practice of swindling one hundred million Americans of trillions in private savings and pension funds. In the current crisis period with Obama they are just the right people to swindle the US Treasury of trillions of dollars in bailout funds to refinance their fellow oligarchs. The White President (Bush) leaves steaming financial turds all over the White House rugs and Wall Street summons the ‘historic’ Negro President Obama to organize the cleanup crew to scoop them out of public view.

Obama, the Militarist, Outdoes His Predecessor

What makes Obama a much more audacious militarist and Wall Streeter than Bush is that he intends to pursue military policies, which have already greatly harmed the US people with appointed officials who have already been discredited in the context of failed imperial wars and with a domestic economy in collapse. While Bush launched his wars after the US public had their accustomed peace shattered by an orchestrated fear-mongering after 9/11, Obama intends to launch his escalation of military spending in the context of a generalized public disenchantment with the ongoing wars, with monumental fiscal deficits, bloated military budgets and after 100,000 US soldiers have been killed, wounded or psychologically destroyed.

Obama’s appointments of Clinton, General Jim Jones, dual Israeli citizen Rahm Emanuel and super-Zionist Dennis Ross, among others, fit perfectly with his imperial-militarist agenda of escalating military aggression. His short list of intelligence candidates, likewise, fits perfectly with his all-out effort to “regain US world leadership” (reconstruct US imperial networks). All the media blather about Obama’s efforts at ‘bipartisanship’, ‘experience’ and ‘competence’ obscures the most fundamental questions: The specific nominees chosen from both parties are totally committed to military-driven empire-building. All are in favor of “a new effort to renew America’s standing in the world” (read ‘America’s imperial dominance in the world’), as Obama’s Secretary of State-to-be, Hillary Clinton, declared. General James Jones, Obama’s choice for National Security Advisor, presided over US military operations during the entire Abu Ghraib/Guantanemo period. He was a fervent supporter of the ‘troop surge’ in Iraq and is a powerful advocate for a huge increase in military spending, the expansion of the military by over 100,000 troops and the expanded militarization of American domestic society (not to mention his personal financial ties to the military industrial complex). Robert Gates, continuing as Obama’s Secretary of Defense, is a staunch supporter of unilateral, unlimited and universal imperial warfare. As the number of US-allied countries with troops in Iraq declines from 35 to only 5 by January 1, 2009 and even the Iraqi puppet regime calls for a withdrawal of all US troops by 2012, Gates, the intransigent, insists on a permanent military presence.

The issue of ‘experience’ revolves around two questions: (a) experience related to what past political practices? (b) experience relevant to pursue what future policies? All the nominees’ past experiences are related to imperial wars, colonial conquests and the construction of client states. Hiliary Clinton’s ‘experience’ was through her support for the bombing of Yugoslavia and the Nato invasion of Kosova, her promotion of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an internationally recognized terrorist-criminal organization as well as the unrelenting bombings of Iraq in the 1990s, Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s murderous bombing of civilian centers in Lebanon…and now full-throated calls for the ‘total obliteration of Iran’. Clinton, Gates and Jones have never in their mature political careers proposed the peaceful settlement of disputes with any adversary of the US or Israel. In other words, their vaunted ‘experience’ is based solely on their one-dimensional militarist approach to foreign relations.

‘Competence’, as an attribute again depends on the issue of ‘competence to do what’? In general terms, ‘The Three’ (Clinton, Gates and Jones), have demonstrated the greatest incompetence in extricating the US from prolonged, costly and lost colonial wars. They lack the minimum capacity to recognize that military-driven empire-building in the context of independent states is no longer feasible, that its costs can ruin an imperial economy and that prolonged wars erode their legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens.

Even within the framework of imperial geo-political strategic thinking, their positions exhibit the most dense incompetence: They blindly back a small, highly militarized and ideologically fanatical colonial state (Israel) against 1.5 billion Muslims living in oil and mineral resource-rich nations with lucrative markets and investment potential and situated in the strategic center of the world. They promote total wars against whole populations, as is occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia and, which, by all historical experience, cannot be won. They are truly ‘Masters of Defeat’.

The point of the matter is that Obama appointed the ‘Big Three’ for their experience, competence and bipartisan support in the pursuit of imperial wars. He overlooked their glaring failures, their gross violations of the basic norms of civilization (of the human rights of tens of millions civilians in sovereign nations) because of their willingness to pursue the illusions of a US-dominated new world order.

Conclusion

Nothing speaks to Obama’s deep and abiding commitment to become the savior of the US empire as clearly as his willingness to appoint to the highest position of policy making the most mediocre failed politicians and generals merely because of their demonstrated willingness to pursue the course of military-driven empire building even in the midst of a collapsing domestic economy and ever more impoverished and drained citizenry.

Just as Obama’s electoral campaign and subsequent victory will go into the annals as the political con-job of the new millennium, his economic and political appointments will mark another ‘historic’ moment: The nomination of corrupt and failed speculators and warmongers. Let us join the inaugural celebration of our ‘First Afro-American’ Imperial President, who wins by con and rules by guns!

Who Says There Are No Slaves in America?

Source: IntelDaily.com.

Who says there are no slaves in America? The greatest domestic issue facing President-elect Obama is not the bailout of the bankers and insurers but the task of lifting tens of millions of hard-working American wage-slaves out of dire poverty. These are the folks who hold one- and sometimes two or even three low-paying jobs, work their tails off 60 hours or more a week, and are still stuck in poverty on payday with no hope of climbing out.

Indeed, if enough workers were getting paid a living wage Wall Street and Detroit would not find themselves begging Washington for billions. Homeowners would have enough money to pay their mortgages and buy new cars. Today’s crisis is the bitter payback for decades of corporate greed. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has written, “Most of what’s been earned in America” in the past 35 years “has gone to the richest 5 percent.” Result: 37 million Americans are said officially to live in poverty but Catholic Charities of Saint Paul-Minneapolis notes a more realistic accounting puts the poor at 50 million.

