How The Dems Got That Right 
   I left you last week with the question of how the Democratic Party has moved right, yes right, of France’s Front National fascist party on most major issues?
    The answer is part of the bigger question about how our country has been steering to starboard for the last 40 years--no matter whether the Reps or Dems are in power. That continuing wave has left us with ridiculously richer rich people, a disappearing middle class, permanent war, immunity for the powerful and a police state for the rest, and the ruination of what’s public and the exaltation of what’s private. In short, we’re turning into one of those banana republics where the bunch who own everything could all attend the same lawn party with plenty of room to spare for the pheasants and flamingos.   

   This ongoing conservative tide has five sources.  The first and most powerful is the global money crowd avid to free itself of taxes and regulations so they can more easily plunder their own system as well as everyone else’s. In a word, they covet the world.

    The second is their chosen instrument, the Republican party, which grows more extreme as its dominance expands. But the Reps are by no means a perfect tool for financiers since many conservatives in the GOP would dilute our extant plutocracy by adding a rival theocratic power center.
     The third is our commercial culture which celebrates selfishness, acquisition and a suck-up and kick-down ethos. 
    Fourth are the media who lend endless credibility to the incredible nonsense emanating from the right by rarely questioning it. They leave that job to the late night comics, who have far more cred among the public than do the corporate cocottes of CNN, NPR and their like.
     Fifth among the fountainheads of reaction in America is the Democratic Party. Contrary to myth, the Dems have never been a purposely progressive party such as Canada’s New Democrats or  Labor in the UK.  Once an uneasy coalition of southern racists and big city political machines, the Dems go with the flow.  From the 30’s into the 60’s when the freshets issued from the left, they championed lots of good stuff like Social Security, unemployment insurance, the GI Bill, Medicare, civil and labor rights, and on and on. The highpoint of Dem liberalism came in 1972 with the McGovern campaign. That crushing defeat for progressive Dems gave pro-business Dems the opportunity to turn the party rightwards.  It’s been heading in that direction ever since. 
     Sadly, progressives have yet to mount a serious effort either to regain influence within the party or to create a new liberalism outside the party. With some honorable exceptions they gradually shed their liberalism and decided that if the Reps were the party of Business, they would be the party of As Usual. From that point on, if you asked Dems what they believed besides winning elections you would get a blank stare or a change of subject.
     Dem leaders were able to hold on to what was left of their ‘progressive’ base by projecting the party as a lesser evil rather than a real opponent of the right. Voters were told they should vote Dem not because the Dems were going to do good things but because otherwise the Reps would do bad things.
     The trick was to make sure that the progressives had no where else to turn. The Dem honchos declared war on left tendencies within and without the party. Typically, they heaped scorn on ‘extremist’ Dems like Dennis Kucinich and demonized outside lefties like Ralph Nader, spending millions on countless law suits to keep progressive third parties like the Greens off the ballot.
    The trick has worked perfectly for decades.  Progressive Dems will tell you, as if playing a tape, that they can’t nominate a progressive for president because that would lose centrist votes. And disgruntled Dems argue that they can’t vote for a third party because that would also throw the election to the Reps. All they can do is to accept an Obama, who populates his cabinet with Wall Streeters and frankly flaunts his buddy-buddying with banksters and his admiration for the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
    And when the next even more right wing Dem candidate comes along, they will say exactly the same thing about her. Thus the notion of having a center-left, let alone a left, party here remains as unlikely as Americans ever getting the month-long paid vacations enjoyed by the Swedes and such.  No, we are heading the other way, into a corporatocracy that doesn’t even offer the sop of  social benefits such as those favored by European fascists.
  A glimmer of hope:  this morning's news reports that two Dem insurgents beat two two sitting business-as-usual Congressmen in the Pennsylvania primaries. "Last night the Democratic Party became more liberal," said Hugh Reily, Dem chairman for Schuykill County.  Let's hope the glimmer brightens.

