War's Costly Toll (Booth)

With consummate skill they [the Damascenes] proposed a variety of arguments to some of our princes and they promised and delivered a stupendous sum of money to them so that the princes would strive and labor to lift the siege--William of Tyre on the betrayal by the Christian princes at the Siege of Damascus, 1148.

One of my favorite old Monty Python bits has a couple of cheap crooks extorting the Colonel Blimpish commander of a British military base. “You don’t want anything to happen to your tanks and artillery, do you?”
Too absurd to really occur, right? Wrong!
In the last week the NY Times has devoted two full page stories to a swag bag of real life replays of that Monty Python sketch. The stage is Afghanistan. And the cockney crooks have been replaced a small army of Afghan and American miscreants.
Prominent among these, according to the Times, is an illiterate warlord named Matiullah Khan, who’s been raking in millions from the Pentagon for “protecting” American military convoys and bases. If you think the George Washington Bridge toll is a ripoff, consider that Mr. Matiullah charges the U.S. Treasury $1,800 bucks for every truck he allows to pass. Apparently that’s a bargain because other “security contractors” demand up to $2,500 per rig.
The payoffs flow from a $2.2 billion pot of our tax money dubbed Host Nation Trucking. “American officials award contracts to Afghan and American trucking companies”... “and leave it to the trucking companies to protect themselves.” “The money is so good, in fact, that the families of some of Afghanistan’s most powerful people have set up their own security companies to get in on the action.”
There’s nothing new here. When we first invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, I advised folks to turn off CNN and delve into books about the Crusades. Not only are they fascinating and action-packed, but they reveal war-fighting techniques useful for us infidels to bone up on.
One is that your enemy doesn’t have to be your enemy all the time. He can casually change roles, from foe to friend to neutral middle man. One minute he’ll be trying to lop your noggin off and the next beseeching you about a good baksheesh on figs or eunuchs.
Pelf plays as prominent a part in warfare east of Suez as do weapons. “For months,” writes Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins, “reports have abounded here that the Afghan mercenaries who escort Americans and other NATO convoys through the badlands have been bribing Taliban insurgents to let them pass.”
“We’re funding both sides of the war,” a NATO official said. “People think that that the insurgency and the government are separate, and that is not always the case,” another NATO official in Kabul said.
Put another way, it looks like Uncle Sam is also bailing out the Talibank.

Israel at Sea

In that same day, the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt, unto the great river, the river Euphrates --Genesis, 15:18

Twice in official state documents David Ben Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister], announced that the state was created "in a part of our small country and "in only a portion of the Land of Israel." He later noted that "the creation of the new State by no means derogates from the scope of historic Eretz (Greater) Israel."