During the Bush regime, five million more Americans slid into poverty, and the unemployment figure, charitably put at 6.5% (but actually much higher counting discouraged workers,) hit a 14-year high in October. And at least five million people are working part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs. What’s more, those fully employed have seen their overtime pay disappear and their working hours shrink as demand tanks for their goods and services. Each day, thousands of pink slips are being handed out.

Poverty is so virulent, there are 18,000 children sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City every night and 1.7-million New Yorkers are eligible for food stamps. “Twenty-five percent of all families with children in New York City—that’s 1.5 million New Yorkers—are trying to make it on incomes that are below the poverty threshold established by the federal government,” writes Bob Herbert of The New York Times. Nationally, 21 percent of U.S. Hispanics and 24 per cent of African-Americans subsist in poverty.

The great slide into poverty and ruin has long been underway. “The underlying problem has been building for decades,” Reich says. “America’s median hourly wage is barely higher than it was 35 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago.”

Indeed, USA employs millions of wage slaves, whether illegal immigrants in the vegetable fields of Florida or native-born serfs in the needle trades of Los Angeles (currently reviving as their substandard wages are now comparable to what coolies earn in Chinese factories.) Few alien toilers, who are blatantly exploited and work under the sword of deportation, dare to protest their plight to Labor Department authorities that, under the Bush regime, are deliberately understaffed and commonly indifferent to workers’ complaints.

As the New York Times editorialized, the Labor Department “has tilted toward employers and failed to properly enforce labor laws.” The Government Accounting Office found Labor’s Wage and Hour Division “failed to adequately investigate complaints that workers were not paid the minimum wage, were denied mandatory overtime or were not paid their last paychecks,” the editorial said. Labor unions today can claim only 10 million members, a tiny fraction of the work force, and multitudes of workers have swallowed corporate propaganda that unions are bad for them even though union workers typically get paid 30 percent more!

Ever more Americans— as mounting credit card debt figures reveal — are unable to make ends meet at their minimum-wage jobs, and are, in fact, wage slaves drowning in a rising sea of red ink, with no prospect of good union jobs to rescue them. Organized labor has been trampled nearly to death on a rigged playing field that denies unions a fair chance to organize. The quickest way to get fired is to ask one of your co-workers to vote in a union. Tens of thousands have enlisted for the military sign-up bonus and job training because it’s the only job and training package they can find. Military recruiters know of their plight and unashamedly concentrate their activities on the children of the poor.

Far from evincing a drop of “compassion,” the AFL-CIO said the Bush 2008 fiscal budget “cuts more than one billion ($)in job training and employment programs,” this “just a week after he (Bush) talked about the need for better training and assistance to help America’s workers compete in a global economy.” It noted, too, the Bush budget “eliminates current job training for unemployed adults and at-risk youths.”

This has had particularly tragic consequences for African-American youth, pushing their jobless rate up in some cities up to about 50 percent. And let’s not kid ourselves: a disproportionate number of the 2.3 million souls’ in America’s expanding prisons are African-American precisely because when people can’t earn income they’ll steal. As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in The Progressive magazine, “We are fast reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.” Over two thousand years ago Aristotle said “Poverty is the parent of crime and revolution” and that’s still true today.

In 1962, the National Urban League’s Whitney Young called for a “Domestic Marshall Plan.” It was a very good idea then but needs to be expanded to meet today’s national emergency. Last January, economist Joseph Stiglitz said the downturn could be stopped in part by strengthening the unemployment insurance system, and that surely needs to be done. The focus must not be on bailing out the fat cats at the top but on making jobs and providing income for those whom FDR called the forgotten men and women at the base of the economic pyramid. And a good place to begin is to slash Pentagon spending for its morbid weapons system development and its endless wars. Imagine what might have been achieved here at home with the trillion bucks lavished on the illegal war in Iraq! (And the total bill may yet be $3 trillion!)

Urgently needed is a public-private sector partnership to refurbish our infrastructure, expand our moderate- and low-income housing supply, (renewing our inner cities, old-line suburbs and failing small towns,) to reinvigorate our mass transit, to retrain the unskilled, to tutor the unlettered, and to make college or vocational training available to every citizen. Let’s put an end to wage slavery once and for all. If the Obama administration will only concentrate on nurturing the grass roots, every aspect of American life might one day bloom as a garden.

(Sherwood Ross, formerly a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and talk show host at WOL Radio, Washington, currently directs a public relations firm for non-profit organizations. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)

It’s Not A “Slow Down,” Barack

Source: The Automatic Earth.

A few days ago during a press conference involving the governors of the 50 states, Barack Obama talked about all of the states needing to work together so that we can quickly turn around this economic “slow down”. I have bad news for Mr. President-elect: this is not a slow down. This is an economic disaster that will dwarf the Depression of the 1930s in scope and toll.

Let’s do an always popular top 10 reasons why considering the current economic situation a “slow down” is actually very dangerous and irresponsible:

1. Almost all the banks of the world are, essentially, bankrupt. They have no capital, solvency. Capital has been summarily destroyed over the years by falling interest rates, rampant -bond- speculation and governmental check-kiting, fraudulent accounting, fraudulent valuation, the elimination of reserve ratios, the creation of money by federal decree (fiat currency), hidden off-book “assets” in the tens of trillions of dollars, a shadow banking system driven by derivative betting scams that globally reach beyond a QUADRILLION dollars in scope, etc. Were you to go the radical route of declaring a bank “holiday” and forcing the banks of the world to “open” their vaults and hard drives for objective inspection, what you’d find is trillions of pieces of worthless paper. If Assets = Liabilities + Equity – and in a world where many if not most of these institutions are leveraged 30:1, 40:1 and beyond – then the assets currently held by the world’s banks are worthless.

