The Great BS Machine

West Tisbury, Mass.

The business of public relations, an American invention, is about a century old. One of its earliest manifestations came when John D. Rockefeller hired Ivy Lee, one of the first flacks, to clean up his reputation after the notorious 1914 massacre at his coal mine in Ludlow, Colorado. Miners there went on strike. Rockefeller goons and troops burned them out of their encampment, killing women and children. Old man Rockefeller was already in bad cess because of his pitiless business practices. Roasting little kids made him the nation’s bogeyman. Ivy Lee changed that. Soon the papers and newsreels were filled with images of the sere, crow-beaked old John D. handing out shiny dimes to photogenic urchins.
About the same time newspaper owners were discovering that something called “objectivity” might make them richer. All through American history, blats and broadsheets had been the clarions of parties, pols and special pleaders. You bought the paper that reflected your opinions and dumped on others. With the rise of giant consumer industries, a need for mass advertising arose. The solution was mass publication newspapers that rose above favoritism by having their stories written by “professional” news people rather than partisan hacks. Naturally, these newspapers were never quite so “objective” as to bite the hands that fed them by getting tough on the sins of big business since they had become big businesses themselves.
Thus the great American bullshit business was born. Ever since, the national take on reality has been produced, edited, Photoshopped and cosmetized. Raw information is treated like uncooked chicken gizzards: something that will make you sick if you even touch it. The honchos at NPR, CNN and such regularly warn us that we need them as “responsible gatekeepers” to make the news digestible.
So complete was the government-corporate control of information, that it had become all but sacrilege to challenge it. The greatest sin, as Gore Vidal liked to say, was giving up the game. By which he meant revealing the truth to those who weren't supposed to know it.
I used the past tense because the net has changed all that--at least technically. Sitting at a laptop on my back porch on an island in the Atlantic I can potentially reach as many people with my take on the news as any media conglomerate. By the same token, I learn things about the world every day from the net that that no money media editor would dare to publish, lest it rile some pol or plutocrat.
So, thanks to the net, our gatekeepers have lost the lock and hinges to the gate, allowing naked reality to wander into the backyard and disport itself before our amazed eyes. The latest and most notorious intruders consist of the Afghan war reports revealed at wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010. Not to brag, but they confirm, underline and tie in pink ribbons the things I’ve been writing about the subject for the last couple of years.* Namely, that the culture and politics of that part of the world are beyond the ken, let alone the manipulation of our empire, and that therefore our designs on it are as doomed as Elphinstone's regiments of foot at the Khyber Pass in 1842.
I have enormous admiration for Specialist Bradley Manning and the crew at WikiLeaks who gave us reality instead of rhetoric on Afghanistan. I hope it will match the impact of the release of the Pentagon Papers that exposed the fraud of Vietnam. But it may be too late. I fear the great American bullshit machine has accustomed us to pointless wars, corruptly, criminally and incompetently fought. Proof of the same may merely produce more useless indifference rather than useful ire.

* War's Costly Toll (Booth), June 10, 2010
Traveling With Hillary, March 19, 2010
Keeping Score On Our Wars, December 3, 2010
Salong, It's Been Good To Know You, Oct 4,2009

Two Scenarios
Two Years Later
I published the blog below on July 19, 2008. Unfortunately, Scenario 2 appears to have prevailed. I went astray in predicting protest (good) followed by repression (bad). The paucity of the former has so far obviated the latter. I was also amazed that, given the new political mood in Latin America, Obama was stupid enough to alienate a whole continent by signing off on the vicious coup in Honduras whose Washington-advised leaders are currently practicing old-fashioned death squad democracy in all of its grizzliness. Our media continue to ignore Honduras's growing list of victims on the well-established principle that it’s not newsworthy, let alone a violation of human rights, for rightists to kill and torture leftists. And, of course, no one could foresee environmental catastrophe on the scale of the Gulf kill. Apart from that, I think, unhappily, that Scenario 2 allows me to don the swami’s turban.

* * * * * *

Scenario 1. Obama wins. The landslide majority that elected him along with a lopsided Democratic congress demand the change he promised. They want immediate action on jobs and the economy. They want the troops out of Iraq and America out of the empire business. Their to-do list also includes energy, health care, the environment, schools, and infrastructure. Obama and the Dems respond positively. They signal their bona fides by initiating withdrawal, citing mounting Iraqi calls for us to clear out. Obama announces global base closings to save money and show foreigners we have no imperial designs on them. In what is called the Obama Overture, he assures democratic Latin leaders that efforts to overthrow their governments will cease to be replaced by cooperation on ending the poverty that drives millions north.
At home, Obama launches a Real Deal of fresh initiatives on the Four E’s--the economy, the environment, energy and education. He says it's time to catch up with the rest of the first world on health care. Some of his proposals seem more practical than others. But people are inspired and energized by the sense that Washington is finally on their side. Hard times gradually give way to a more rational and balanced prosperity that emphasizes broad well-being over personal consumption. The world seems a bit safer and Americans more hopeful. Obama and the Dems easily win reelection in 2012. We become Denmark with Rockies.