The headline above refers to something beyond last monday’s murderous maelstrom in the Mediterranean. Let’s begin with a commonplace. Israel’s acolytes never stop asking: doesn’t Israel have the right to exist? My answer is, “Sure, what are its borders?” They are certainly not fixed, like the line, say, between Vermont and Quebec. Rather, they are described by Zionists as "to be negotiated." In fact, Israel is an expansionist state both by aspiration and by action. Since its founding in 1948, it has invaded and seized land from all of its neighbors. Those additions are populated by five million people who are afforded no rights by their occupier. Israeli writer Yitzak Laor put the situation this way:
"We are the masters. We work and travel. They can make their living by policing their own people. We drive on the highways. They must live across the hills. The hills are ours. So are the fences. We control the roads and the checkpoints and the borders. We control their electricity, their water, their milk, their oil, their wheat and their gasoline. If they protest peacefully we fire tear gas at them. If they throw stones, we fire bullets. If they launch a rocket, we destroy a house and its inhabitants. If they launch a missile, we destroy families, neighborhoods, streets, towns."
Over the four decades of its existence, Israel has used the often vicious and self-defeating resistance of its captives as an excuse to portray itself as a victim while making their lives all the more miserable. There is a plan to this. After the 1967 Six Day War in which the Israelis conquered parts of Syria, Egypt and Jordan, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan offered a suggestion to the welter of Arabs that had come under its rule. “You can live like dogs,” he said, “or you can leave.” That plan has not changed in the last 43 years. “The message,” says Yitzak Laor, “is always the same: leave or remain in subjugation under our military dictatorship. We are a democracy. We have decided democratically that you will live like dogs.”
Israel is a settler nation, redolent of the United States in the early 19th century. The U.S. was able to destroy its indigenous population and overrun a continent because its numbers were huge compared to theirs. Israel lacks such advantages. Its indigenous people are almost equal in number to its Jewish settlers. What’s more, Israel is surrounded by tens of millions of the kith and kin of those its seeks to eliminate as part of its expansionism. Most of the world’s Jews choose not to live in Israel, meaning there are not enough potential settlers to populate the lands seized. Immigration by gentiles would dilute the requisite Jewish nature of the state. Finally, demographics are on the side of the conquered, who are multiplying at a greater rate than the Israelis.
As a result, Israel has been unable to digest its gains. It was obliged to return the Sinai with its oil resources to secure a fitful peace with Egypt, its biggest neighbor. Unable to defeat a tenacious 22-year resistance, it finally retreated from the ten percent of Lebanon it had grabbed. In 2005, it ended its costly ground occupation of Gaza. Instead, it sealed the territory from the outside, turning it into what the president of Turkey calls an “open-air prison.” Rather than its troops kicking in doors, Israel relies for control on what it calls keeping the Gazans “on a diet.” In other words, starving them into submission.
Thus Israel cannot recreate Eretz Israel, and, worse, has increasing difficulty in holding on to the territories it has already seized. Most vexing of all, its Jewish population is riven by bitter differences between the Haredi (orthodox) and secular communities. So antagonistic are these groups that Israel’s housing minister has proposed their physical separation. This would mean double apartheid: that between Jews and Arabs and that between Jews themselves.
After a succession of increasingly hard right governments and wars characterized by over-the-top violence and ruthlessness, Israel has been been losing friends in the world. Even old allies like Turkey are dropping away. An important article by Peter Beinart, a conservative American Jew, bemoans the failure of the pro-Israel lobby to prevent the serious erosion, particularly among young American Jews, of unquestioning support for Israel. Like its now departed close ally and role model, the Union of South Africa, Israel is becoming increasingly isolated in the world. Who knows whether it will react by loosening up or digging in its heels? All we do know for sure is that the "dogs" are not going away.

BP Bashing "Un-American"
If the oil kill in the Gulf was gushing from the site of a Venezuelan rig, we would already be bombing Caracas. If it came from Mexico’s Pemex or France’s Total, we’d be mocking their incompetence in quasi-racist terms. But since it is the dirty work of British Pollution, a premier UK multinational that we treat as one of our own, we get instead the usual tepidity from Barack Obama and no less than a defense of BP by Rand Paul, the Kentucky GOP’s Libertarian senate hope. Mr. Paul avers that the Obama administration’s underwhelming impatience with BP is “un-American.” Yes, to repeat, he says it is “un-American” to criticize a foreign conglomerate.
The pundits explain that, being new to politics, Paul has yet to master the requisite dexterity at dissembling and, on too many occasions, actually says what he means. And what he meant was that to be a patriotic American requires a forbearing attitude towards any outfit with Inc. (or the foreign equivalent of same) at the end of its name. Globalization and multinationals have been around long enough that even the most ardent yahoo's adoration of private enterprise now extends from Royal Ahold to Royal Saudi,
That’s because corporations of whatever provenance do wonderful things for America (with occasional mistakes, to be sure, like the rape and pillage of the financial system or the grand Gulf defecation) while government gets in the way and messes things up. Surely some hard-driving BP executive who was chosen CEO by a dozen or so fellow board members in a conference room in London deserves more respect and deference than a politician who was elected president with 60 million votes of mere citizens.
When conservatives make their pitch to the public, they posit a too big, bossy and bureaucratic government that stifles initiative and crushes the individual. The problem is that what they want to replace it with are too big, bossy and bureaucratic corporations that stifle initiative and crush the individual. It’s not a good trade off, if only because government is a national institution that flies our flag and whose leaders we vote for. Corporations have no nationality and are run as dictatorships--what the boss says, goes.
One wonders why intelligent people like Rand Paul haven’t figured this out? Then again, maybe they have. Maybe they are nothing more than corporate shills pretending to be be freedom-loving individualists. Why else would any real American worry about hurting the feelings of British corporate honchos?

