Was it worth it? The answer partly depends on whether one works for or has holdings in one of the oil companies that made out well in the aftermath.

The final major prize in the war, southern Iraq’s giant Rumaila oil field, was finally awarded on November third with mixed results from an American standpoint. This is because the only successful bidders for it were BP and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and the second organization, it can be assumed, will primarily support Asian interests over ones favoring Western nations.

Nonetheless, plans are moving forward by the BP-CNPC consortium to invest $US15 billion into Rumaila, the fifth biggest known single reserve of oil in the world, to almost triple production from one million barrels daily to 2.85m and, if successful, the field would be the world’s second biggest in existence. While BP will own a 38 percent stake, CNPC will retain a 37 percent share and Iraq will hold 25 percent.

Meanwhile, the US government, that invested so much in the Iraq War, is said to be disappointed in the overall outcome, particularly in that CNPC was awarded another favorable ($US3bn) deal in Iraq — rights to the Ahdeb field in Wasit province in southeastern Iraq. On account, it is by far the largest foreign player.

This being the case is probably above all vexing since the Chinese people did not have to sacrifice lots of lives and taxpayer money into the Iraq war since their focus was concentrated on strengthening the economy in their homeland all the while the USA and its NATO allies remained largely set on trying to gain control of the fossil fuels for themselves through invasion. Even so, the USA and NATO partners, despite an all-out effort to dominate the region, lost most of the reward.

“The Chinese are very aggressive here.” According to Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh, “They are very eager to build up their presence in Iraq’s oil industry.” Furthermore, a CNPC-led consortium is one of the three bidders for West Qurna 1, another gargantuan field. A group overseen by Russia’s Lukoil and another conglomerate commanded by Exxon Mobil are also in the running for this field.

In consideration of its tremendous success to date, CNPC has developed, along with another Chinese oil company, a special Iraq-focused joint enterprise, called Al-Wah — an Arabic term meaning ‘the oasis’ — to expand the Chinese presence and work in Iraq. At the same time, the Chinese, along with not having to subsume any of the war costs, do not have to bear any guilt over the heavy human toll — assessed by some groups to be a million and a third Iraqis killed, along with 4,680 American military personnel and additional foreign forces from other nations.

At the same time that various organizations involved with fossil fuels are competing to obtain profitably favorable arrangements for themselves and the respective countries to which they supply fuels, leading climate change scientist around the world are putting out an entirely contrary message. They are indicating that, very quickly, global fossil fuel dependence has to greatly shrink to avoid run-away climate change that would cause much of the world’s surface to be inhospitable to life. In other words, an almost complete cessation of its use must occur fairly soon despite ever increased worldwide demand.

For example, John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the main environmental scientist for the German government, told officials from Barack Obama’s administration that U.S. carbon emissions must fall from its annual 20 tons per person to zero if there is going to be an even slight possibility for the climate to stabilize with a 2C increase.

As Stephen Leahy points out in “Four Degrees Of Devastation“: “Eighteen months ago, no one dared imagine humanity pushing the climate beyond an additional two degrees C of heating, but rising carbon emissions and inability to agree on cuts has meant science must now consider the previously unthinkable.”

He goes on to add:

A four-degree C overall increase means a world where temperatures will be two degrees warmer in some places, 12 degrees and more in others, making them uninhabitable.

It is a world with a one- to two-metre sea level rise by 2100, leaving hundreds of millions homeless. This will head to 12 metres in the coming centuries as the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets melt, according to papers presented at the [UK international climate science] conference [recently held] in Oxford.

Four degrees of warming would be hotter than any time in the last 30 million years, and it could happen as soon as 2060 to 2070.

As Clive Hamilton, Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, points out in “Is It Too Late to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change?“, “It is clear that limiting warming to 2ºC is beyond us; the question now is whether we can limit warming to 4ºC. The conclusion that, even if we act promptly and resolutely, the world is on a path to reach 650 ppm and associated warming of 4°C is almost too frightening to accept. Yet that is the reluctant conclusion of the world’s leading climate scientists. Even with the most optimistic set of assumptions — the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades — we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change.”

At the same time, his views are echoed by Lord Stern, former World Bank chief economist, who stated, “A rise of 5C would be a temperature the world has not seen for 30 to 50 million years. We’ve been around only 100,000 years as human beings. We don’t know what that’s like. We haven’t seen 3C for a few million years, and we don’t know what that looks like either.”

“Do politicians understand just how difficult it could be, just how devastating rises of 4C, 5C or 6C could be? I think, not yet,” Lord Stern shared with a group of scientists gathered in Copenhagen after which he went on to warn that the risk associated with governments not adequately addressing climate change in time to avert the brunt of the disaster would lead to horrendous consequences. According to him, these involve risking at least a third of the world’s aggregate wealth, including a minimum of a thirty percent reduction in consumption per person worldwide or, put another way, global GDP would drop to at least 70 percent of current output.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media (MSM) in the United States reveals little information about the degree that the public must radically change lifestyle habits and expectations for economic growth. Little is mentioned about the degree that climate change could have catastrophic impacts across the globe and no government or business leaders are suggesting that reduced consumption of material goods, delimitations in fossil fuel use and other major changes should be carried out very soon. Likewise, none are encouraging ecologically friendly, self-sustaining, financially vibrant communities to be strengthened, nor hinting that transnational patterns of commerce drain dollars out of the country.

In a similar vein, none indicate that these very same globalized patterns that enrich corporate tycoons exacerbate our reliance on fossil fuels due to long distance transportation of raw materials and finished products, as well as the extraordinary amounts of energy used in a massive production of lots of unnecessary merchandise. Obviously, their doing so would be run counter to their extraordinary financial gains at the expense of the poorly paid, everyday work force.

So instead, we have “a business as usual” mentality shoveled forth with bailouts for major commercial organizations, policies to purchase cars subsidized by the federal government, happy-go-lucky TV programs that focus on trivial topics and plenty of advertisements informing the populace that it ought to purchase this or that item to have the latest look in fall fashion, the best anti-aging formula or whatever else for which doing so will, obviously, raise one’s personal carbon and overall ecological footprints in most instances.

At the same time, one can assume that there are no immediate plans to direct society into a pattern of living that is regionally self-reliant (so as to avoid carbon footprints from imports derived from other areas) and restricted in terms of the types of goods available from distant locations. In light of the financial recession and the desire for ever more economic growth based on further globalization of transnational industry and fossil fuel use, quite the opposite pattern is emerging despite the disastrous implications in terms of our breaching climate change tipping points, and the fact that, at some point, fossil fuels, themselves, will no longer be available.

On account, a wise program would be to jumpstart an all out effort to put the means for alternative benign energy sources into place while using the larger portion of fossil fuels to build and install these alternatives across the landscape, as well as help communities to transition away from fossil fuel use altogether. Without a doubt, this would especially be positive in light of the fact that almost 71 percent of electricity in the U.S. is currently supplied by fossil fuels while modern agriculture, industry and transportation all have petroleum at their cores.

Meanwhile the largely consensual opinion reached at the annual conference of the U.S. contingent for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO-USA) is that conventional crude peaked in 2005. Further, biofuels are not expected to be any sort of panacea to make up for pending large-scale oil deficits.¹

Despite the increasing number of indicators that humanity needs to change course in its fossil fuel use, the policy makers sit in their safe government offices planning new dangerous military operations for others to conduct in resource rich regions abroad regardless of the fact that the death toll is rising in these invasions and it seems highly unlikely that the Taliban or any other groups defending their homelands will be easily defeated if at all despite that ever more Pentagon funding is provided toward that aim.