2. The environment is collapsing. Oceanic acidity and de-oxygenation are creating enormous “dead zones” in which fish cannot live. The polar ice caps are melting at a rate far more hyper-annuated than first thought, destroying habitat at an alarming rate. Phytoplanktons are disappearing from the world’s salt water bodies, depriving many of the ocean’s species of ample food sources. Disease-carrying insect populations are exploding due to longer and warmer springs and summers around the globe, leading to large outbreaks of Malaria, Dengue Fever and Sleeping Sickness. We have reached the Peak Oil plateau and will begin to see rapid depletion of the world’s oil reserves: The age of fossil fuels is coming unceremoniously to a close.

More and more countries are facing drought and famine caused in part by a lack of predictable rainfall and in part by a lack of glacial run-off. I could go on of course. The conclusion drawn however is that trillions of dollars would need to be invested immediately in developing technologies aimed specifically (not secondarily or in by-product) at trying to reverse these ongoing processes. Not only are these dollars we do not have, but under current economic conditions the cries of build more, dig more, mine more, produce more are the cries of the desperate: and desperation cannot tarry with the indulgences of environmentalism. Thus comes the death bind of depleted resources, environmental degradation, and a lack of capital to employ in the production of goods that use these depleted and un-harvestable resources.

3. Sovereign default looms on the horizon at a scale never before witnessed. Ecuador will default on its loans 2 weeks from now—unless of course it secures more loans to stave off the need to service the interest on existing loans. Ecuador is but the 1st of many. Pakistan, Iceland, Ukraine—all countries lining up to receive emergency sustenance from the soon-to-be illiquid IMF. The Baltic states, Ireland, Argentina—all countries teetering on the edge of default. The cascade of events precipitated by such defaults will be horrific.

4. The Baltic Dry Index currently stands at a rate of 684, down 14 points from yesterday’s close. The index essentially tells us how much it would cost to send certain goods and commodities via ship to different locations around the globe. In May of 2008 the Baltic Dry Index reached its high of over 11,700 points. A 90+% drop in just 6 months means ships are not moving goods because the ship-owners cannot make a profit in doing so. As such, much needed bulk commodities (wheat, steel, etc.) are not being shipped to market. When reserve stocks run out, so will the production of food. This trend cannot be reversed through the infusion of more debt into the already reeling system. Additionally, within months the cost of oil might once again rise as OPEC manipulates markets to try desperately to maximize gains. When this happens, the Baltic Dry Index should reach 200 or less. At that level, it will cost a shipping company hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship goods. Not a great business model.

5. The housing implosion is surreal in the level of capital destruction that is ongoing and that is not even close to “bottoming”:

• a. It is impossible to valuate CDOs that ‘hold’ mortgages because it is impossible to untangle them. No longer do banks hold the loans from which they have profited: they are packed together with hundreds of other “like” assets and sold on the market to investors. (Of course those days are gone, but the detritus remains)
• b. Nobody trusts valuations anymore anyhow. The agencies who were supposed to valuate securities accurately did nothing of the kind. The depth of mistrust–and rightly so—is so deep that, in fact, all of the moves to prop up the system are viewed by the public as ways in which the rich can make themselves richer. Claims to the contrary by Paulson et al are met with anger and amazement: “Do they really think we are that dumb?!?”
• c. There is no such thing as mark-to-market anymore: even mark-to-model is dubious as the current models are utterly fraudulent.

6. People aren’t going to start borrowing anew, and banks aren’t gonna start lending anew, because suspicion runs deep regarding duplicity, off-book debt, etc. The FED can spend trillions on “purchasing” and guaranteeing anything it so desires, but until the government carries out a full blown censorship campaign on the Internet and on Television, trust will not return. Every time Paulson or Bernanke speak, the market responds with fear. The market knows that these men are dissemblers extraordinaire, and the markets respond accordingly. Your team, Mr. Obama, does nothing to engender the kind of trust necessary for individuals and institutions to willingly take chances on the kind of investments that have just recently been exposed as fraudulent and illegal.

7. Foreign countries who have purchased US Bonds are not stupid and they are NOT going to wait until those bonds reach maturity. As soon as it becomes crystal clear that default may be looming, the run on the US bond market will be, shall we say, entertaining.

8. Confidence in the veracity of our political leadership is at an all-time low. Don’t under-estimate this dynamic. Even in this moment of relative beauty – the election of an African American President – you, our incipient Chief Executive, have pulled together a staff of old-school, Keynesian cronies. Your ploy may be an appeal to the Center, but it ignores the reality that tens of millions of Americans have come to associate the old school as entirely corrupt and duplicitous. And these suspicions will only be exacerbated by the doomed-to-failure Freidmanite approach to the financial crisis: that of spending trillions more on stimulus packages that cannot, by their very nature, succeed in an environment of debt-based toxic shock.

9. The Credit Default Swap Cyclops is hiding in the cave, but it has not gone away. The crime of derivative trading has created so much debt and so much counter party risk, that one more significant corporate failure could start the dominoes a-tumbling and essentially bring the global economy to a complete and grinding halt.

10. And finally, our obsessive and insane addiction to 5% GDP growth—to growth and expansion in general—makes any solution to the current mess a failed proposition before the fact. Spending trillions to renew growth in a global system that has reached well beyond the limits of healthy growth is craziness. Utter craziness.

No sir, Mr. Obama. This is not a slow down. This is not a contraction. This is not a market correction. This is an economic disaster of epic proportions. This is to the 1930s what an F5 tornado is to an afternoon thundershower. An umbrella will not shield you from this storm sir.