The Democrats:
How Right They Are
I’ve been following the French presidential elections, the first round of which kicks off this Sunday. There are ten certified candidates from the Hitlerite right to the Trotskyist left. Since everyone is the self-labeled real item there’s no time wasted on accusations of “socialism,”“fascism,” etc., that occupy so much of our political space. That, to the logical French, would be like denouncing a duck for being a duck.
The leading candidate on the right is Marine Le Pen, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the gray eminence of the Front National who recalls the Nazi occupation with a certain nostalgia. Though I used the word “Hitlerite” above, that was a trifle unfair. Le Pen fille represents a new generation and has endeavored to move the FN away from its collabo politics of yesteryear and into the contemporary world of European racism.
Interestingly, I found myself watching Marine’s speeches with disgust but also with a yen to learn more about the FN. So I Wikied the FN in English and then checked out their platform in French. From the former came this quote: “Under her leadership, Marine Le Pen has been more clear in her support for protectionism, while she has criticised globalism and capitalism for certain industries. She has been characterized as a proponent of letting the government take care of health care, education, transportation, banking and energy...Le Pen opposed the invasions of Iraq, led by the United States, both in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War."
From the FN Programme, i.e., la bouche du cheval, I learned that the party wants
to boost taxes on the rich and on luxury goods. It favors a “strict application of laicite” (secularism) in the schools and the state generally. It proposes government training programs for youth and the jobless. It supports retirement at 60 for workers with strenuous jobs and wants a lower retirement age for mothers of three or more kids. To be sure, the FN shows its fangs with the draconian policies by which it would halt further immigration and torment immigrants already in France.
Are you thinking what I am?
That a French fascist party is well to the left of our Democratic Party on major issues!
That maybe Dems should be wearing little swastikas, or at least the fleur de lis, next to their Obama buttons. That perhaps they should switch their World War II hero worship from Winston Churchill to Marshal Petain?
How did this happen? How did American politics steer so hard to starboard that not only our yahoos, but our 'liberals' as well, line up as ultra-right nut cases in comparison to Christendom’s uber conservatives?
I’ll offer my two cents on that subject with my next blog. Until then, my favorite in Sunday’s balloting is the smart, tough and witty Jean Luc Melenchon, candidate of the Front de Gauche. He provided the campaign with one of its best laughs when he dismissed Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, the Mitt Romney of the French left, as a “pedal boat captain.” And imagine the brouhaha if Romney or Obama ran a campaign ad like this one.

Holiday in Venezuela
Not everything the empire does is evil. It’s given lots of countries reason for a national holiday, with kids off from school, colorful parades and blaring bands. What those people are celebrating is beating off the empire’s army, ridding themselves of occupation, or booting a Washington imposed dictatorship.
Party time comes to Venezuela this April 13, occasioned by the tenth anniversary of the defeat of a military coup hatched in Washington and aimed at replacing the nation’s popular democracy with an obedient plutocracy of the sort it used to suffer.
On April 11, 2002, the right wing opposition to the elected government took to the streets while elements of the military surrounded the presidential palace. President Hugo Chavez was taken prisoner and members of his government were arrested or went into hiding.
The coup capos issued a decree dissolving the courts and all elected bodies. They promised elections--but allowing only candidates “chosen in accord with this decree.” All pro-government media were banned and protestors were ordered shot on sight.
The Bush administration immediately recognized its spawn and offered aid and encouragement. The NY Times welcomed the overthrow, editorializing that “democracy was no longer threatened" in Venezuela. They forgot to add that that was because it had been abolished. By contrast, every nation in Latin America angrily denounced the coup as a tiresome replay of Yanqui business as usual and demanded the restoration of the legitimate elected government.
The plotters threw a big shindig for themselves at Miraflores, the presidential palace, inviting the media to record the event. They even had the elite in attendance sign off on their decree, never dreaming it would shortly end up as evidence of their treason. The event looked like it came out of a 19th century French revolutionary novel. Beaming capitalists, colonels and clerics offered up champagne toasts to the restoration of the ancien regime. If you want to see both sides of a military coup, go to You Tube and watch The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Chavez: Inside the
Coup. (The key scenes in this eye-opening documentary start at about the 40 minute mark.)
At first, the palace party goers could only dimly perceive the rumble of the raging citizenry gathering at the gates. As it grew louder and and angrier, they got the message and began to scatter. The great majority of Venezuela's people and the best part of their military were not about to surrender their democracy. With overwhelming numbers they swept out the coup plotters like so much trash. The plan was to kill Chavez but loyal enlisted soldiers disobeyed orders and foiled the assassination. Paratroopers rescued the president from his island prison. By April 13, a mere 48 hours after the outrage was launched, Venezuelans were celebrating the restoration of the new order.
The battle was won, but the fight goes on. Obama is just as intent as Bush on reversing the outbreak of independence in Latin America--with the Chavez government still target numero uno.
Venezuelans go to the presidential polls in October. Washington is backing--with your tax payer bucks-- Henrique Radonski Capriles, the right wing scion of a media conglomerate who took part in the April 2002 coup. The fact that media conglomerates and their scions still thrive and contest for power in Venezuela gives the lie to the endless propaganda that Chavez is a dictator. If he were, the chosen opposition candidate would now be resting comfortably six feet down. In fact, the Chavez government was surprisingly mild and even conciliatory in its handling of the golpistas it captured. Only those who had committed violence, including the murder of demonstrators, were prosecuted.
Despite the fact that the Chavistas enjoy a solid majority, the upcoming election is fraught. President Chavez is battling cancer. That has occasioned a scramble for position within his democratic and broad-based socialist party among leftist and more conservative elements over which will predominate should Chavez pass from the scene.
Whatever happens, Chavez is, by his deeds so far, assured a place in history as one of Latin America’s greatest leaders. His movement brought independence, popular democracy and economic justice to Venezuela’s long beaten down poor. Like Bolivar, Juarez, Zapata and Marti before him, he’s beloved by the many and hated and feared by the few. I wish the Venezuelans many happy returns of their April 13 holiday.