Added up, the expenses to contain Iran, strive to obtain Venezuelan and newly found Cuban oil, fight for arctic fossil fuels, carry out Afghanistan and Pakistan operations, and ramp up covert or military operations via AFRICOM in Africa all together create a recipe for extreme U.S. bankruptcy and assorted other disasters. At the same time, the U.S. undertaking such endeavors merely postpone the inevitable fossil fuel shortfall, anyway, while not ensuring that the country and its citizens are prepared for the huge transition away from fossil fuels. In addition, such ever enlarging, Pentagon run ventures entail an inordinate amount of national sacrifice as money that could be used to support programs at home drains into war costs and the military’s ramped up fossil fuel use.

In relation, is there any question whatsoever as to the reason that there are proposals for greatly diminished funding of certain key social programs, including ones connected to healthcare and public education, in the homeland? How could outcomes be otherwise when 54 percent of every U.S. federal tax dollar goes to plans related to the U.S. military and another 19 percent goes to interest payments on the current federal debt, which leaves 27 percent for all other provisions (excluding the further sums to be borrowed to fund costly bailouts, war expansion plans, etc). Accordingly, the federal budget is at present almost twice the amount taken in from American taxpayers — an irresponsible and disastrous state of affairs with dire repercussions for many years ahead.

In addition, it’s difficult to imagine that, starting with Reagan, U.S. Presidents did not see the long term ramifications in their push for:

• Deregulated globalized U.S. industry, which led into greater oil use due to greater reliance on importation, along with offshoring and outsourcing of U.S. jobs so as to effectively hollow out the economic base at home and harm the average American worker. Ultimately financial contraction in the U.S. and tangentially abroad could be the only anticipated outcome.
• A lack in adequate oversight of Wall Street activities and the banking industry.
• An ever enlarging, expensive war program for obtainment of fossil fuels and other finite resources.
• Ratification of many other destructive patterns, such as the huge repeated government bailouts, and acceptance of costly no bid contracts in response to various Pentagon requests.

Just where did they think that such a set of irresponsible orientations would ultimately lead? Could none of them see the consequences, such as the federal deficit reaching a record $1.42 Trillion, representing 10 percent of the economy or the highest amount since W.W. II, along with continuing to rapidly shoot upward?

It’s hard to imagine that they were all of them so ignorant, nefarious or outright stupid so as to not see where their intended trajectories would in combination land, especially when the speed with which rapidly diminishing oil reserves would disappear is thrown into the mix. Likewise, the quest for unbridled economic growth is equally if not ever more calamitous when the long view’s taken.

It’s simply not supportable, as Michael Bond points out in these three sections from “Why Economic Growth Is Unsustainable“:

The present economy is obliged to grow annually at between 3% and 6%. Too much less than 3% for too long and the economy will collapse from lack of currency. Too much over 6% for too long and inflation will spiral out of control, rendering currency meaningless.

Below is a table that points out how long it takes for something to double, triple, etc. in size, when it increases at rates of 3%, 4%, 5% and 6% per year. For the last 15 years, the global economy has been growing at an average of about 4% per year. Note that at 4% growth the economy doubles every 19 years, and grows 10 times its size in a mere 59 years.

The second problem stems from the fact that in order to sustain 4% annual economic growth, global debt must increase at about 10% annually. Because it is annual growth, this means it is exponential rather than mathematical growth. The difference between the two is shown below.

The Global Economy is on course to collapse well before 2030 due to a looming global inability to repay annual interest. The reason why debt outpaces economic growth stems from a fault in global money supply. This fault is described in the article Money – Deadlier Than Plutonium…

Moreover, people collectively can’t keep taking and taking ever more resources from the natural world and expecting that they can keep raising ever higher the human population and the standard of living for all. It just won’t work because the world is largely limited. At the same time, it should be absolutely clear that our current economic programs for the most part do not work either. Anyone who asserts otherwise perhaps needs to be reminded that nearly half of the world comprising of over three billion people live on less than $2.50 a day. How could this possibly seem like any sort of a success, especially when others, parasitically siphoning the wealth towards themselves off the backs of underpaid laborers and through ravage of the natural world, individually make a financial killing in the millions and billions of dollars at the same time?

It’s a killing, all right. The signs of the social and ecological costs are all around us to see.

In truth, an expectation for relentless growth comes with a very high price tag as is well explained at “Interconnectedness of World Problems, a Conceptual Map by Fritjof Capra based on Plan B 3.0, by Lester Brown” — a vision that goes well beyond a simple, barely accurate, linear model. Likewise, the evaluation of Joel Kovel’s “The Enemy of Nature” is a well thought out, comparable assessment, as are Bill Mckibben’s “A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth” and David Model’s analysis at “The Elephant in the Room. Ignoring Unsustainable Growth.”²

Real limits in mind, this excerpt from Wikipedia’s coverage of the Carter Doctrine is particularly dicey. Simultaneously, it shows a fallacious (arrogant?) sense that the U.S.A. can enact any course of action that it pleases, is completely invincible and is impervious to any internal or external influences, whether social or environmental in nature, that would undercut its kingpin position in the world.

The Carter Doctrine:

Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region.

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

This last, key sentence of the Carter Doctrine, was written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser. Brzezinski modeled the wording of the Carter Doctrine on the Truman Doctrine, and insisted that the sentence be included in the speech “to make it very clear that the Soviets should stay away from the Persian Gulf.

In The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, author Daniel Yergin notes that the Carter Doctrine “bore striking similarities” to a 1903 British declaration, in which British Foreign Secretary Lord Landsdowne warned Russia and Germany that the British would ‘regard the establishment of a naval base or of a fortified port in the Persian Gulf by any other power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal.”

All the same, Mamoun Fandy of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University identifies, in “U.S. Oil Policy in the Middle East,” that the U.S. faces some key problems in its quest for oil dominance. These difficulties include:

• Controlling oil access is a cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy.
• U.S. reliance on imported oil is very high.
• Oil from the Persian Gulf accounts for 10% of the oil used in the U.S.
• Dual containment of Iran and Iraq, along with a broader military engagement policy, is key to U.S. strategy in assuring the flow of oil.

Despite the absolute need to drastically and immediately rein in fossil fuel use for a number of compelling reasons, the U.S. government continues to pursue a forceful and antagonistic policy abroad aimed toward unilateral control over global energy supplies. Using a combination of outright military invasion in an expanding number of countries and threats (i.e., towards Iran and Venezuela), U.S. legislators demonstrate little noticeable remorse over the high fiscal (bankrupting), environmental and social costs of these operations. These include that “The Pentagon Is The Largest Consumer Of Oil In The World,” the number of war related deaths continue to rise, there’s depleted uranium (DU) spread across the Middle East, the war efforts and resultant obtained oil ensure that the climate change devastation to come is sped into place, inadequate funding is allocated for provision of alternative energy supplies and improvement of the electrical grid, public transportation is not sufficiently expanded, and other tragic outcomes will unfold.

There are many ways that humanity can move forward to create “the good life” as long as a plan is sound. In 1970, Henry Kissinger claimed, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” However, one group’s domination of oil and food stocks, while denying the needs of other groups, is reckless, unethical and expensive.

Frankly, we’ve had enough of resource wars. More to the point, conflicts can only get worse as fossil fuel reserves increasingly dwindle and the perception of the diminishment merely strengthens that we have to have the dregs regardless of the grave social and environmental consequences.