Obama’s Change.org site Censoring ALL Ideas Related to Ending the Federal Reserve

Source: http://www.abolishthefederalreserve.com/?p=437

Yesterday I posted an “Idea” to Change.org in an attempt to promote the issue of ending the Federal Reserve System. There were already about 5 other similar proposals, some with almost 100 votes, but I posted mine anyway. Today, ALL of those Ideas are gone.

For those who aren’t familiar with this website, Change.org “aims to serve as the central platform informing and empowering movements for social change around the most important issues of our time.”

Ideas for Change in America, a project in partnership with MySpace and dozens of other nonprofits, GOTV groups, and advocacy organizations. We couldn’t be more excited.

President-Elect Obama recently said that “I will open the doors of government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again.” We’re taking him at his word, and opening the doors of Change.org to you. Go to the site to post an idea for what Barack Obama should do to change America, and vote on your favorites.

The project is actually contest in two rounds. When the first round of voting ends on December 31, the top three ideas in each category … will carry over to the second round. Then, we’ll take the top 10 ideas from across the site and present them to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day.

Sounds good, right?

If you want to propose an Idea, you go to this page, which has this friendly message: “President-Elect Obama says he wants to hear ideas from all Americans, so we’re taking him up on his offer. Here’s your chance to pose innovative solutions to the major problems we face and to get them heard.” Wow, Obama wants to hear about our ideas!

I posted a quick and informative video on how the Federal Reserve perpetuates rather than fights inflation and suggested that Obama urge Congress to pass Ron Paul’s legislation, H.R. 2755, which would repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

Today, I received an email saying this idea “lies outside the scope of the Ideas for Change in America project, which is focused on identifying solutions that we believe can, through a grassroots lobbying effort, receive serious consideration from the Obama administration and/or Congress.”

Needless to say, last night my idea was completely deleted from the site.

So what ideas lie inside the scope of the Ideas for Change in America? Monumental movements like taxing plastic bags and setting up a “National Do Not Mail Registry” to stop junk mail. Whoa, those ideas are HUGE! They would certainly stop the collapse of our economy, right?

The moral of the story is — if you propose anything that would bring about REAL CHANGE and address the serious issues our country is facing, like abolishing the Federal Reserve, you WILL be censored. End of story, no exceptions.

At this point, those of us in the liberty movement have two options:

1. We can keep posting the ideas until they decide to stop hitting the delete button and leave it up, at which point it would blow the other Economy ideas out of the water and get some much-deserved attention.
2. We can stop wasting our time fighting with people who are obviously opposed to real change and are just putting up a front to look like they care. If we do this, they will get what they ask for. More inflation. More debt. More falling dollar. And we’ll say “I told you so.”

My reason for posting this is to expose the blatant censorship that takes place, especially (and most disappointingly) within the so-called social change community. It’s up to you whether you choose to fight it or move on to more inviting communities. It’s another instance of asking ourselves whether we want to work within the system or outside of it. It depends on how badly you want to save your country. Personally, I know that most Americans still think and operate within the system, so I generally choose to try and break down its walls and throw wrenches in its gears whenever possible. I think both tactics are needed, so for those who decide to fight this disgusting censorship — here is your rallying cry!

2pm UPDATE:

Somebody suggested that I frame this idea as others on the site have done, where the end-result is presented, rather than the uncomfortable cure that turns people off. So, here is attempt #2, vote it up while you can, tomorrow it may be gone!
http://www.change.org/ideas/view/return_to_a_constitutional_and_sound_monetary_policy

6:30pm UPDATE:

Censorship in record time. Idea #2 is gone, and I have a fresh new email from Change.org:

We wanted to send you a note about an idea you recently submitted on in the Ideas for Change in America competition titled “Return to a Constitutional and Sound Monetary Policy.”

We welcome you to directly petition the Obama Administration about this matter, which you can do at http://change.gov/page/s/ofthepeople. However, this unfortunately lies outside the scope of the Ideas for Change in America project, which is focused on identifying solutions that can, through a grassroots lobbying effort, receive serious consideration from the Obama administration and/or Congress. Regardless of its merits, it is our judgment that this idea will not be seriously considered by the administration or the 111th Congress regardless of the intensity of our lobbying effort, and it is therefore not eligible to enter the second round of the competition.

We understand that good people may disagree with our vision. But this is a private effort not connected to the Obama campaign or transition team, and we reserve the right to keep the competition and its content aligned with the stated mission and overall spirit of the project.

12/03/08 UPDATE:

Somebody on Digg said they have now set up a filter so you can no longer even submit an Idea with the phrase “Federal Reserve” in it. If anybody wants to test it, please let me know what happens. I would test it myself, but they’ve deleted my entire account (very classy.)

How To Deal With Pirates (American, not Somalian)

By Rob Kall, OpEd News.

The Wall Street Journal offered an article yesterday on How to Fight pirates. It reported how, in the late 18th century and early 19th Century, Moroccan pirates– Barbary pirates– were attacking American ships and kidnapping their crews, holding the crews and the goods on board for ransom. In 1785, the Pasha of Morocco demanded a million bucks, ten percent of the fledgling USA’s national budget, for protection. Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson had no alternative. For at least a decade, for lack of a navy and support from other nations to fight back, the US paid those ransoms.

The Wall street journal article goes on to talk about the current Somalian pirate affliction off the coast of Somalia.

But what about the pirates in the USA? I’m talking about the finance company and hedge fund execs who have hijacked our economy and run off with billions in booty, at the cost of tens of millions of citizens’ homes and life savings.

These criminals are destroying lives at a much larger scale. And the American people have no champion to rescue them. Bush appointed Hank Paulson, the equivalent of Blackbeard, to suggest the “bailout” which looks more and more like a massive keelhauling of the economy. And Obama has appointed another fellow pirate– Geithner– to take the treasury and swing the citizenry by the yardarm.