Killing Through The Centuries
In Catch 22, General Dreedle, annoyed by Major Danby’s moaning, orders that he be taken out and shot. Dreedle’s son, Colonel Moodus, whispers to him and he replies in surprise: “‘You mean I can’t shoot anyone I want to?’ He pricked up his ears with interest as Colonel Moodus continued whispering. ‘Is that a fact?’ he inquired, his rage tamed by curiosity”
The reason General Dreedle couldn’t shoot anyone he wanted to has to do with western civilization. Once upon a time, kings and generals could kill people and start wars at their whim. Over centuries the rule of law and popular consent gradually replaced Caesar’s thumbs up or thumbs down. We in the west became civilized.
Nothing lasts forever. Back in June 2002, in a prep rally for the forthcoming Iraq war, President Bush declared that he could attack any country he felt like merely on his assertion that it might do us harm at some future time. This was enshrined in what is now known, and apparently accepted by Obama, as the Bush Doctrine.
George’s fiat pissed on the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Considered one of the basic advances of western civ, it was an agreement by European powers, tuckered out after the Thirty Years War, to establish the principle of sovereignty and quit attacking each other over religion. So much for that notion--at least in the U.S.
Four hundred years before Westphalia, King John of England was forced by his barons in 1215 to sign a document stripping him of many of his ‘divine’ powers. Called the Magna Carta, it codified the notion of habeus corpus. It held that the king couldn’t just disappear you in the middle of the night on his say-so. If he thought you had committed some infraction, he had to produce you, bring charges and let a trial decide your guilt or innocence.
Barack Obama is currently micturating on that bedrock attribute of western civ. He has announced, more by deed than word, that he can Dreedle by drone anyone anywhere. This didn’t make much news because Bush had been doing the same thing on a lesser scale. It hit the headlines only when the Obama administration publicly targeted a U.S. citizen. Bit of a sticky wicket that.
“The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy,” said the NY Times. No doubt those uneasy legal authorities are afraid of losing their jobs. If the ruler can kill at will, courts and lawyers become irrelevent. So does western civ.
At the same time, we learned the Obummers have new weapons in the works “capable of reaching any corner of the earth from the U.S. in under an hour...with accuracy capable of picking off Osama bin Laden in a cave.” Or even, I might add, a passel of peaceniks in Berkeley.
Progressive Democrats, no less than conventional pundits like Thomas Friedman, are disappointed in Obama for his timidity. They see his promises of change dribbling down the drain of business as usual. Would that it were mere business as usual. Every day it gets to look more like Byzantium as usual.