No, we do not. In fact, we can no longer afford to fight over material supplies — particularly the ones, like oil, that are going run out or, like food, be at risk to largely run out due to climate change effects brought on in large measure by our lust for rich energy sources.

Sometimes it’s rueful to ponder the way that the present would be different had the U.S. followed Denmark’s example on the same timetable while using the funds that were to become allocated to fossil fuel wars towards development of the self-reliant energy security as Tomas Friedman indirectly suggests in “Flush With Energy” in which he states “Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)”

Meanwhile, there’s growing public awareness that the Pentagon’s worldwide mission IS to get command over oil and gas supplies — as is explained in an elucidating report by Rick Rozoff with many outstanding factual details. Likewise, it is obvious that the IMF and WB goals are en simpatico with the mission and, as a result, are on a disastrously wrong track as “The grave ecological destruction sponsored by the World Bank,” by Eric De Ruest and Hélene Baillot, undeniably indicates.

As an aside, the first TV announcements routinely popped up, several weeks ago, to suggest that the U.S. populace ought to pitch in and cut it energy consumption by 3 percent per person. While the objective is admirable, the recommended curtailment is far too small and the diminishment process is starting around twenty OR MORE years too late. Besides, why don’t we even go a few steps further and take Walden Bello’s advise from “The Virtues of Deglobalization“:

The aim of the deglobalization paradigm is to move beyond the economics of narrow efficiency, in which the key criterion is the reduction of unit cost, never mind the social and ecological destabilization this process brings about. It is to move beyond a system of economic calculation that, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, made ‘the whole conduct of life…into a paradox of an accountant’s nightmare.’ An effective economics, rather, strengthens social solidarity by subordinating the operations of the market to the values of equity, justice, and community by enlarging the sphere of democratic decision making. To use the language of the great Hungarian thinker Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation, deglobalization is about ‘re-embedding’ the economy in society, instead of having society driven by the economy.

In tandem, let’s realize, as did Shamus Cooke, that “the industrial basis for an alternative energy superstructure needs to be created. Only by doing this can we seriously address the needs of the planet. Transforming our giant auto plants — many laying idle — into producers of solar panels, windmills, electricity–producing buoy’s, high-speed trains, electric busses and cars, etc., while massively investing in new research and technology to deal with climate change, is the only realistic way to drastically change direction in the time allotted.”

The alternative path to his, of course, is the exact one that we are following. We all know to where it leads — a 4C (or even) hotter world filled with massive loss of human and other forms of life, ruinous economic consequences, devastating weather patterns, an ocean level rise that puts many coastal regions at risk, massive fresh water shortages, food shortfalls, spreading pestilence and invasive species, and an extremely tenuous future for many generations to come.

Like our ancestors before fossil fuel were discovered, we can live without its benefits. Humankind, throughout our history on this planet, has been able to adapt to widely varying circumstances. Anyone who doubts this to be the case simply needs to compare the way that Inuits live in relation to 67 different uncontacted tribes in Brazil.

In other words, we CAN still adjust to widely varying conditions — even ones without fossil fuel. However, we, absolutely, cannot prepare to exist in a world that has states outside of the ranges that gave rise to and support of human life. All the same, we — out of willfulness, wishful thinking or ignorance — are willing to gamble that we can, it seems.

Perhaps we find it just too hard to give up our current ways of life even though our not doing so ensures that a large portion of the Earth will likely become unable to sustain life towards the end of this century. How tragically demented and selfish of us if, indeed, this is the case!

Of course, our drastically relinquishing fossil fuel use as much as is possible right away is not an easy action to endure. Yet, it can and has to be faced despite that the happening will mean hardship, privation and myriad kinds of losses.

After all, the sorts of difficulties that will exist after we forgo fossil fuel will be minor in comparison to the horrific adversities that would definitely be present if we do not deeply cut our collective carbon footprint in the near future. If anyone thinks that this cutting action is simply too hard to bear, he should for a moment picture the harshness that severe and worsening climate change could bring. Then, it becomes quickly clear about which trouble is doubtlessly preferable.

1. A review of the ASPO-USA conference from Chris Nelder: Oil and Gas Outlook. A further assessment from Steve Connor about the views of Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA): Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast.
2. PowerPoint – Earth Policy Institute – Building a …, Derek Wall’s review of The Enemy of Nature, by Joel Kovel; A Timely Reminder of the Real Limits to Growth (), and OpEdNews – Article: The Elephant in the Room. Ignoring …

If the U.S. populace somehow imagines that its members are viewed any differently than any other populations across the world that are used to produce maximal profits for the top economic class, there’s a rude awakening in store ahead. Further, most legislators simply do not care whether middle and lower class interests are or aren’t well served as long as they, themselves, can somehow make out well in the times ahead.

Besides, why should any Americans feel that they deserve to be treated more favorably by the transnational moneyed elites and their government backers than their counterparts across the rest of the world? As A. H. Bill reminds: “The richest 225 people in the world today control more wealth than the poorest 2.5 billion people. And… the three richest people in the world control more wealth than the poorest 48 nations.”

Occasionally someone making a staggering amount of money in a crooked sort of way might raise a few officials’ eyebrows or induce a mild reprimand. In addition, he might, occasionally, be singled out as the token fall guy so as to be made into a warning example as was Bernie Madoff. Most of the time, though, no action is usually undertaken to correct the situation when directors of major companies carry out activities that are, obviously, right on or over the edge of fraudulent practices.

As Barak Obama, perhaps hypocritically, chastened, “Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productive and sound business practices. We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales.”

Yet, he, himself, showed no hesitation during his election campaign over collecting $40,925 from the bailout fund recipient and nearly bankrupt investment house Bear Stearns, $161,850 from the bailout fund recipient and mortgage underwriter Morgan Stanley, as well as benefits from countless other institutions that have received government favors at taxpayers’ expense. As such, it’s hard in actuality to deliver more than just a mild verbal rebuke about these organizations’ modus operandi if one picks up a personal windfall from not meddling. Thus, the financial corruption continues at all levels of government.

A case in point is the self-serving oil trader Andrew Hall. His relationship with Citigroup’s (C.N) Phibro energy-trading unit brought him approximately $100 million in 2008 despite that his parent company registered a net deficit of $18.7 billion for the same year and received $45 billion in TARP funds.

However, it’s been pointed out that he could moderately adjust his current level of gain and continue to maintain the same procurement pattern if he manages to stay out of the limelight. If he follows this plan in the near future, his earnings and bonuses won’t likely duplicate the $250 million personal compensation that he’d received in the past five years. Yet, he could still make out quite well all the same!

In any event, one has to question such lavish rewards considering that Citigroup suffered a 95% loss of its share value since 2007 in relation to which Phibro “occasionally accounts for a disproportionate chunk of Citigroup income.” At the same time, the U.S. government will shortly be the owner of 34% of this company. Put more bluntly, is Andrew Hall’s personal prosperity and propensity to add to his private art collect the best use of taxpayers’ funds?

As long as he’s a lavish beneficiary, would he care if they weren’t? As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once suggested: “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.” Naturally, Andrew Hall aims to keep such a cozy arrangement intact.

Besides, his personal take is relatively inconsequential. It’s a mere pittance contrasted to the almost two and a quarter billion dollars grand total — roughly $2,217,800,000 — that the top ten U.S. business moguls collectively grossed as their own recompense in 2008.¹

At the same time, it cannot not be expected, in a market based economy, that political influence is not also a purchased commodity. Clearly, opinions are bought and sold just as easily as are any other products and services with payment being campaign funds, such as Obama’s, from big industry — offers of high paying future jobs and other lavish advantages dangled as bait.