The fact is, the financial system throughout the world has been taken over by pirates– rip-off artists who have invented new ways to finagle billions out of the hands of the people and into the hands of the few.

It seems Democrats AND Republicans are equally eager to help THESE pirates to come up with new ways to maintain their pirate ways, to keep the pirate “system” going.

The solution is no simple matter. It took more than a decade of pirate depredations, in spite of the protection monies charged, for the US, under Jefferson’s (a liberal) leadership to get the guts to build an armada that would go to the Mediterranean and wipe out the pirates and their home bases. Once Jefferson got things going and showed it could be done, the rest of the world followed his footsteps.

We can’t wait that long. The US must face the fact that we have the worst pirates in history right in our nation, filthy rich, hobnobbing with politicians, treated with honor, given power. They must be reframed as the pirates– as the criminals they are. Their practices– derivatives, etc., must be defined as criminal endeavors, and they must be brought down– all the way down, with fines that take away their massive salaries and bonuses, for what- for failure. No. They’ve been paid booty for their successful plundering of the USA’s families and national resources.

I’m not just speaking metaphorically. These men are not brilliant leaders. They are no better than the pirates holding the Saudi oil tanker. They deserve the same treatment– capture– alive or dead. And destruction of their tools of destruction– and that, my friends, includes the Federal Reserve Banks, the WTO and most of the other current globalism tools that have been used to lay waste to democratically established democracies.

America needs a lot more than Obama is setting up between Geithner and Summers. This start is a bad beginning. We don’t need people who are masters at the pirate system. We need people who can tear it down and replace it with something that works for Americans.

There Is No Secret Sauce — The Truth About ‘Deflation’

Mostly good. I disagree with the assessment that those in government don’t know what do do. I’m pretty sure they do know—but don’t want to stop the coming economic debacle. Their masters won’t let them.

By Richard Miller

Author, “In Words and Deeds: Battle Speeches in History”

As discussed many times in this space, the economy continues to deflate. It pays (indeed, it may be the only thing that’s currently paying) to pause and reflect on just exactly what this means.

One dictionary defines deflation as the “reduction of the general level of prices in an economy.” That’s about right but only as far as it goes, and we’ve all seen it as far as it’s currently gone: real estate, commodities and financial assets are all “reduced”–and vastly so. I predict that “dead-cat bounces” aside, they will continue to reduce.

Unfortunately, depending upon how much wages fall, the idea of air travel or eating out at all may soon become beyond the reach of many Americans.

But how far does this dictionary definition not go? Well, it doesn’t explicitly include falling wages. And that’s what unemployment is about–falling wages– to zero, at least for those who don’t avail themselves of public assistance. Also wages fall when people are asked to work fewer hours for less money, or more hours for the same money. The dictionary will eventually be right about more than just stock or home prices, because eventually, all of those places and retail outlets catering to ex-highenders will either cater to the masses or go bankrupt with the classes.

Obama, Pelosi, Reid, McCain, Bush, Boehner and the rest aren’t going to do a thing for you. You want to know why? It’s because they themselves don’t know what to do.

There’s also another thing that is falling–our standard of living.

This has been occurring, and at least for the middle class, almost imperceptibly. Little things that used to be free may now cost money. For example, some airlines now charge a fee to check luggage. At many restaurants, the size of entree portions has shrunk. Not much to whine about.

But, unfortunately, depending upon how much wages fall, the idea of air travel or eating out at all may soon become beyond the reach of many Americans. You get the drift.

What can you do? Sorry folks, but there’s no secret sauce, and in deflations, the only thing to do is the obvious–if you still can. Get rid of your debts, because you’ll be paying them back with more expensive (and fewer) dollars. Don’t rush to buy stocks, no matter how “cheap” they look. Just remember that the Dow was around 3700 as recently as 1994–and that’s half of its current levels! Stay liquid–cash in FDIC accounts, U.S. governments and some agency bonds, and whatever you do, don’t buy any hooey about the “opportunities” in foreign markets. They’re in worse shape than we are.

And also, remember the Talmudic observation about not putting your trust in princes. In short, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, McCain, Bush, Boehner and the rest aren’t going to do a thing for you. You want to know why? It’s because they themselves don’t know what to do, and the political culture of pander that we all reside in doesn’t provide them with any clues. The last guy who knew how to handle deflation was my depression-surviving grandfather, and he passed away in 1974.

There’s no pandering your way out of a deflation. It’s hard, hard work that requires more of a Churchillian “blood, sweat, toil and tears” approach, something that’s quite foreign to our increasingly illusory leisure culture. We simply have to do with less and pay it all back.

So sorry.

Conned Again? Obama, Rahm-bo and the End of the New American Century

We’ve been conned all right. We can expect either the Greater Depression, or 9/11 Part Two, or maybe even both.

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, Counterpunch.

If the change President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America’s wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama’s choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama’s selection of Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that change ended with Obama’s election. The only thing different about the new administration will be the faces.

Rahm Emanuel is a supporter of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Emanuel rose to prominence in the Democratic Party as a result of his fundraising connections to AIPAC. A strong supporter of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, he comes from a terrorist family. His father was a member of Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization that used violence to drive the British and Palestinians out of Palestine in order to create the Jewish state. During the 1991 Gulf War, Rahm Emanuel volunteered to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. He was a member of the Freddie Mac board of directors and received $231,655 in directors fees in 2001. According to Wikipedia, “during the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities.”

In “Hail to the Chief of Staff,” Alexander Cockburn describes Emanuel as “a super-Likudnik hawk,” who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 “made great efforts to knock out antiwar Democratic candidates.”

My despondent friends in the Israeli peace movement ask, “What is this man doing in Obama’s administration?”