From Antibes to Athens
The Cannes Film Festival--happening right now--has long served as one of our gaudiest exemplars of excess. Quaffing kirs at 100 Euros a pop on the terrace of the Hotel du Cap. Zillion dollar yachts bobbing at anchor in Golfe Juan. Wheeling flocks of swifts that, on second glance, turn out to be fleets of Citations, Gulfstreams and Dassaults heading into Nice-Cote d’Azur.
Indecent indulgence? Not so much. This year our pols and media have stamped the stigmata of sybaritism on a hitherto unremarked cohort. Hedge fund managers? Nah. Bond traders? Guess again. Michelle Obama’s couturier? Not hardly. Lindsay Lohan’s bail bondsman? You’re getting close.
The real out-of-control spendthrifts, we are told, are Greek civil servants. Mail carriers redolent of Midas. Trash collectors a la Trump. Buffet-like bureaucrats. The land that first gave us democracy has brought itself into debtocracy. Instead of piling on an Acropolis of arrears to benefit the rich, which is perfectly acceptable business as usual, the Greeks committed the unpardonable capitalist contravention: letting the poor and middle classes share in their ill-advised cornucopia of credit.
For this they must be punished, severely and ceaselessly. The penalty is penury. Greece’s government workers and ordinary citizens must be made bereft of their bennies. The national standard of living has to become more Cote d’Ivoire and less Cote d’Azur. Greeks must learn that before babies are fed, let alone jet skis fueled, the banks and bond houses must be made whole.
The universe has not fallen into hock because Joe Six Pack or Alex Ouzo decided one day to spend beyond their means. It happened because the the richest people on earth, with powers that make Zeus look like a mere conjurer, decided that the manipulation of money stood to be more profitable than the manufacture of goods.
Debt is not incurred; it’s sold just like junk food. If you are the treasurer of a sizable organization, be it public or private, you will be chauffeur-driven to distraction, not to mention free lunch, by battalions of bond peddlers. Each will ply you with pithy Power Points on how your outfit (and, wink, wink, even you) will profit by purchasing yet a newer and more exotic form of debt. If you’re honest, you will shoo them away like flies. If you are flexible, a Porsche would be a fun weekend car.
By the same token, if you are a feckless freshman settling in at Frobisher State, the credit card vultures will alight on you shoulder, gifting you free tees and power juices in exchange for your financial thralldom. Now multiply those solicitations by the millions and scatter them over the earth.
Both debt and junk food deliver instant gratification at the cost of long term misery. And, after enticing you into destitution, distension or disease, both damn you as a knave for falling for their scams.
Our media is currently reveling in the Greek tragedy. They limn it as an object lesson that welfare states go broke and that the lesser classes must learn to live with less, lest, in the words of today’s NY Times, they find themselves in “investors’ line of fire.”
It’s hardly a secret that the big hedge funds have gone from shorting companies to shorting countries. This is the new piracy that has replaced the rapine and pillage of yore. And though there are still rich pickings in Europe, we Americans remain the fattest target in more ways than one. Even after a couple of years of stealing our jobs, looting our pensions, and making a yoke of our nest eggs, Wall Street still sees some meat on our bones. Social Security, of course, is the big jackpot. Bush couldn’t privatize it; it’s more likely that Obama can. We’ll be told we have no choice unless we want to end up in the souvlaki with the Greeks. Don't believe it.
To me, the best thing about the Greek example is the combative spirit of their workers. They know enough economics to understand that they don’t have to take the hit, at least not alone. They can alter the terms of their retrenchment. They can join the Latin Americans in telling the IMF to piss off. In short, they can fight back.
So can we. But not with tea bags.

Strange Ideas
The Brits are having elections today. The way they vote is just as weird, socialistic and un-American as they way they take care of sick people.
Imagine if we were subject to the following:
Campaigns are limited by law to four weeks. Worse, spending is restricted to what we would consider pocket change. That means elections remain a so-called civic responsibility. We Americans, of course, have gotten rid of civics, whatever they were. Our elections are a proudly permanent multi-billion dollar industry providing work for tens of thousands of people in politics and the media and contributing to the economy. The Brits are still decades behind on that score. How many of their prime ministers have the practical experience of managing big money from big shots before they take office?
Shockingly, the British system allows for spoilers. They assume that all candidates are entitled to whatever votes they get. By contrast, in our system only candidates of the two major parties are entitled to their votes. Participation by other parties are discouraged by election laws, and their candidates are properly reproved for taking votes from the entitled parties. Thus we eliminate the possibility of unconventional opinion screwing up voters’ sensibilities. Just think if we, like the Brits, ended up with a health care system where insurance execs couldn’t make zillions of dollars a year? Oh, the horror!


Seis de Mayo

We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by the thousands, and pursue them perhaps to their capital; we can conquer and annex their territory; but what then?--Horace Greeley, 1846, on the eve of the Mexican-American War.