On account of this kind of shady deal, tax subsidies connected to executive pay amounted to $20 billion in 2008 according to United for a Fair Economy (UFE) and Institute for Policy Studies. (Imagine if this money, instead, were allocated towards improvements in public education, provision of a universal heath-care plan or any number of other programs that could uplift the American public as a whole.)

During the same period, average CEO pay, at $10.54 million, was 344% higher than typical worker pay. This disparity, also, is generally indicative of a trend that increasingly funnels wealth upward rather than having it more equitably distributed across class lines.

Another sign of this ascendant drift can be found in the change between the first Forbes 400 report (1982) and its 2008 version. In 1982, an entrepreneur only needed slightly more than $100 million dollars to get on the list. By 2008, he wouldn’t be in the top 400 unless he’d garnered at least $1.3 billion. In other words, so much more wealth shot upward in the last twenty years that $100 million now is almost viewed as chump change in comparison to the new top gains.

In addition, Congressional reports have indicated that widespread tax avoidance tricks, like use of overseas banks that do not report amounts to the IRS, have cost taxpayers more than $2 billion annually. Certainly, these lost moneys could well be used to help people less fortunate. For example, the hidden $2 billion could be used to create job training programs for any of the one in nine Americans currently forced to rely on food stamps as an alternative to starvation.

To be eligible for such aid, a family of four, for example, has to have no more than $2,389 as its gross monthly income or 130% of the official poverty level and no more than $1,838 net monthly income or 100% of the poverty level. (There are few deductions and exceptions to the requirements allowed, along with limits for owned property value imposed, that further determine whether one meets qualifications.)

In other words, a typical household of four cannot receive this help if the gross income for the foursome exceeds $28,668 annually and, for an individual, the gross not to be surpassed is $14,088. Additionally, recipients cannot have a great deal of assets with a clearly defined, too high level of worth.

As such, they have to be nearly broke across the board. Meanwhile, it’s clearly disgraceful that more than 27,651,388 Americans are so extremely poor they require food assistance to try to make ends meet.

Even that help, though, is often not enough to prevent further poverty and many folks are unable to avoid outright destitution across the so-called wealthy U.S.A. So next, they lose their homes… and they lose them in droves.

The huge portion of Americans who do so are staggering: While the number of U.S. foreclosure filings climbed by more than 81% in 2008, the total is still sharply rising in 2009. In relation, 300,000 homes foreclosed per month from March to May in 2009 and 1.8 million homes represented the anticipated total for the first half of the year. With such a backdrop, one out of every 398 homes received a filing in April and a whooping 6.4 million homes are anticipated to be in foreclosure by mid-2011. Simultaneously, a record number of individuals, also, applied for bankruptcy.

In a similar vein, the jobless rate, despite some minor dips downward, is still seemingly on the rise. Therefore, the current number of out of work adults could well exceed 20% if all of the hopeless ones, who are no longer collecting unemployment benefits and who gave up looking for opportunities, are added into the mix.

Moreover, they will not be able to jump-start the economy so long as they cannot find work, and especially work at a living wage. After all, how can anyone make lots of purchases or take out bank loans if he has no reasonable income? So it follows that even more retail and wholesale stores, along with banks, will go belly up.

At the same time, the supply side of the market, itself, has created labor troubles. This is because goods have been overproduced. Consequently, there is overstock piled high in warehouses and shipping containers across the world ready to resume its path to the market once the spending reinitializes. However, spending cannot resume as long as the money has largely flowed to the top economic tier and away from average former and low wage workers, who can not expect to have decent paying jobs to create more goods until the current product glut diminishes.

In other words, consumers can’t buy much when money’s tight and work won’t be provided when there’s an oversupply of merchandise largely produced in second world sweatshops whose workers are paid so little that they hardly can put food on their own tables let alone make many more extravagant purchases — ones like toothpaste, soap and shampoo. Besides, they, too, face employment opportunities diminishing because worldwide sales are down for many of the products that, previously, their companies too copiously produced.

Concurrently, the bailouts, oriented towards fixing the credit side of the equation, are not addressing these sorts of supply side problems. Therefore, they will not keep the financial collapse from worsening.

Alternately put, TARP and other payoffs to the self-serving, unconscionable banksters and Wall Street high rollers largely responsible for the downturn will not produce an abundance of jobs. So the reasonable salaries, ultimately needed to buy the wares to cause industrial output to resume, won’t materialize any time soon.

It’s rather simple to understand, really. So why don’t Ben Bernanke and his colleagues seem to notice that massive job loss, itself, needs to be addressed posthaste? Why hasn’t a public works program been initiated? Why don’t they grasp that the act of offshoring all kinds of American jobs to maximize profits at the top tier does not ensure that products will be avidly snapped up by a greatly unemployed and underemployed public?

Since they, apparently, don’t understand, the downturn, with a few small upward twists, will remain in its plunging slide, which in turn will create further layoffs. All the while, the über-wealthy and their corporate supporters, such as most members of Congress, will continue to pamper themselves with capital largely derived from struggling taxpayers and massive loans that raise the federal deficit.

More to the point, how could the slump not last when the affluent elites gamble away huge fortunes comprising of their own and others’ money while manufacturing bubbles and Ponzi schemes in the process? How could anything change when they keep amassing more and more assets for themselves while indifferent to their impact on society as a whole?

Such practices as theirs, obviously, cannot sustain the American middle and under classes and it cannot buoy up the utmost bottom rung either. On account, scores of individuals of all ages continue to wind up in tent cities or ensconced on public park benches. (Supposedly, families with children represent the fastest growing subset of the homeless population in the U.S.A. at present and the average age of a homeless person is nine years old.)

When the upper-crust keeps getting richer by taking an ever greater portion of the overall wealth and government schemes assure that the process continues, nearly everyone else becomes increasingly cash poor. When every now and then big investors suffer hefty losses, the government steps in to shore them up again and again. However, this practice, clearly, does not help the populace in general. The evidence that it does not can be seen everywhere across the American landscape and the entire world.

It follows, then, that, “in the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2004, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.3% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.3%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.2%…”, according to G. William Domhoff, a sociology professor at University of California at Santa Cruz.²

Another way to measure the shift in wealth is by noting some of the corporate trends, themselves. As Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, at the Institute for Policy Studies, point out:

1. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs).
2. The Top 200 corporations’ sales are growing at a faster rate than overall global economic activity. Between 1983 and 1999, their combined sales grew from the equivalent of 25.0 percent to 27.5 percent of World GDP.
3. The Top 200 corporations’ combined sales are bigger than the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest 10.
4. The Top 200s’ combined sales are 18 times the size of the combined annual income of the 1.2 billion people (24 percent of the total world population) living in ‘’severe” poverty.
5. While the sales of the Top 200 are the equivalent of 27.5 percent of world economic activity, they employ only 0.78 percent of the world’s workforce.³

Especially exemplifying this type of corporate immensity is the Wal Mart company. For example, the Walton heirs have a collective worth of around $65 billion and over 1.7 billion shares, or 43%, of Wal Mart stock in addition to earning $29 billion off the stock price rise alone from November 2007 to June 2008.

Meanwhile, the Waltons pay their jean laborers in Nicaragua approximately $1.50/ day. Simultaneously, their average U.S. workers are given wages of about $12,000/ annum causing a full one half of Wal Mart’s 720,000 employees to qualify for food stamps.

At the same time, the clearly exploitive Wal Mart business model is considered an unqualified success — one that should be more often duplicated across the board. After all, it shows the capitalistic free market with its best possible outcome — profits beyond imagination and the American Dream come true (for the few who manage to take unfair advantage of the actual wealth producers)!