Obama’s election was necessary as the only means Americans had to hold the Republicans accountable for their crimes against the Constitution and human rights, for their violations of US and international laws, for their lies and deceptions, and for their financial chicanery. As an editorial in Pravda put it, “Only Satan would have been worse than the Bush regime. Therefore it could be argued that the new administration in the USA could never be worse than the one which divorced the hearts and minds of Americans from their brothers in the international community, which appalled the rest of the world with shock and awe tactics that included concentration camps, torture, mass murder and utter disrespect for international law.”

But Obama’s advisers are drawn from the same gang of Washington thugs and Wall Street banksters as Bush’s. Richard Holbrooke, was an assistant secretary of state and ambassador in the Clinton administration. He implemented the policy to enlarge NATO and to place the military alliance on Russia’s border in contravention of Reagan’s promise to Gorbachev. Holbrooke is also associated with the Clinton administration’s illegal bombing of Serbia, a war crime that killed civilians and Chinese diplomats. If not a neocon himself, Holbrooke is closely allied with them.

Madeline Albright is the Clinton era secretary of state who told Leslie Stahl (60 Minutes) that the US policy of Iraq sanctions, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, had goals important enough to justify the children’s deaths. Albright’s infamous words: “we think the price is worth it.” Wikipedia reports that this immoralist served on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange at the time of Dick Grasso’s $187.5 million compensation scandal.

Dennis Ross has long associations with the Israeli-Palestinian “peace negotiations.” A member of his Clinton era team, Aaron David Miller, wrote that during 1999-2000 the US negotiating team led by Ross acted as Israel’s lawyer: “we had to run everything by Israel first.” This “stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking. If we couldn’t put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be?” According to Wikipedia, Ross is “chairman of a new Jerusalem-based think tank, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, funded and founded by the Jewish Agency.”

Clearly, this is not a group of advisors that is going to halt America’s wars against Israel’s enemies or force the Israeli government to accept the necessary conditions for a real peace in the Middle East.

Ralph Nader predicted as much. In his “Open Letter to Barack Obama (November 3, 2008), Nader pointed out to Obama that his “transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights . . . to a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby” puts Obama at odds with “a majority of Jewish-Americans” and “64 per cent of Israelis.” Nader quotes the Israeli writer and peace advocate Uri Avnery’s description of Obama’s appearance before AIPAC as an appearance that “broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning.” Nader damns Obama for his “utter lack of political courage [for] surrendering to demands of the hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the Democratic National Convention.” Carter, who achieved the only meaningful peace agreement between Israel and the Arabs, has been demonized by the powerful AIPAC lobby for criticizing Israel’s policy of apartheid toward the Palestinians whose territory Israel forcibly occupies.

Obama’s economic team is just as bad. Its star is Robert Rubin, the bankster who was secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration. Rubin has responsibility for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and, thereby, responsibility for the current financial crisis. In his letter to Obama, Nader points out that Obama received unprecedented campaign contributions from corporate and Wall Street interests. “Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart.”

Obama’s victory speech was magnificent. The TV cameras scanning faces in the audience showed the hope and belief that propelled Obama into the presidency. But Obama cannot bring change to Washington. There is no one in the Washington crowd that he can appoint who is capable of bringing change. If Obama were to reach outside the usual crowd, anyone suspected of being a bringer of change could not get confirmed by the Senate. Powerful interest groups–AIPAC, the military-security complex, Wall Street–use their political influence to block unacceptable appointments.

As Alexander Cockburn said of Obama in a pre-eection column, column “never has the dead hand of the past had a ‘reform’ candidate so firmly by the windpipe.” Obama confirmed Cockburn’s verdict in his first press conference as president-elect. Disregarding the unanimous US National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran stopped working on nuclear weapons five years ago, and ignoring the continued certification by the International Atomic Energy Agency that none of the nuclear material for Iran’s civilian nuclear reactor has been diverted to weapons use, Obama sallied forth with the Israel Lobby’s propaganda and accused Iran of “development of a nuclear weapon” and vowing “to prevent that from happening.”

The change that is coming to America has nothing to do with Obama. Change is coming from the financial crisis brought on by Wall Street greed and irresponsibility, from the eroding role of the US dollar as reserve currency, from countless mortgage foreclosures, from the offshoring of millions of America’s best jobs, from a deepening recession, from pillars of American manufacturing–Ford and GM–begging the government for taxpayers’ money to stay alive, and from budget and trade deficits that are too large to be closed by normal means.

Traditionally, the government relies on monetary and fiscal policy to lift the economy out of recession. But easy money is not working. Interest rates are already low and monetary growth is already high, yet unemployment is rising. The budget deficit is already huge–a world record–and the red ink is not stimulating the economy. Can even lower interest rates and even higher budget deficits help an economy that has moved offshore, leaving behind jobless consumers overburdened with debt?

How much more can the government borrow? America’s foreign creditors are asking this question. An official organ of the Chinese ruling party recently called for Asian and European countries to “banish the US dollar from their direct trade relations, relying only on their own currencies.”

“Why,” asks another Chinese publication, “should China help the US to issue debt without end in the belief that the national credit of the US can expand without limit?”

The world has tired of American hegemony and had its fill of American arrogance. America’s reputation is in tatters: the financial debacle, endless red ink, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, rendition, torture, illegal wars based on lies and deception, disrespect for the sovereignty of other countries, war crimes, disregard for international law and the Geneva Conventions, the assault on habeas corpus and the separation of powers, a domestic police state, constant interference in the internal affairs of other countries, boundless hypocrisy.

The change that is coming is the end of American empire. The hegemon has run out of money and influence. Obama as “America’s First Black President” will lift hopes and, thus, allow the act to be carried on a little longer. But the New American Century is already over.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Barack Obama: The New Jimmy Carter

Change? Be careful what you wish for, America.

Source: CounterCurrents.