Anomalies In The News

Not So Free Enterprise
If we elect a hippie president, can she force us to buy marijuana? The Supreme Court is currently considering a similar question: can the government make us buy a product that’s as illegal in the first world as smoke is here?
Toke on this: it’s unlawful to sell basic health care for profit in just about every country whose citizens wear shoes most of the time.
It’s verboten because health is a right. Turning it into a business is a crime because it would deny care to those who can’t afford the product. Since the goal is having a healthy, long-lived population at a reasonable cost to society, the most humane, economical and efficient way to achieve that goal is to make health care a public service like fire or police protection. Or so modern capitalist countries agreed decades and decades ago.
In the U.S., which has resigned from the first world, health is a hugely profitable business. The most lucrative part of it consists of financial companies who do no health care themselves but merely broker its provision.
After secretly consulting with its obscenely remunerated executives, the Obama administration promoted a law guaranteeing the vast profits of these financial companies by obliging citizens to buy their overpriced products. The Supreme Court will decide the fate of this giveaway. Odds on, it will give the big money crowd what it wants. But you never know. One or two of those irascible reactionaries on the court may really believe in free markets. Meanwhile, people living in the first world will be taking summer vacations on the money they saved by way of publicly-financed health care.

Rome In Havana
On arriving at Havana, the pope urged Cuba to “strive to build a renewed and open society, a better society, one more worthy of humanity, and which better reflects the goodness of God.”
That, to be sure, is a worthy goal for every polity. But Cubans could hardly be blamed for treating that message as ironical rather than inspirational. A very well educated people, particularly on their history with the Roman church, they were aware that those words were uttered by one of the most reactionary and secretive of the modern popes. That history told them that when Cuba was under Spain up until 1898, “priests were immune from prosecution in civil court, church buildings were erected and clergy members were paid partly out of state coffers. The Church's authority was backed by the might of the state and the force of law, and the profession of other religions in the colonies was illegal. Furthermore, until the 1880s, there was no marriage other than the canonical”
At the least, Joseph Ratzinger’s pontificate represents nostalgia for those good old days, if not worse. Another irony: though they approach it from different sides of history, the medieval pope and the Marxist Castro tend to agree on the excesses of capitalism.

A Model For Others To Emulate?
Not So Much

We spend so many zillions on our elections that NPR has a full time reporter-cum-accountant named Peter Overby just to keep track of them. This morning he was sending me back to sleep with comparative superpac numbers.
Of course, the zillions spent here are only part of it. Our government shells out for “democracy” in countless other countries. I just read about another $50 million on tap for Russia even though they just finished their presidential voting. Then there are messy situations from Venezuela to Egypt where our “pro democracy” efforts are treated as illegal foreign influence. Us? Foreigners? Though we have such laws here, Washington apparently feel free to ignore them elsewhere.
The justification our leaders (both Dems and Reps) give for meddling in the politics of others is that since the U.S. is the global exemplar of democracy, it has an obligation to help the less virtuous model themselves on us. Apparently, that’s an opinion that provides either a good guffaw or a bad fright to the rest of the world. Below is a round-up of foreign comment on our election campaign so far.