Scenario 2. Obama wins. The people who voted for him demand the change he promised. They expect things to happen, but nothing much does. It becomes more and more apparent that Obama, despite his brains, youth, cool and promise, is just another face for business as usual.
People feel betrayed. The angriest among them take to the streets. Obama quickly unleashes the repressive apparatus built up over the Bush years to punish the troublemakers. Mass roundups, disappearances and fear of torture or worse scare potential protesters into quiescence. The economy sinks further, imperial wars get nastier, the country grows dismal and surly. And, of course, the rich get richer. Comes the 2012 election and Obama is excoriated for the mess. An extreme right wing Republican (possibly an Alaskan yahoo) promising order and military victory, wallops him in the election. We enter a dark age of fascism.

Vergessene Helden
(Forgotten Heros)
Now that July 4th has become a barbeque bash and America a counter-revolutionary corporatocracy, it’s time to switch over from adulating the Minute Men to a celebration of the proud predecessors of our forces from the private for-profit security sector now standing terrorism alert from the savannahs of Somalia to the karsts of Kyrgyzstan.
They are our up-and-coming first line of offense against those who would keep their countries for themselves. When these Velcro-belted warriors delve into their scrapbooks and pause to reflect on the history of their profession, they too harken back to the fateful summer of 1776.
It was on August 15 on Staten Island that the Hessians first trooped onto our shores. They were immediately flung into combat at the Battle of Long Island and acquitted themselves with honor. The contract combatants were part of a larger force of Brits whose mission was to suppress terrorism and restore law and order. Insurgents had destroyed food stocks, even tossing tea into the sea in Boston. They were rampaging through the countryside and killing loyal troops.
Over the next seven years, nearly 30,0000 private enterprise fighters from Hesse would see battle in the war on terror from Trenton to Yorktown. Thousands would succumb to disease--more than died in combat. Upwards of six thousand would settle here and raise families. Thousands of others would return to their beloved Hesse.
In truth, not only Hessians but Russians, French, Poles and other Europeans served the cause of King George III, America’s sovereign. The colonial insurgents used the name Hessians to denote mercenaries of whatever provenance. People on both sides of the Atlantic had different values in those days and were appalled by the use of hired soldiers. The rebellious colonists were particularly outraged that their monarch was using foreign troops to restore order.
In Europe, “Frederick the Great, a man not over-scrupulous in his own measures, viewed it as an abominable traffic in human lives, and it is said that whenever any of these hirelings passed through his territory he levied on them the usual toll for cattle, saying that they had been sold as such.”
Attitudes are much changed today. We’ve gotten over that particular difference with the king. Not only have we Americans moved from a draft military to a paid one, but business interests have found it to their profit to increasingly substitute for the government when it comes to making war. Given the direction of events in Afghanistan and Iraq, it looks like our future wars will be purely entrepreneurial endeavors. So lets hoist a July 4th brewski to King George and his hired Hessians who paved the way.

The Locals Win Again
The cashiering of Rambo McChrystal and his replacement by the bazaari Petraeus, announces that our Afghan adventure is no longer a war but has become, as is common in that part of the world, a haggle.
The collapse of the war part, like that in Iraq, marks yet another failure for the world’s most expensive murder machine. In both places, the conundrum was the same: kill abundantly and makes lots of new enemies or kill selectively and make fewer of them. A third option, making loyal compradors and satraps of the inhabitants, was no more possible than Salt Lake City accepting domination by an occupation army of Upper West Side atheists.
The great universal of human history is that people everywhere want to be ruled by their own kind. Interestingly, some are more or less admandant than others. My father came from Dubrovnik, the “pearl of the Adriatic.” It remains among the most perfectly preserved and gorgeous medieval towns in Europe. One reason, according to local folklore, is that its citizens kept siete bandiere in the attic. If the Venetian fleet appeared on the horizon, up went the Venetian flag. If it were the Turks or the Austrians, their respective banners soon carried on the mistral breeze. The burgers of Dubrovnik, known as the city-state of Ragusa in those days, waited on the dock, wearing smiles and bearing tribute. Thus, the town was never sacked, let alone having its cattle raped and its women rustled.
On the other extreme, the peoples of western and central Asia enjoy a multi-millenial rep for conquest and resistance to same. The clear lesson of history is don’t mess with them. But we Americans prefer not to mess with history. So we keep getting ourselves into easily avoidable disasters like Iraq and Afghanistan. When our imperial wars go bad, they occasion internal ones. The battle raging today in Washington is between those retaining enough sense to haggle our way out of Kabul and those who want to keep the highly profitable show on the road, even if we have to pay tribute to local warlords. The demission of McChrystal and the rerise of Petraeus signals that the sensibles have won, at least for the time being.
The winner of our Iraq war was Iran. Today’s Times tells me that Pakistan will be the winner of our Afghan war. This is for the obvious reason that those with the greatest incentive to provide advice and aid to war-shattered nations are their largest and closest neighbors.
For the last decade, a major goal of the Pentagon has been to prevent the rise of regional powers that might locally challenge the U.S. claim to total global domination. First under Bush and now with Obama, Washington has managed a perfect failure in this endeavor. We have entered the multipolar age. The proof is that regional powers like Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Brazil, not to mention hemispheric hegemons like China and Russia, are not only growing in influence, but see no need to challenge us. They can simply ignore us while we self-destruct.