Two lifetimes later, we know “what then?” Our brute force conquest of Mexico gave us Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and half of Colorado. It also gave us 110 million neighbors who see no reason to be any more respectful of our border than we have been of theirs.
Indeed, when they cross that border, whether in the oven heat of the Sonora or the muddy bottoms of the Rio Bravo, few feel like they’re really leaving Mexico. Rather, they are entering a lost part of their land that, dios mediante, they may some day reclaim. Why not? Israel is making good on a 2,000-year-old irredentist initiative.
But it’s not dreams of national redemption that have brought millions of legit and illicit Mexicans to the U.S. Rather it is the poverty of too much corn. Bill Clinton was in Haiti the other day, apologizing for the poverty of too much sugar. The empire plays the same game everywhere, though apologies are still lacking in Mexico. Not that they mean much after the damage is done. It’s simple. You target a third world country, then flood it with under-priced mountains of the main commodity it produces. In Mexico, that meant corn, grown by millions of small farmers and processed in local mills serving tiendas that made their own tortillas.
With ultra-cheap corn cascading in from Iowa and Indiana, those Mexican farmers and processors soon went broke. Local food production was replaced by U.S. fast food outlets. The millions who lost their land and their livelihood headed for the overflowing cities in search of scarce jobs.
The human overabundance, like that of corn, kept the price of labor low. Here were millions of Mexicans to work for next-to-nothing in the U.S. runaway factories. Here were millions more to push north across the border, and, by the chump wages paid them, enrich the bottom line of meat packers, agro businesses, hotel and restaurant operators, etc. You visited that new Albanian restaurant in L.A. and found that your meal was cooked by some hard-working chef trying to support a family back in Zacatecas.
Not only could we exploit Mexicans, but we could also demonize them as “illegals” for entering their erstwhile country without an invitation when all they were doing was emulating General Zachary Taylor, the 12th president of the United States.

Nothing Sells Like Nothing

“...a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: Well, what if we have created a thing which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which no one knows how to price?”--Fabrice Tourre of Goldman Sachs on the ABACUS synthetic collateralized debt obligation offering that he structured for the firm, as quoted in the NY Times
Before capitalism came along economics was mainly conquest. You ravaged and savaged other people, enslaved the survivors, stole their stuff, and lived off the proceeds. As Casper Gutman, seeker of the Maltese Falcon, pointed out, "the Holy Wars were largely a matter of loot."
The notion that you could create wealth by hanging up the pike and making useful items for sale began to catch on in the middle ages. Soon people were creating even more wealth by hiring others to make even more stuff to sell.
There were certain expenses involved that we nowadays call capital--hence the term capitalism. You had to pay for the raw materials, the tools, wages for the workers, etc. Obviously, you could become richer by keeping these expenses as low possible while selling your goods for as much as possible.
The ideal would be a product that cost nothing to make and whose main purpose was to profit its sellers. An impossible dream, you say. For eons human society had been based on tangibles (i.e, a pepperoni pizza) and services (i.e., a delivery boy). How could business escape that straight jacket of substance? How could it achieve maximum productivity and profitability by making nothing out of nothing? That was the ultimate challenge.
It took a son of Gaul who chose America to meet that challenge--something we can all be proud of.
So what is that perfectly nebulous product?
It’s the Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligation or SCDO. It allows underlying credit exposure to be taken on using a credit default swap rather than by having a vehicle buy assets such as bonds.
Who wouldn’t want to own one of those--especially the kids? Hey, Mother’s Day is coming? I know moms are finicky. What if you gave her one and she said she wanted a flower pot instead? No problemo. You could short her ABACUS SCDO. You know, that’s when you sell stuff you don’t own.
A couple of decades back when it became apparent that we were switching from an economy that made tangible items to one based on services, pundits warned that Americans would end up washing each others' cars for a living. Wall Street has since advised us that that was wishful thinking.