Perhaps, though, the best way to look at the new arrangement between citizens, State and the rising corporate structures is through this superlative summation by Benito Mussolini:

The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.

State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.⁴

Even if Benito Mussolini’s position has an alarmingly familiar ring to it, no one still should expect U.S. legislators to create laws any time soon that would enact tax code changes in order to remove subsidies that encourage overpayment to executives and that cost taxpayers $20 billion a year. Indeed, nobody should expect any major changes at all that would level the financial playing field, remove a sense of economic injustice or bring back jobs and reasonable wages to the American people.

As Joel H. Rassman, Toll Bros. CFO in 2006, explained about CEO Robert I. Toll’s $20 million compensation while shareholders were suffering a 22% loss: “I have yet to meet the person who has enough money.”

Like Toll, a majority of Congressional representatives, of whom many are multi-millionaires, apparently imagine that they never have quite enough for themselves and justify their dodgy choices accordingly. They, also, know who butters their bread and it surely is not the increasingly impoverished average U.S. citizens, who continue to be the indirect victims of corporate rapacity and pathetic corporate oversight by executives and Congressmen alike.

In relation, one wonders when a significant number of Americans will, finally, recognize that they’ve been had. Put another way by Andrew Greeley: “It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us. Perhaps the reason is that rich men are very clever at covering up what they do.”

This explanation in mind, we need not worry as much about the terrorists from abroad as the terrorists from above and the duped voters who repeatedly fall for political candidates pandering to this broadly malignant upper class. The latter bunch and their sycophantic legislative admirers, more than any foreign guerrillas, are leading the world’s wealthiest nation into ever deeper ruin.

1. ”Top CEO collected $702 mln in 2008,” Yahoo! News.
2. ”Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power.”
3. CorpWatch, “Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power.”
4. Benito Mussolini, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (Rome, ‘Ardita’ Publishers, 1935): 133-135.

One does not have to look only at charitable institutions to find this to be the case. One can see it in the teacher who works day after day against daunting odds to uplift materially disadvantaged children living in extreme slums. Further, the Girl Scouts, who devise a special project at a senior center, exemplify this mind set when they earnestly strive to bring joy to the elderly of whom many are on their last legs. Likewise, the social workers tirelessly toiling to help families whose homes have been foreclosed and the countless volunteers who gather supplies for victims of disasters typify this focus.

Therefore, one has to wonder about the morality of numerous U.S. government and business leaders, especially the ones who routinely put their own limitless self-gain above the needs of others. What sorts of people are these? Just how did their families and society in general fail them in matters of conscience?

In considering the answers, one often winds up incredulous and outraged by their actions. After all, what kinds of individuals lie about their underlying motives while they systematically destroy the people, the culture and the country of Iraq primarily in order to wrestle control of their oil for companies that favor American interests? What sort of individuals condone torture as their nation’s covert plan to help ensure that domination of the Middle East can be better assured? What sort of individuals publicly talk of service to society and change in which we can all believe while expanding resource wars in order to secure geo-political supremacy over regions rich in fossil fuels at a time during which scientific evidence inarguable points to the need to direct national focus on benign forms of energy?

Certainly, they are aware that this redirection of plans is a necessary precondition for future generations to not face a living hell on Earth due to climate change effects. Surely they must know that they have no moral or legal right to invade other lands for coveted war spoils regardless of the degree that they seem essential to have. Do they?

It is especially worthwhile to ponder the responses to these kinds of questions as one, also, considers that these same individuals, of whom many are U.S. Congressmen, annually allocate fifty-four percent of the federal budget to military related endeavors. Simultaneously, they are mandated to hand over nineteen percent further to the ongoing payment of interest on monies currently owed to maintain their present scale of funding for armed service, bailouts and other reckless ventures.

These circumstances leave a whopping twenty-seven percent left over for ALL other U.S. programs unless, of course, further loans beyond the ongoing intended ones are taken out, i.e., to purchase Swine Flu vaccines. With these additional costs in mind, one can anticipate that legislators will continue in arrangements to borrow staggering sums of money to sustain their disastrous spending patterns, as is mentioned in “The U.S. Federal Budget Pipeline: Where Do The Dollars Drain?” All the while that individual States, like California, and individuals continue to be devastated by the indirect consequences.

In a similar vein, one questions about the morality of people who keep supporting big business practices and amassing wealth for themselves¹ like modern duplicates of mad King Midas while an increasing number of their fellow Americans wind up jobless and homeless. Meanwhile, a backdrop like this leads Ramsey Clark to suggest, “But we’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.”

Accordingly, U.S. employment positions continue to transfer to offshore sites to bolster a plan for maximum profits for the already grossly enriched at the expense of the populace at large. Analogously for companies on U.S. soil, cutbacks and closures have a similarly deleterious effect in terms of under and unemployment.

In relation, the public, obviously, cannot make lots of purchases while an inadequate supply of money is coming into households during which time store shelves are overstocked due to past practices wherein the market became saturated with far too many items for a wide variety of products. Consequently, the manufacture of goods grinds to an almost complete halt and the economy continues to tumble.

Yet no Works Progress Administration (WPA) and extended Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) programs are put in place to make up for the financial deficits that average people are experiencing even though the move could, indirectly, jumpstart spending. Further, the groups that stand to fabulously benefit from the status quo remaining as is continue to do so even as the masses flounder.

As Paul Kane points out in “Lawmakers Reveal Health-Care Investments”:

The list of [lawmakers] who have personal investments in the corporations that will be affected by the [health-care] legislation — which President Obama has called this year’s highest domestic priority — includes Congress’s most powerful leaders and a bipartisan collection of lawmakers in key committee posts. Their total health-care holdings could be worth $27 million, because congressional financial disclosure forms released yesterday require reporting of only broad ranges of holdings rather than precise values of assets.

Health care is not the only industry that is both heavily regulated by Congress and heavily invested in by lawmakers. As The Washington Post reported Thursday, more than 20 members of the House leadership and the House Financial Services Committee hold investments in companies that received more than $200 billion in federal bailouts.

On the Senate banking committee, at least a half-dozen senators had significant investments in companies that benefited from the $700 billion bailout legislation that the panel helped draft last fall. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) reported $18,000 to $95,000 in investments in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bonds, and also that he sold at least $15,000 in Fannie ’step-up’ bonds at the end of last year. The committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Miss.), reported holding $260,000 to $850,000 in money market and retirement accounts with Countrywide, Citigroup and Wachovia.²

Now contrast their bounty with these stark facts of which all were derived from Michael Moore’s investigations.³ (One can agree with his overall perceptions or not. Either way, it does not change the basic actualities.)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually reported that 54.5 million people were uninsured for at least part of the year. Health Insurance Coverage: Early Release of Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, 2006. Centers for Disease Control. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/insur200706.pdf

According to the most recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office issued in January of this year [2007], for the ten-year period, 2006 through 2016, the projected spending [for medical purposes] is $848 billion. “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2008 to 2017,” Congressional Budget Office, January 2007. http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/77xx/doc7731/01-24-BudgetOutlook.pdf

At one point, Moore notes where the U.S. ranks in terms of health care around the world. ‘The United States slipped to No. 37 in health care around the world, just slightly ahead of Slovenia,’ he said. That ranking is based on a 2000 report from the World Health Organization…

Meanwhile, the health-care industry lobbyists are trying their utmost to guarantee that there are no major shifts in US medical policies. Why would they press for alternatives when it has proven to be such a boon for them and many legislators to keep everything the same? Therefore, they throw almost a million and a half dollars per day at the effort to shape Congressional opinion while sometimes bribing or threatening government officials in the process.⁴

Concurrently, let’s not forget that these tempted lawmakers are the very same ones who vote on war and black ops budgets for which, if they make certain choices, they’ll be lavishly compensated with money for their reelection campaigns, as well as receive stock option tips and other perks, such as highly lucrative job offers after they leave public office. All considered, what a boon such alluring plans en toto have been!