From Germany
The Republican presidential contest in America is a 'freak show,' said Marc Pitzke in Der Spiegel. The candidates vie with one another to spew the most outrageous hard-right positions, denying evolution while endorsing torture and joking about electrocuting illegal immigrants. How did a major party in the world's sole superpower become a 'club of liars, debtors, betrayers, adulterers, exaggerators, hypocrites, and ignoramuses?' These know-nothings are enabled by a U.S. press that has been 'neutered by the demands of political correctness' so that it can't say what's obvious: These people are daft! Instead, it 'proclaims one clown after the next to be the new front-runner.' Newt Gingrich, is actually considered an intellectual merely because he can create sentences with multiple clauses. Scarcely a one has even the most basic grasp of foreign policy. One said Africa is a country, another that the Taliban rule in Libya . Collectively, 'they expose a political, economic, geographic, and historical ignorance that makes George W. Bush look like a scholar.

From France
That's the scariest part, said Lorraine Millot in Liberation. The only GOP candidate who knows a thing about diplomacy, Jon Huntsman, is dead last in most polls. The others careen to extreme positions that include starting new wars and abandoning old allies. And that's when they even have a position. Herman Cain, now thankfully out of the race, was the front-runner even though he couldn't find a single coherent word to say about President Obama's policy on Libya. He even boasted of knowing little about foreign countries. And yet it was his adultery, not his astounding ignorance that brought him down.

From the UK
There's a simple explanation for this bizarre phenomenon, said Max Hastings in the London Daily Mail. In the lunatic, gun-toting badlands of America's Hicksville, Tea Party country, it's considered suspiciously elitist to show any interest in modern science or the world beyond America's borders. Say what you like about British politics, no MP of any party would dare to offer themselves as town dog-catcher while knowing as little about the world as the Republican presidential candidates. We take public service seriously. Yet we in Britain, and everyone in the rest of the world, will suffer if 'one of the lunatics' vying for the nomination makes it to the White House. The American political system has seldom, if ever, looked so inadequate.
Don't worry, said Matthew Norman in the London Independent. The fact that Gingrich is the latest threat to Mitt Romney's inevitability confirms how inevitable Romney's nomination is. The thrice-married, ethically challenged Gingrich is unlikable in the extreme. Which means the nominee will be Romney, 'the slimiest, phoniest opportunist to run for president since...well, ever.' So sit back and enjoy this circus passing for a presidential election. It can't possibly end in a GOP victory. Can it?

From Cuba
The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”--Fidel Castro, who has survived ten U.S. presidencies.

(Thanks to LDB for providing all but one of the quotes)

Afghanistan Not For Sale

Some American actions in the area also alienated villagers, like the wholesale destruction of villages that commanders decided were too riddled with booby traps to safely control--NY Times, March 13, 2012