Bigger America? Great!
Bigger U.S.? Not So Fast!
America’s lust for largeness has long appalled and amused the other 95 percent of the world. We’re the land where bigger and better are synonymous. Where a “monster” is not an evil ogre but a food portion. Where fat people in phat clothes need trucks to haul their bloated carcasses between their MacMansions and the Mall sprawl.
We’re the nation that needs to graze everywhere on earth because our appetites have long since outgrown our ample home pastures. We’re the folks who turned The Star Spangled Banner into a multinational anthem. We the ones who made our elections into a multi-billion dollar business where cash flow crowds out civics. We rate movies by box office take and the Superbowl by the price of its commercial spots. We await the quarterly accretions of corporate growth like expectant parents.
They say our economic problem is that we’re not growing fast enough. Imagine, we’re still too small! Maybe devouring Pakistan will help us bulk up.
Then again, the pundits tell us we live in an exceptional land. The exception, of course, is the government--the only institution in all of America that people say is too big rather than not big enough. How the hell did that ever happen?
In fact, our government is smaller than those of first world countries. When we say it’s too big, that’s in relation to the little it does for us. It’s like a Hummer that can’t go faster than 40 mph but guzzles gas anyway.
In those countries with bigger governments, taxes cover health care, education through college, decent pensions, paid vacations, efficient public transportation, etc. Our smaller government spends much of our money on expanding an empire, making war, and seeing to it that the comfortably off are rarely discomfited. But those are areas that advocates of a reduced regime believe should be bigger. Happily, that’s not as true as it once was. Libertarian conservatives, whose ideas seem to catching on among some righties, are solidly anti-imperialist. On that subject, Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky are as close as clams.
The smaller state scam is really an effort to reduce or eliminate the parts of government that serve the needs of ordinary Americans. In particular, to privatize Social Security and Medicare, the last two big government programs whose main beneficiaries are not the military or the wealthy but you and me.
Listen to the constant cry that they’re running out of money. Does anyone worry that the Pentagon will go belly up? That they’ll be no bucks to pay for $600 a gallon gasoline in Afghanistan. Or that the Dept of Energy will no longer be able to dish out billions in giveaways to big oil?
The fact is SS can be made solvent for decades to come by way of a small tax hike. Medicare is in truth a god awful mess. A cash cow for crooked providers, it will take an army of Savonarolas to clean it up.
These are useful things to keep in mind as the campaign mounts to make the government smaller by making us poorer.

Real 'Death Panels'
In fact our government does have them. But they have nothing to do with health care or the blitherings of Sarah Appallin. They consist of high-level committees ensconced deep in the bowels of our national security apparat that decide which of the world’s 200 or so governments should be euthanized for the convenience of our empire. These politicide panels then determine whether the fatal dose should be administered by war, assassination, coup d’etat, destabilization and/or economic strangulation.
Their most recent application was Honduras, where last summer the elected president was removed at gunpoint and death squads were loosed on legitimists, leftists and such. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton celebrated this ongoing bloodbath as a victory for democracy.
Still topping the list for what is bureaucratically dubbed ‘regime change’ are Iran and Venezuela. They got up there by insisting that the vast oil and gas deposits under their lands belong to them and not to Exxon, Chevron or Shell.
Funny, our pols and pundits are forever predicting future “resource wars” with nations scrambling for everything from aluminum to zinc. But they never admit to the ones already happening. Its 31 years now that we’ve been scheming to take back “our” oil in Iran and 10 that we’re plotting to do the same in Venezuela. We don’t admit to the obvious, of course. Rather, we accuse the two countries of seeking nukes, having aggressive designs on their neighbors, oppressing their people and, to be sure, committing the ultimate sin of “anti-Americanism.”
What we omit is that if they turned over their oil to us they could do all of those things with our blessings--and that we’d give them good prices on weapons and torture instruments to boot.
Iran and Venezuela have very different governments. The former is a theocracy like our good buddy Saudi Arabia. Unlike the Saudis, Iran overthrew its pro-Washington royal family back in 1978. It also allows more freedom, especially for women, than do the medievals in Mecca.
By contrast, Venezuela is a raucous democracy. The poor and middle class majority have wrested power away from the old elite and are working to develop bottoms-up governance against vicious opposition from that elite and its Washington patrons. Few nations today have as open and interesting politics.
What the two share in common is peace. Venezuela has never fought a foreign war, while Iran hasn’t attacked anyone in 250 years, or since the course of history put the 5,000-year-old Persian civilization out of the empire business just as it was admitting the nascent United States.
I mention Venezuela this week because its people have just celebrated the eighth anniversary of their victory over one of our ‘death panels.’ In April 2002, a cabal of local military and business types, coordinated, advised and backed by our CIA, Naval Intelligence and such, seized power in Caracas, taking the president prisoner and commencing a reign of terror.
They issued a single decree that read like the CliffsNotes for Fascism 101. It shut down the courts, the legislature and all other elected institutions from the local to national levels. It promised new elections within a year--but gave the cabal veto over candidates.
Meanwhile, the coup’s cops began firing on protesters and rounding up supporters of the legitimate government. The Bush administration lost no time in recognizing the new “government” and praising it for “restoring democracy.” The rest of world all but universally condemned the coup and demanded restoration of the elected government.
Washington and its compradors had badly misjudged. Literally millions of Venezuelans poured into the streets in defense of their real democracy. They were backed by loyal military, who quickly retook the Miraflores (Venezuela’s White House) and freed the president from his island prison. It was all over in less than 48 hours.
The result: the right wing opposition in Venezuela was utterly discredited as dictatorial rather than democratic. The lawful government was strengthened. Latins learned yet again that when Uncle Sam talks about democracy, it means bullets rather than ballots.
The battle goes on. The empire won last summer in Honduras (we’ll see for how long). But attempted coups in Bolivia and Paraguay were thwarted. Venezuelans will be voting in September for their congress. Your tax dollars and ‘death panels’ are still hard at work destabilizing and demonizing the elected government in the name of democracy.