For example, “members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon.”⁵ At the same time, the heads of companies that receive favorable legislation pertaining to subsidies and bailout cash do not make out poorly either. As such, the salaries for directors of certain organizations and their bonus payments are considerable and, for the ones who don’t get direct funding, they still make out well due to favorable deals made relative to resources (i.e., the petrol, minerals, metals, etc.) indirectly obtained through U.S. military assaults.

As such, they can do well for themselves even when they do not make out as well as the banking/oil Rockefeller family or the Rothschilds, with their respective holdings equaling roughly (US) $11 trillion and (U.S.) $100 trillion according to Gaylon Ross Sr., author of Who’s Who of the Global Elite.⁶ Correspondingly, Bank of America chief Ken Lewis made a mere $24.8 million in 2007 while performance bonuses were lavishly paid out in this banksters’ paradise, one managed so poorly that it has taken in at least $25 billion in bailout funds.⁷

This sort of happening being more the norm than not, it is apparent that no importance has been attached to Abraham Lincoln’s counsel: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.”

With the beefed up surveillance of private citizens by operatives in assorted government agencies and the above sorts of disasters, some researchers are understandably questioning whether the U.S. is slipping towards a permanent plutocratic, oligarchical and/or fascist state. If so for the latter condition, the opinions of Naomi Wolf and Laurence Britt, as well as this following description from the Wikipedia anti-capitalism section,⁸ might have an uncomfortable ring of familiarity.

…Fascism protected the land-owning elites and is regarded as a reaction against the rising power of the working class…

Adolf Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that ‘the attitude of the State towards capital would be comparatively simple and clear. Its only object would be to make sure that capital remained subservient to the State’. Hitler made a clear distinction between ‘capital which is purely the product of creative labour and … capital which is exclusively the result of financial speculation.’…

Marxists argue that fascism is a form of state capitalism that emerges when laissez-faire capitalism is in crisis and in need of rescue by government intervention. Fascists have operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim has been to promote ’superior’ individuals and weed out the weak. In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class. Lawrence Britt suggests that protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism. Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because ‘the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise… Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social.’

Classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises argued that fascism was collectivist and anti-capitalistic. According to Mises, fascism maintained an illusion of respecting private property, since individuals could not use their property how they wished because the government frequently enacted regulations (on behalf of government allies in the business sector) that were not in line with the functioning of a free market.

Historian Robert Paxton contends that fascists’ anti-capitalism was highly selective; the socialism that the fascists wanted was National Socialism, which denied only foreign or enemy property rights (including that of internal enemies). They did, however, cherish national producers.

One might add that they particularly cherish fiscal producers, wizards that magically pull a seemingly endless stream of money out of the air for their favorite recipients. As H. L. Birum, Sr., suggests, “The Federal Reserve Bank is nothing but a banking fraud and an unlawful crime against civilization. Why? Because they ‘create’ the money made out of nothing, and our Uncle Sap Government issues their ‘Federal Reserve Notes’ and stamps our Government approval with NO obligation whatever from these Federal Reserve Banks, Individual Banks or National Banks, etc.”

Moreover, one can easily supplement his views with those of John Adams: “Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.” (Can you imagine the comments that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and other founders of the nation would make were they to observe a number of contemporary Congressional activities in relation to banks and other organizations?)

At the same time, it’s not all that hard to conclude that, for some time, U.S. government policy has been one typically called “last man standing.” In other words, it is to throw the majority of federal funds into an effort to commandeer the last amounts of nonrenewable (and, in some cases, renewable, although depleting) critical material goods (through global resource battles, programs like NAFTA and so forth) with a sort of survival of the fittest (a modernized Social Darwinian derivative) model in mind.

As Henry Kissinger quipped, “Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy” and “control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” In other words, let’s use the troops to enforce hegemony everywhere!

With such a Machiavellian frame of reference for expert guidance, the majority of US federal funds, of course, will continue to be slated for such endeavors as broadening wars, interest payments on further borrowed money and ongoing bailouts. In a similar vein, the fittest do not include the looted American middle and poor classes. They are immaterial and, as such, are mostly ignored or, if in terribly dire straits, pushed out of homes to live in city streets (90,000 in L.A. alone), tent cities (updated Hoovervilles) and car parks if they are fortunate enough to still have a vehicle in which to live after their domiciles are foreclosed and their jobs are removed. (Meanwhile, such loss is simply another program to enhance the monetary advancement by the elites — the ones fittest to survive in the ever worsening environmental and financial downturns brought on by draconian economic growth policies.)

In the end, one has to ask whether practices that are aimed at government and business leaders mutually servicing each other represent the best interests of Americans and other peoples of the world. Assuming that this is not the case, great accountability must be demanded of these so-called leaders.

If they cannot be made to conform to reasonable moral codes of conduct, the USA will surely become a terrible place to be a citizen for the majority of people who find that, while conditions in their personal lives deteriorate, the wealthy elites make out just fine due to self-enriching agendas, like deficient public health-care programs, that put everyone else in jeopardy. Put another way by Justice Louis D. Brandeis: “we can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

1. Google Answers: average income of members of the u.s. congress and The Congressional Millionaires Club.
2. ”Lawmakers Reveal Health-Care Investments,” Washington Post.
3. MichaelMoore.com : SiCKO : ‘SiCKO’ News : AP vs. THE … .
4. ”Health-care industry spending over $1.4 million per day on lobbying,” Washington Post.; “Ethics Panel Rebukes DeLay,” Washington Post; “DownWithTyranny!: Has The Heath Care Industry Bribed Enough …; MEDIGATE; “Econbrowser: Fiscal Exposure and Medicare Part D“; “Lies, bribes and hidden costs,” Salon.com; () “Who tried to bribe Rep. Smith?” Timothy Noah, Slate Magazine.
5. FINANCE: U.S. Lawmakers Invested in Iraq, Afghanistan Wars, IPS.
6. The True Evil Doers.
7. ”Obama talks tough on CEO pay,” CNN, Feb. 4, 2009; Executive PayWatch Database; “Bank Of America To Get Billions More In Bailout …“; “Bank of America Has yet to Repay bailout funds to TARP,” NY Post; “BofA receives another $20 billion from U.S. bailout fund.”
8. Naomi Wolf, “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps,” Guardian; “George W Bush and the 14 points of fascism“; “Anti-capitalism,” Wikipedia.

Despite that DoD officials removed the offensive section from their educational resources at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance is still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many government departments and agencies. Indeed the participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960’s by peaceable Quakers and FOR members after having discussed Gandhi’s Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza. (My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both were in attendance. When the film crew focused on us, she stood tall, faced the agents with their telephoto lens, glared in disdainful defiance and, simultaneously, throw the corner of her coat over my face. Afterwards, she muttered, “How dare they try to intimidate us!”)

This sort of happening in mind, the treatment of Nobel Peace Award winner Aung San Sui Kyi in Myanmar is not necessarily all that different than the response that she’d receive in the USA and, while it’s commendable that American spokespersons publicly object to her most recent arrest, they, certainly, might seem to be a bunch of hypocrites. This is due to the fact that a number of Nobel Peace Award recipients, such as American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), have had difficulties of their own on American soil.