Since Barack Obama emerged as the Democrat’s choice for president, the national mood has frequently been compared to the late 1960s, another time when an unpopular war polarized the nation. A recent ad for Republican candidate John McCain makes this explicit, starting off with clips of 60s protesters and “flower” children before warning that hope can be a slippery slope. But the dynamics in 2008 may have more in common with 1976, when a GOP discredited by Watergate, Richard Nixon’s resignation (under the threat of impeachment) and his pardon by Gerald Ford was defeated by a newcomer to national politics, Jimmy Carter.

Carter, an obscure but charming agribusinessman, became Georgia’s governor in 1970 with the support of an Atlanta establishment in need of someone who could talk populism while remaining in tune with corporate interests. Similarly, Obama looks like an “anti-establishment” politician but has played ball during most of his career with the Chicago political establishment. He ran for the state and US Senate as an outsider while operating like an insider, supported by Mayor Richard Daley and the city’s wealthy Gold Coast.

By the mid-70s, Carter was the darling of Eastern opinion-makers, meeting with David Rockefeller and lauded as a leader of the “New South.” In 1973, he was recommended for membership in the newly formed Trilateral Commission, a private international group that brought together leaders from the North America, Western Europe and Japan. Joining Carter on the North American section of the Commission were Rockefeller, Time Magazine Editor Hedley Donovan, corporate lawyers Cyrus Vance and Warren Christopher, Bendix Corporation chairman W. Michael Blumenthal, IBM20director Harold Brown, UAW president Leonard Woodcock, and eight other business, union, and political figures. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a close friend of Rockefeller, became director of the Commission.

Carter subsequently used Commission sources for much of his presidential campaign strategy. A key document produced during this period was The Crisis of Democracy, co-authored by Brzezinski associate Samuel Huntington, who advised Carter during the campaign and subsequently coordinated security planning for Carter’s National Security Council. Brzezinski became National Security Advisor.

Huntington advised that a successful Democratic candidate for president would have to emphasize energy, decisiveness, and sincerity while coming across as an outsider. But the real lesson of the 1960s, he added, was that political parties “could be easily penetrated, and even captured, by highly motivated and well-organized groups with a cause and a candidate.”

The appeal of Carter to the establishment was a combination of charm, an “interesting” family, traditional values, and his outsider image. But they knew he was essentially a “centrist” eager to be all things to all people, as Laurence Shoup explained in The Carter Presidency and Beyond. The same can be said of Obama.

Like Obama, Carter went from local curiosity to national phenomenon in less than four years, during a period when the public lost faith in the presidency and other national institutions. By 1975 The New York Times was regularly publishing pro-Carter editorials, articles and columns. Time Magazine was even more enthusiastic, in one feature describing him as looking “eerily like John Kennedy from certain angles” – and hammering the point home with a cover rendering. The drumbeat continued right through primary season with coverage that belittled competitors like Fred Harris, a real populist, with headlines like “Radicalism in a Camper.” Carter meanwhile received cover hypes like “Taking Jimmy Seriously.” The rest of the mainstream media soon came on board.

Why was it happening? As Brzezinski recently noted in an interview, there is no need to believe in hidden conspiracies. Groups like the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations don’t conceal their intentions, he noted; you can easily find out what they hope to see happen. Huntington’s diagnosis and prescriptions were blunt, and remain relevant. The authority of government depends on confidence and trust, he explained, and when these decline both participation and polarization increase. “If the institutional balance is to be redressed between government and opposition, the decline in presidential power has to be reversed…”

Describing the surge in democratic aspirations as a form of “distemper,” Huntington=2 0advised that some of the problems “stem from an excess of democracy.” It’s just one way to exert authority, he argued, and sometimes should be overridden by “expertise, seniority, experience and special talents.” He also explained that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.” People sometimes make too many demands, thus making democracy a threat to itself, he wrote. The basic prescription was to restore respect for authority, particularly in the presidency as an institution, and lower the general level of expectations about what government can do.

When Carter became president, he packed his administration with members of the center and liberal wings of the Eastern establishment. At least 27 high level officials were members of the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations, including Vice President Walter Mondale, Vance, Brzezinski, Blumenthal, Christopher, Brown, and Donovan. Pointing to an “alarming deterioration” in international relations and the threat of “long-term disaster,” Brown – as Secretary of Defense – prescribed leadership that would persuade people “to make sacrifices of individual and group advantages in order to produce long-term benefits of international economic and political partnership abroad.” Carter’s job was to restore trust and “renovate” the domestic and international system while leaving its basic structure intact. The fact that he failed in many respects is beside the point.

Now that Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee, it’s becoming apparent that his administration would have many things in common with Carter’s. The leader of his foreign policy team is Susan Rice, an assistant Secretary of State for African affairs in the Clinton administration and, more to the point, a current member of the Trilateral Commission’s North American Group. Until recently, Trilaterial member James Johnson was on Obama’s vice presidential vetting team. He stepped down after questions surfaced about loans he received from Countrywide Financial Corp., a key player in the U.S. housing crisis.

Other North American Trilateral members in Obama’s inner circle include Brzezinski, former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Michael Froman of Citigroup, and former Congressman Dick Gephardt, along with Dennis Ross, Middle East envoy for Clinton and the first President Bush, and James Steinberg. Additional Trilateral members of team Obama include Warren Christopher and Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake.

According to a recent New York Times article, Ross, who accompanied Obama to the Middle East in July, is often asked by Rice and Lake for help in framing Obama’s comments on Iran and Israel. Steinberg, a Dean at the University of Texas and member of both the Commission and CFR, authored a white-paper titled, “Preventive War, A Useful Tool.” In this telling essay, he wrote, “Unilateralism is not the only alternative… regional organizations and a new coalition of democratic states offer ways to legitimize the use of force when the council fails to meet its responsibilities.” The problem, he says, isn’t the Bush doctrine of “preventive force but that it too narrowly conceives of its use.”