PS-An Irish film crew made a terrific documentary on the 2002 Venezuelan coup that, amazingly, covered the occupation of the presidential palace by the coup plotters. It's called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and is viewable at You Tube

Down Memory Lane
With the Tea Baggers
If you were 260 years old, which is the average age of a tea bagger, and had been a stone conservative all your life, you would have believed, or at least professed, the following things:
* That King George III was our proper sovereign.
* That Washington, Adams, Franklin and that bunch deserved the noose.
* That, having unfortunately become independent, America should have a king rather than a president.
* That, having regretfully become a republic, America should restrict the ballot to white men of property.
* That blacks, Indians, women and children were property.
* That human slavery was God’s way.
* That opposition to slavery was the devil’s work.
* That the extension of voting rights to white men without property put America on the road to ruin.
* That human slavery should be extended to the new states in the west and reimposed on Latin America and the Caribbean.
* That the maintenance of human slavery in the south required attacking the United States of America, destroying its union, killing its soldiers, trampling its flag, and creating a new slave nation.
* That the abolition of slavery marked another awful step in America’s ruination.
* That freed slaves should be retained in bondage by way of feudal share-cropping and strict segregation.
* That free labor should have no rights and that any effort of workers to combine in unions should be prosecuted as conspiracy.
* That child labor kept kids busy and discouraged delinquency.
* That public schools were socialistic.
* That group practice by doctors was socialistic.
* That antitrust laws were socialistic.
* That the government had no right to protect citizens from foul air, bad water, contaminated food or poisonous drugs.
* That the supreme right was private property and the freedom of its owners to do as they wished.
* That any organization with Inc. in back of its name is preferable to any organization with U.S. in front of its name.
* That corporations should have all the rights of human beings but few, if any, of their responsibilities.
* That money talks every time.
* That Woodrow Wilson and his progressive ilk caused most of our current problems.
* That Franklin D. Roosevelt was really named Rosenfeld and was a traitor to his class.
* That fascism was a positive trend in the 1930s and that Hitler and Mussolini were leaders to admire and emulate.
* That the United States should never have entered World War II.
* That Dwight D. Eisenhower was a conscious member of the international communist conspiracy.
* That Joe McCarthy was a saint.
* That taking God out of the schools and putting the N------rs in ruined America yet again.
* That civil rights laws added to the ruin.
* That John F. Kennedy got what he deserved.
* That Ronald Reagan was our greatest president.
* That Saddam Hussein committed 9/11 and that we found his weapons of mass destruction.
* That Wall Street bankers had nothing to do with the current financial meltdown. Instead it was caused by a conspiracy of poor people to destroy capitalism by borrowing money to buy houses they couldn’t afford. This conspiracy was hatched by Woodrow Wilson in the 1910’s and put into motion in the early 1960’s by a couple of radical Columbia University professors scheming with the then four-year-old Barack Obama.
* That Barack Obama grew up to be a Kenyan, an Indonesian, a Muslim, a radical Christian, an atheist, a socialist, a Nazi, an alien and the anti-Christ.
* That even though I think they are socialistic abominations, I keep my Medicare card handy and have direct deposit for my Social Security.