For example, “AFSC’s work, always open and resolutely nonviolent, has been under government surveillance for decades. The Service Committee secured nearly 1,700 pages of files from the FBI under a Freedom of Information request in 1976. These files show that the FBI kept files on AFSC that dated back to 1921. Ten other federal agencies kept files on AFSC, including the CIA, Air Force, Navy, Internal Revenue Service, Secret Service, and the State Department. The CIA has intercepted overseas mail and cables in the 1950s, and some AFSC offices (and even its staff’s homes) have been infiltrated and burglarized in the late 1960s into the 1970s.”

In relation, AFSC associate general secretary for justice and human rights, Joyce Miller, asked, “How can we speak of spreading democracy in Iraq while dismantling it here at home?” She further remarked, “Political dissent is fundamental to a free and democratic society. It should not be equated with crime.”

Add to the AFSC problems, those pertaining to Nobel Peace Award recipient Nelson Mandela, who only a year ago had the designation “terrorist” removed from his name, under protest by the State Department, so that he no longer suffered travel restrictions from the US government. Yet his travel curtailment was not nearly as awful as was Ramzy Baroud’s blockage. He, the editor of Palestine Chronicle, had his US passport seized by a consular officer at an overseas American Embassy. [3] Similarly, Senator Edward Kennedy was, also, flagged by the US no-fly list.

Then again, Ted Kennedy received much less harassment than did Nobel Peace Award winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire after her flight from Guatemala had been directed to Ireland through Houston:

She was probably tired and ready to get back to Belfast, where her attempts to bring about an end to The Troubles in 1976 made her at 32 the youngest Nobel Peace Prize-winner ever. Since then, she’s been given the Pacem in Terris Award by Pope John Paul II, and the United Nations selected her (along with the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Jordan’s Queen Noor and a dozen or so other fellow Nobel Laureates) as an honorary board member of the International Coalition for the Decade.

Unfortunately for Maguire, her flight back home to Northern Ireland was routed through Houston, where none of that meant diddly. Federal Customs officials were far less interested in any of that than they were in a box on the back of the transit form she filled out on her flight.

“They questioned me about my nonviolent protests in USA against the Afghanistan invasion and Iraqi war,” Maguire said later in a statement. ‘They insisted I must tick the box in the Immigration form admitting to criminal activities.

Maguire was detained for two hours — grilled once, fingerprinted, photographed, and grilled again. She missed her flight home. She was only released after an organization she helped found — the Nobel Women’s Initiative — started kicking up a fuss.

On can add to her troubles countless other ones wherein human rights and environmental supporters have been repeatedly hassled for no other reason than that they’re holding views that don’t jive with positions at any number of U.S. government institutions. One needn’t return in time to the McCarthy Era to find many individuals who have been investigated and persecuted for holding vilified opinions. For example, Stephen Lendman, a peace advocate and writer in his seventies with a permanent knee injury that delimits travel, has been repeatedly investigated by the FBI.

At the same time, he is joined by myriad others such as assorted activists in Maryland whose names were put on federal terrorist lists by state police who infiltrated their groups. As such, their perfectly legal activities, freedom of speech and right to unhindered assembly have been criminalized.

Simultaneously, there’s a certain inescapable irony and disingenuous quality presented by the Western government heads who are harshly critical of the Iran crackdown on dissenting citizens while they, themselves, condone similar ironfisted policies in their own lands. Their two-faced position is barely hidden beneath the surface of their mock concern for the well-being of Iranian protesters as they urge their own and allied troops into battle, show little (if any) sincere remorse over the slaughter of masses of civilians that happen in the process and make sure that demonstrators at home are disregarded, denigrated or preemptively rounded up as happened at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Then again, one might find himself in pretty good company if he were singled out as unpatriotic and treacherous for holding viewpoints or undertaking actions that go contrary to the perspectives that a certain hawkish and totalitarian segment of society holds. All the same, every method conceivable might be used to hunt down the offenders and, when taken to the extreme, render their seemingly provocative positions ineffectual by any means possible, including imprisonment and murder.

Anyone who doubts this to be the case needs only to remember about what happened to people like Howard Fast, the slain Freedom Riders Andy Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, the thirteen shot students at Kent State University at which Ohio National Guardsman fired sixty-seven rounds over a thirteen second period, and scores of others who have stood against mainstream policies.

Meanwhile, stigmatizing dissidents is a fairly common practice. As such, “There are 1.1 million people on the [U.S.] Terrorist Watch List and there is a 35 percent error rate, minimum, for that list,” according to ACLU’s Michael German. [6] Furthermore, the overzealous and aggressive surveillance tactics used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to check the public’s e-mails, telephone calls and other communications are the same ones as were in use during George W. Bush’s administration. Likewise, the amount of spying on personal exchanges is as high as it ever was.

In relation to recent claims by Justice Department and national security officials that the overcollection was unintentional, House representative, Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey and Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, commented, “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental.” Additionally, the act of tracking e-mailed transmissions and other interactions has seemed in violation of federal law according to lawyers at the Justice Department. Regardless, the practice continues.

At the same time, the decision to designate social activists as troublemakers, while singling them out for intimidation, threats and investigations, carries serious legal and political implications in democratic societies. The further measure of subjecting them to the sorts of difficulties that Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ramzy Baroud, AFSC members and innumerable others have endured is clearly based in xenophobic, paranoid and despotic thinking. It embodies the kind of authoritarian mentality and oppressive activities that one finds in the worst types of tyrannical regimes.

As Harry S. Truman suggested, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” Due to this fear, are we, then, to all conform with lock step in perverse obedience to the State’s dictates, outlooks and agendas in an increasingly Orwellian milieu? If not, then we must constantly remind ourselves and each other of US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s vision: “Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”

Indeed, many Americans and people from other countries knew that domination of a region rich in fossil fuels represented the primary motive for the Iraq incursion and the only reason that Iran is not similarly assaulted is that it has an arsenal, unlike Saddam Hussein, capable of rendering serious damage in retaliation. Besides, the U.S. military is stretched too thin as it is with approximately 1,000 bases worldwide, along with operations occurring on every continent, such as the AFRICOM sorties, which are generally tied to oil company interests as the map in the link shows.

Furthermore, plans to invade Iraq were long in the making, but the problem was finding the grounds, legal or otherwise, to obtain the support of the public for such an outrageous act of violence, which to date has led to the displacement of millions of Iraqis and the slaughter of more than one million individuals, including over 4,300 U.S. troops. In tandem, George W. Bush and Tony Blair knew that the UN inspectors would not find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and were hard pressed to find a reason that could justify the war. So the U.S. President came up with alternatives:

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan “to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover.” Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be “brought out” to give a public presentation on Saddam’s WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed [in a memo written approximately two months prior to America's preemptive attack on Iraq that] even without a second [United Nations] resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was “solidly with the president.”

This in mind, it behooves the public, particularly the American public, to realize that U.S. armed invasions and covert operations, in general, have little to do with protecting Americans from global terrorists and more to do with getting fossil fuels on behalf of the Pentagon and favored companies, whose heads contribute to government officials’ campaign funds and offer other perks like high paying jobs upon the completion of terms in office. As such, it would be more accurate were the directors of the Department of Defense to change its name to the Department of Assault. Doing so would, certainly, better reflect the United States history that has been well chronicled by Bill Blum, who indicates, “From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.”