Our military and intelligence services have been killing Afghans for the last ten years. God only knows how many thousands our boys and girls have popped by now. A few days back, an army staff sergeant wasted another 16 of them, including nine children, by bullet and knife. He apparently took this initiative on his own hook without orders from above. There’s been consternation about it in Washington.
It is the expectation of our leaders that surviving Afghans make fine distinctions about how and why we kill them. They are expected, first of all, to appreciate that we are making war in their country for their own good. They are supposed to know whether our targets are bad guys or good guys, intended or incidental, or simply random like the sergeant’s tally. And, since our motives are ever benign, we expect them to give us the benefit of the doubt on each lethal occasion lest we suspect them of actually being bad guys.
The trouble is the Afghans don’t meet our expectations. Instead of accepting our careful categories, they tend to lump together our violence and destruction as all bad rather than as beneficial, understandable or regrettable. Worse, they stereotype us as “occupiers” and “infidels.” All in all, they seem to be ingrates.
President Obama and Hillary Clinton have repeatedly gone out of their way to apologize to the Afghan president and people when inadvertent or un-called for killings have occurred. Rather than graciously accepting these apologies, the Afghans make impossible demands. The most recurring of these is to subject American citizens to Afghan law for the crimes they commit in Afghanistan. They fail to understand that if we permitted that we would be unable to conduct military operations in their country. Neither do they recognize that as “the greatest country” we can do whatever we want in their nation or any other.
Until the recent incident of the over-eager sergeant, the problem that captured the headlines was the increasingly frequent attacks on NATO troops (a term of art usually denoting Americans) by their Afghan trainees and allies. This was a new one to the American empire. As a rule, the subordinate troops we trained and armed in our client states remained trustworthy, if only for opportunistic reasons.
With our Afghan “friends” as dangerous as our enemies, we are obliged to guard our forces from those they are instructing, never knowing when they will turn on us. Not only that, we can have no expectation that Afghanistan will continue to do our bidding once our forces are gone. In a word, the situation is as hopeless as our decaying position in Iraq.
When we jumped head first into this mess after 9/11, I wrote a piece suggesting that folks quit following the war news and instead pick up some histories of the Crusades. A commonplace comment in those accounts of bloody battles and endless treacheries is that people in that part of the world can be rented, but not bought. It’s a lesson that a nation like ours devoted to the sales effort sees no point in learning.

Our Eroding Empire

"Washington concerned about the secrecy surrounding the Chinese defense budget. During a visit to Washington last month by Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to be the next leader of China, the Obama administration specifically asked for greater transparency in the Chinese military budget and for deeper communications between the two militaries"--NY Times, March 5, 2012

"The top-secret world the [U.S.] government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work"--Washington Post, July 19, 2010

Apart from making money, the point of having an empire, particularly a powerful one, is that you can ignore the golden rule. You can do unto others what you would never let them do onto you.
So we can demand that other countries tell us their military plans. Or that Afghanistan continue to allow us to kill and imprison its citizens on its territory. Or, as President Obama likes to say, keep all options open when it it comes to blockading, bombing and subverting sovereign nations whose policies irk us. Or that we can spend hundreds of millions influencing foreign elections even though we have a law barring foreigners from doing the same to us. Of course, most of this is illegal, but, then again, the law is there to keep the lesser classes in line. If it, as idealized, applied equally to all, half the greedheads on Wall Street would be doing time right now.
Americans have become so used to bossing around foreigners that they don’t notice that their commonplace utterances, as well as their deeds, create new enemies daily. I don’t think my next door neighbor would be charmed if I kept referring to his property as my back yard. Nor would the guys at the bar bow down because I had anointed myself the greatest and therefore their leader. More likely, they’d kick me out on my ass.
That’s exactly what’s happening world-wide right now. The American empire is getting booted out of its satrapies. Not all of them, of course. And it’s even adding a few new ones. Burma comes to mind, while Syria appears up for grabs. But the trend is on the down side. Latin America, our longtime “backyard,” has already become free. And it’s not just the leftist nations like Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Even conservative politicians from Mexico to Chile are finally realizing that there are fewer and fewer reasons to take orders from the decaying gringo empire. They see that it’s better for the whole continent, with nearly twice the population of the U.S, to unite than to continue to singly submit to Washington and Wall Street. Indeed, there you have a prime reason for the empire's ennui. Another is that when it comes to products, ideas, or protecting foreign elites from their own people, the U.S. no longer has anything special to offer.
Behemoths China, Russia and Brazil are powers unto themselves. India is defying the U.S.-led economic assault on Iran. Pakistan has announced it will stand with Iran if Israel and/or the U.S. attack. Turkey and South Africa are growing in influence. Regional powers are strengthening despite Washington’s resolve to never let them rise up.
While eastern Europe seems satisfied to retain its satellite status, merely switching masters from the USSR to the U.S., western Europe is another story. Its politicians and money managers are still yoked to Washington and Wall Street, but its people haven’t been so restless since the Great Depression. Unlike Americans, large numbers of Europeans are willing to do battle with the enforcers of austerity. From Spain to Greece, there’s even a whiff of revolt in the air.
In the Middle East, the whiff has already turned into a whirlwind. Whether it will ultimately blow left towards secularity and social democracy or right towards a Muslim version of Santorumism remains to be divined.
In short, stuff’s happening everywhere. Not so much here yet out on the right cusp of the world, where folks remain as ignorant of their empire in its dotage as they were in its heyday. But that can change, too. And quickly.