The renewed prominence of Brzezinski – architect of the “secret” war in Afghanistan three decades ago – along with the appointment of James Rodney Schlesinger, CIA director and Secretary of Defense during the 1970s, to lead a senior-level task force on nuclear weapons suggests that the process of moving from a neo-con to a Trilateral approach is already underway. The prospect of a military showdown with Iran would decrease during an Obama presidency, but confrontations with Pakistan, China and Russia become more likely.

Faced with such harsh realities, some conclude that an Obama presidency is still preferable to the disaster that is likely with John McCain. O thers contend that the evidence reinforces the need for a third party alternative. Both arguments have merit. Despite Carter’s surrender to Trilateral logic, his presidency was a necessary reprieve from morally and ideologically bankrupt Republican rule. And it’s certainly vital to look beyond the two-party monopoly, however long the road may be. But the truth is that, in Obama, a worried establishment has found the vessel through which they hope to restore international and domestic stability.

What do they hope to accomplish? Part of the agenda was revealed during an April meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Washington, DC. During panel discussions, the “suggestions” included increased foreign aid – especially for Africa, paying back UN dues, intervention on behalf of “financial institutions under stress,” and a more liberal immigration approach. On the other hand, there was much rationalizing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And what does Obama say? While he pledges to end the war in Iraq, he wants to leave behind a “residual” force of about 50,000 troops. He says his administration will emphasize diplomacy, yet describes Iran as a terrorist state and pledges to use “all elements of American power” to deal with it. “If we must use military force,” Obama told the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), “we are more likely to succeed, and will have far greater support at home and abroad, if we have exhausted our diplomatic efforts.”

As far as Afghanistan and Pakistan are concerned, he wants to send at least 10,000 more U.S. troops to reinforce the 36,000 already there, taking unilateral military action inside Pakistan if necessary, whether its government agrees or not. “This is a war that we have to win,” Obama explains. In Berlin last week, he called on Europe to provide more troops to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The size of the US military is likely to grow during an Obama presidency, and the projection of US force, combined with diplomatic carrots and sticks, will certainly continue.

Still, Obama’s Trilateral-influenced vision embraces reforms that may bring some relief from the theocratically-infused Bush approach. Supreme Court appointments will be more centrist, the health care system may improve, and some of the worst abuses of the Bush years could be rolled back. These are not insignificant changes, and the pragmatic wing of the establishment, rapidly shifting in Obama’s direction, seems to recognize that relief is essential if trust in government is to be restored.

As Huntington noted more than 30 years ago, “democratic distemper” makes allies nervous and enemies adventurous. “If American citizens challenge the authority of the American government, why shouldn’t unfriendly governments?” So, Obama – like Carter – can be useful in calming things down and re-establishing confidence in the legitimacy of the current political order. In short, he can reinforce the argument that “the system” still works. For those who want real change, he’s bound to be a disappointment. But perhaps, along the road to inevitable disillusionment, at least he may do a bit to ease the pain.

Greg Guma is an author and journalist living in Burlington. He writes about media and politics on his website, Maverick Media (http://muckraker-gg.blogspot.com/).

Developing Economic Reforms

From Catherine Austin Fitts’ Solari Blog.

Obama has proposed restoring the PAYGO policy that prohibits increases in federal spending without a way to compensate for the lost revenue.

So what can a new Administration propose that would address our economic problems under the umbrella of PAYGO? Why not move away from the central banking / warfare model and decentralize the economy in a way that actually makes money for people?

Here are some initial ideas that could reduce the drain on the real economy and kickstart new growth. Please post your own ideas below…

1. Return the issuance of currency to the US Treasury and create an alternative depository function rather than using the NY Fed;

2. End the manipulation and suppression of the precious metals prices;

3. Reverse changes over the last decade that allow financial institutions and credit card companies to practice usury;

4. Implement compliance with laws related to audited financial statements for the US government and publish the federal budget and financials on a place-based basis so that voters can see the federal financial performance by congressional district and county;

5. Publish federal agency contract budgets, contracts and payments;

6. Publish totals for intelligence agency and national security budgets that are currently confidential;

7. Create a process for streamlined waivers whereby county and states may apply for an receive waivers of federal laws and regulations that permit reengineering of federal programs, credit, expenditures and rules within communities that are PAYGO neutral or positive and improve return on investment to taxpayers;

8. Encourage the creation and use of local currencies;

9. Direct the Securities and Exchange Commission to review and improve methods for non-accredited investors to invest locally;

10. Legislate a special tax on recipients of bonuses resulting in compensation in excess of that of the senior civil service for firms receiving bailout benefits;

11. Authorize and encourage federal agencies to engage in debt-for-equity swaps with municipalities and counties that wish to assume ownership and responsibility for local assets owned by the US government or any financial institutions in federal government conservatorship or financed by federal government bailouts and arrange for market makers in the resulting equity securities;

12. Encourage the prototyping and implementation of energy and healthcare technology and techniques; use enforcement agencies and offices to protect entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from dirty tricks by public and private parties attempting to prevent the application of energy-saving and life-saving knowledge;

13. End the chemtrails spraying program;

14. Require strict labelling for all genetically modified food, phase out its legality;

15. Promote self-sufficiency skills and financial literacy in both grade school and high school curriculums;

16. Pardon and release from prison non-violent offenders of drug use crimes;

17. Outlaw most financial derivatives and authorize the creation of exchanges and stocks that have the authority to prevent the creation of puts, options and derivatives related to their activity;

18. Encourage local government to use articipatory budgeting.

19. Authorize and fund a third party audit of the US gold reserves.

20. Determine and implement provisions to increase the ease with which funds in 401ks and IRAs can directed to local investment.