Note to my reader (not you, honey, the other one): I am running late on the blog owing to my continuing research into the American health care system. I spent the first half of this week checking on the cardiac services at Yale New Haven Hospital. I got two new stents as souvenirs of my visit. That’s a grand total of nine since 1998. I made sure to have my card punched so that the 10th one is free. With so much metal in my ticker, I plan to introduce myself at future formal events as Pierre Coeur de Fer.

Soon, The Triple A Threat
I thought we were stuck in a rut.
The last time I took a look, eighteen months ago, our “national security” threat board had turned senile. It was thirty years, for example, since our leaders first warned us that Iran was minutes away from getting a nuke and zapping Israel and Iceland to boot. Cuba’s “threat” to the hemisphere was fifty years old. Fidel Castro had long since emulated me by retiring to blogging. The North Korean “danger” had been around for 60 years, but it was hard to pin the aggressiveness rap on a country known to the world as a hermit kingdom. It looked like we’d be doing dotage with our same old enemies, glaring at each other from wheel chairs on the porch of the assisted living facility.
But never stumble in front of the wheels of history. We suddenly seem to be on the way to acquiring two new and rambunctious foes. Brazil, with nearly 200 million feisty Brazilians and a wealth of natural resources, is off the ranch and gone mustang. So is Turkey, which strategically straddles Europe and Asia and is home to 70 million hard-working and increasingly independent-minded Turks.
The Brazilians have been subverted by the dangerous notion that being the biggest and richest country on a huge continent means they don’t have to take orders from an insolvent empire so degenerate that has to pay protection to secure its gouty military from the depredations of feudal tribes.
As for the Turks, they were long considered “one of the United States’ most pliable allies” who “reliably followed American policy” in the Middle East. But that’s all changed. “Regional powers want to have a say in regional and global politics. “This is our neighborhood,” say the Turks, and we don’t want trouble. The Americans create havoc, and we are left holding the bag.”
This is a knee in the jewels to official Washington dorktrine which holds that “the US. must prevent “potential competitors from challenging our leadership” or “even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
If that’s not enough agita, there are increasing signs that China, our cosmic creditor, is moving beyond disobedience to defiance. The Obama administration’s efforts to “give Beijing a larger stake in solving international problems” is not working out. Instead, Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, charges that Beijing is pursuing polices “designed to protect China’s workers and firms at the expense of China’s trading partners” (that means us).
Putting your own country’s interests ahead of those of the American empire is, to be sure, the ultimate sin in Washington. Assassinations, coups and outright invasions are the usual penalty for such breaches. The trouble is that they’re easier to pull off in tiny Honduras than in big countries like Turkey and Brazil, let alone humongous ones like China.
Not yet overpowered by the stench of oil in the Gulf is the scent of blood in the water--this time from the imperial shark itself rather than from its prey. The great beast is old and wounded and the littler fishes are feeling more secure. The scariest word in Washington is “multipolar.” It means a world of many more or less equal players rather than one run by Goldman Sachs and such via their errand boys in the White House, Treasury and Pentagon.
Hard times are here and business and government are making drastic cuts. Thus far this trend has yet to reach the empire, whose budgets still soar no matter the diminishing return on investment it's suffering. Spending ever more spondulicks to boss around ever fewer subjects is not good business. This would then be a perfect time to discreetly step back from our declining global “interests.” Not capitulation, but starting with a little here, a little there. For instance, Obama could begin to make good on his fine words to the peoples of Latin America and the Middle East that the U.S. will actually respect their sovereignty. They’re in the process of sending us packing anyway. It would be dignified to gracefully heed their invitation to tend our own garden rather than be weeded out of one country after another.
Besides, not even I have a wacky enough sense of humor to start making fun of the threat notices the media are no doubt already preparing for us about the “evil Amazon-Anatolia Axis!”

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.