Post Script

For three days, Iran has dominated the agenda of the annual conclave of Aipac, a must-have ticket for politicians eager to prove their pro-Israel bona fides--NY Times, March 7, 2012

I was finishing the blog above when I ran across the above quote from a Times story about the ubiquitous and all powerful influence that the politicians and generals who run a country the size of Honduras have over the world's self-declared most powerful nation. One of the many unmentioned ironies of this election year is that Obama is being trashed both for being insufficiently tough on foreign policy and insufficiently servile to a tiny foreign state. Only in America!

God Help Us

Anyone who attempts to construe a personal view of God which conflicts with Church dogma must be burned without pity--Pope Innocent III

Amen--Rick Santorum

In 1929, when John F. Kennedy, our first Roman Catholic president was 12 years old, the last vestiges of the Papal States were dismantled and reduced to 110 acres in central Rome. The Pope’s armies had long since been defeated, his police powers revoked, his dungeons and torture chambers emptied. Catholicism had lost the temporal power that it exercised for 1600 years in what Montesquieu called the bloodiest kingdom of all.
The America of 1929 had just rejected the presidential candidacy of New York Governor Al Smith, partly because he was a papist. The KKK, the Tea Party of its time, was clamorously anti-Catholic. The fear was, as now with Muslims, that the Vatican was out to control America and the rest of the world.
At the birth of the United States, even the Protestant majority was leery of the likely power of its own clergy. America had freed itself from Britain, a nation with a meddling state church. Europe had suffered centuries of horribly bloody religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Few wanted a repeat of that history here. What’s more, small towns in those days were often congregational rather than civic, making the minister the ex officio mayor. Not very democratic, that. With all this in mind, the founders wisely put in the Constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Better to keep church and state separate.
By 1960, when JFK won the presidency, anti-Catholicism and even anti-Semitism were fading. Americans were becoming ever more willing to vote for politicians who professed belief in anything shy of atheism. The issue of church and state had been settled. Or so it seemed.
Yet here we are in 2012 with papist Rick “Google Me” Santorum in unholy alliance with Protestant fundamentalists to spread theocracy throughout the land. Like the kissy-face relationship between usually antagonistic Bible thumpers and Zionists, the stench of opportunism overwhelms the incense of ecumenism. Should they ever retake temporal power, the three faiths, each with its own perfect message, will be at each other's jugulars in short order. It will be minutes, not hours, before the garottes are unwound and the strappados cranked.
For what is most noticeable about Santorum and the cretinous cut of Christianity he inspires is their apparent eagerness to harken back not just to the idyllic slavery times that ordinary American reactionaries dream about, but all the way back to the actual dark ages. Instead of sitting on the porch and enjoying a mint julep while watching the slaves being whipped, this crowd hankers for seats at the star chamber meting out tortures to those who would dispute dogma. I hope the rest of us have learned enough in 2,000 years to treat this replay of tragic history as farce and blaspheme it out of existence.

Back at the Blog

...As I Was Saying
Last June, after turning out 141 blogs over three years, I began telling myself every day that I would write something tomorrow. For various reasons, it took all these months for tomorrow to finally come. To my surprise, the world kept spinning without my two cents.
So let’s review.
I guess the most dangerous news since then is that we’re escalating our long-running war on Iran. So far, we’ve hit them with assassinations, subversion, sabotage and economic blockade--all to no avail. The next step, if it comes, is bombing. Invasion looks exceeding unlikely. If you recall, back in the 80’s the Persians fought off a half million Iraqis armed and advised by our Pentagon.
Unlike our fracases in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, a shoot-em-up with Iran will cost all of us as much as ten bucks a gallon at the gas pump (Europe is already there). That would plunge us deeper into depression. Thus the traditional calculus by our leaders that war is good for the economy won’t work this time. We’ll all end up poorer--except for the defense contractors and the oil companies.
The cover story for Iran is that we can’t let them build their own nukes because they’re suicidal nuts. The real story, which hasn’t changed in 33 years, is that we want to overthrow their government and take their oil. With Iran’s ally Syria in flames this looks like an opportune time to tumble Teheran.
American foreign policy appears very complicated, given that we’re at dagger points with all sorts of foreigners from medieval Muslims in the Middle East to modern-minded secular leftists in Latin America. Not to bore you, but the current list of countries we have problems with include:

Afghanistan Argentina Belarus Bolivia Brazil China Cuba Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Haiti Honduras Iran Iraq Libya Nepal Nicaragua North Korea Pakistan Russia Somalia Syria Turkey Ukraine Venezuela Yemen and Zimbabwe

Among them, you’ll find just about as wide an array of politics, cultures and economies as this old world has to offer. No matter, we have exactly the same problem with all of them: they are to one degree or another disobedient. Most often that means that they have asserted their own interests in their own parts of the world. In other words, they have challenged Washington’s doctrine of “full spectrum dominance” over the whole, entire and total planet and space beyond.
As noted above we have a variety of means to show the other 95 percent of humankind who’s boss. These range from propaganda campaigns to invasion and occupation. The problem is that we’re getting weaker thanks to a corrupt and insolvent economy while those we target are getting smarter, if not actually stronger.
The tough talk about Iran, a large and well-defended country numbering 80 million people, conveniently hides the reality that we just lost two wars against feeble foes. The comprador regime we imposed on Iraq has turned on its master and given us the boot. Washington built a Vatican-sized embassy in Baghdad to accommodate a staff of 16,000. This was to be our imperial control center for the Middle East. But that ambition faded as our troops were politely but firmly asked to go back where they came from.
Meanwhile, the Afghans have, as they’ve done with every other invader, worn us down. We spent ten years training their troops, while they spent that time outfoxing ours.
Now, President Obama tells us, the Pentagon’s Grand Guignol of mercenary mayhem will be moving on to East Asia to deal with the threat of Chinese influence in the China Sea. Shades of Teddy Roosevelt, the first of our presidents to declare that America’s future resided an ocean away from these United States.
So what we have here is a current crisis in re Iran and another that we’re cooking up with China. Not only do the media take this news in stride, but they frame it in a context of permanent war. I remember when politicians used to regularly applaud peace as if it were a worthy goal. You don’t hear such sissy talk any more.
Until 9/11, war was good--and safe--business, so long as we picked on those who couldn’t do us much damage. It even hardly mattered if we won or lost over there so long as the profits rolled in over here. Today, the game is much more fraught. Just talk about bombing Iran gooses gas prices. The real thing will make them soar. And just imagine if the wily Persians have a couple of 9/11s up their sleeve. Or, catastrophically worse, that they are really suicidal and already have the bomb. It looks like we’ll be paying for our pleasures from now on.

Three Short Takes

War And Peace
The NY Times has revealed yet another war being conducted by Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama. “The extent of America’s war in Yemen has been among the Obama administration’s most closely guarded secrets...” said the paper of record. The Times also reported that “as things get more and more chaotic in Yemen, the space for the Americans to operate in gets bigger.” The Nobel medalist in the White House is currently overseeing four public wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya and a number of clandestine ones from Latin America to Asia. Peru is likely to be added to the list now that its people have elected a leftist president by a narrow margin. The Guinness Book of Records has yet to list the most number of wars fought by a peace prize recipient.

Wimpy Europeans
At Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995, the Serb general Ratko Mladic reportedly committed the worst war crime in Europe since World War II by ordering the massacre of nearly three times the number of innocent civilians who died on 9/11. He was finally arrested in recent days and will stand trial at the Hague. Apparently, there is no sentiment in Europe to shoot him in the face, dump him in the ocean, and then joke about it on late night tv.

Funny What Doesn't Get Played Up
Which one of these current sex stories have you heard little or nothing about?
1. Congressman Anthony Weiner admits to cyber flashing women he didn’t know after first engaging them in political palaver.
2. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and a leading candidate for the presidency of France, accused of sexual assault on a hotel housekeeper.
3. Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister of Italy, now on trial for committing “bunga-bunga” with an under-age prostitute.
4. Arnold Schwartzenegger, former Governor of California, admits to fathering a child by a woman working in his family home.
5. Moshe Katsav, president of Israel, sentenced in March to seven years in prison for serial rape.