Blum further reminds that there existed a total of 168 separate invasions of countries around the world by the United States. This information was derived from the revision to the 1969 rendition of the Appendix to a report researched by the Foreign Affairs Division, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1975 and listed as “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945.

Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan summarized, in talks and The Age of Turbulence his displeasure with the Bush administration. “My biggest frustration remained the president’s unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending,” Greenspan indicated. “Not exercising the veto power became a hallmark of the Bush presidency . . . To my mind, Bush’s collaborate-don’t-confront approach was a major mistake.”

It, certainly, was and, in the Obama administration, it still is a major mistake compounded by other factors. These include the bailout funds committed as of December 2008 in the amount of $8.5 trillion, which represents 60% of the GDP and the $1,449 billion, 54% of the federal budget, allocated for military expenditures in 2009. (This is in contrast to $1,210 billion, which represents 46% of the $2,650 billion total intended for the 2009 federal outlay, which is largely comprised of money borrowed from Chinese government controlled institutions).

Out of such a reckless and cavalier setting, the total federal debt, itself, has blossomed to around $100 trillion, according to some researchers, based on the ongoing pattern of spending loaned funds and expecting future taxpayers to foot the ultimate bill in a Ponzi-like scheme, one that makes the USA unarguably the world’s biggest debtor. (While Barack Obama seems to consider spiraling healthcare costs as the primary driver of the public deficit, surely he jests. Based on the tabulations above, it is clear that warfare and preparedness for extended wars is the largest cost that taxpayers subsume.)

Simultaneously, the IMF and WTB directors, in a way, must be beside themselves with glee over the mounting shortfall. Like the personification of Bernie Madoff, Simon Legree and Uncle Scrooge all rolled into one, they draw together in a perfect vision of eager anticipation over the financial killing yet to come.

As Vi Ransel explains about them in two sections of “Manufacturing Poor People“:

The World Bank loans money to a poor country to “help” in its development, to build up a part of its economy. “If”, and almost certainly when (that’s The Plan) the poor country is unable to pay the usurious interest on the loan because of declining exports (again, The Plan), the country has to borrow more money in order to service the debt. Enter the [International Monetary Fund].

The IMF extends more loans, with more of those stainless steel strings more tightly bound around the victim, er, I mean, loan recipient, trussing up the “benefiting” poor nation like a Thanksgiving turkey about to be devoured by the West, The Rich. The country which borrows money… must give tax breaks to Western transnationals. The country must slash wages and refuse to protect local businesses from being ravaged by cheap imports and corporate takeovers.

The country is further strong-armed to sell, at fire sale prices, all its government-owned mines, its railroads, industries and utilities to privately-owned, mostly-foreign corporations. The country must allow its forests to be clearcut and its land to be strip-mined. Money for education, healthcare, food assistance and the transportation infrastructure must be sheared back to service the debt. And the interest on the debt, through the wondrously magical Western miracle of compound interest, keeps growing and growing and growing and growing and on and on and on and on… And all the while, the people of the country are less able to feed themselves, since they are forced to grow cash crops for export to feed that debt service.

Well, U.S. transnationals didn’t intend to ever let that happen again. There would be no more giving a real leg up to potential competitors. And thus we arrived at where we are today. And, in fact, the ruse works so well, that since the Seventies the plutocracy has been using the very same template here at home, – with an increasingly heavy hand. See U.S. auto workers, healthcare, the bank bailout, foreclosed homes, 600,00 jobs a month jettisoned, the murder of California, et al. Who, or what, will be next?

Will it be the entire USA? Perhaps it will be in that the public finances in America are, currently, arranged along this line:

In Fiscal Year 2008, $412 Billion was spent to pay back interest on money owed to holders of the National Debt. It represents the third biggest federal expense and the full amount owed in 2009, due to continued borrowing, will in all likelihood be higher as it equaled $214 Billion by May. Furthermore, educational spending in 2008 received a mere 4.4 percent of the budget while the accumulated estimated total for the interest owed on the National Debt is estimated to be $445,095,000,000, although the sum will, obviously, increase as more money is borrowed.

Meanwhile, the current monthly aggregate for the 2009 interest owed is roughly $42.8 billion per month while monthly federal outlay is approximately $220.8 billion per month with this interest paid back each month representing slightly more than 5.1 % of each tax dollar spent or, posed another way, over nineteen cents for each one expended while the budget deficit, itself, entails loans close to fifty cents on each dollar paid out with an increase in borrowing by $87 billion to $1.3 trillion expected in 2010 according to a White House spokesperson. [10]

In addition, there will, ultimately, be less tax dollars to collect in that presently, America is hemorrhaging jobs at one every thirty seconds according to some analysts. So why not spend money to bail out the families living in their cars and under tarps in tent cities by providing employment and income through a widespread Works Progress Administration (WPA) and extended Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) programs as occurred during the Great Depression?

Wouldn’t such a plan go further than bailouts to financial institutions and the ever present resource wars as a way to jumpstart the American economy, as well as US taxpayers who are watching 73 % of every tax dollar going to military expenditures (54%) and interest payments (19+ %)? (It forces one to wonder from where funds are going to derive for universal public health care, future Social Security payments, Medicare, Medicaid, public education and assorted other programs, such sustainable benign energy provision on a model close to energy independent Denmark’s enviable prototype as described by Thomas L. Friedman in “Flush With Energy.”

Then again, the Pentagon directors probably have concluded that they need their resource wars in that the U.S. military is the single biggest user of oil in the world and it takes lots of oil to get the further oil supplied to American favored oil companies so that it can be returned in large measure and at high expense to the armed forces. In other words, it requires the type of assurance for a continued oil supply that only beaten down countries and puppet governments can render.

On account, open combat and covert operations will be the favored means to obtain fossil fuels. On account, the military will continue to drain away the majority of the U.S. federal budget while the US covert operations budget, by itself, will surpass a staggering $50 billion for 2009.

“‘That’s the largest-ever sum,’ according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer — a three percent increase over last year’s total. It makes the Pentagon’s secret operations, including the intelligence budgets nested inside, ‘roughly equal in magnitude to the entire defense budgets of the UK, France or Japan,’ Sweetman adds. All in all, about seven and a half percent of the Defense Department’s total spending is now classified.”

All in all, the ongoing U.S. financial mess provides signs that, while China’s rising, the USA will never gain back its former glory days that gave rise to both world dominance and a large middle class. As the country continues to lose jobs at the rate of approximately one every thirty seconds to either offshore company sites or business cutbacks, it has nowhere else to go except to sink down into increased hardship, as well as some degree of destitution, for an increasing number of Americans and the nation as a whole.

The unending act of misappropriating a land’s collective assets year after year has a way of ensuring this final result. As Ethel Grodzins Romm alleges,“What could our worst enemy do to damage this strong and beautiful country? He could do no better than to get us to squander our human and natural resources on dubious missions and then trick us into plugging our ears against the howls of those who object.”

The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.

– President Bush in June 2003

I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved … I told the country we did that. And I also told them it was legal. We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it.

– President Bush in April 2008 about interrogation tactics used on detainees.

As Americans, we can take enormous pride in the fact that courage has been inspired by our own struggle for freedom, by the tradition of democratic law secured by our forefathers and enshrined in our Constitution. It is a tradition that says all men are created equal under the law and that no one is above it.

– President Obama in November 2008

Based on legal precedence, there is plenty of evidence that interrogation techniques used in Guantanamo Bay and other US run facilities, such as Abu Ghraib, constituted torture in violation of US and international laws. It makes no difference that some slick legal counselors, that were under pressure to deliver lies, skirted these regulations and informed operatives that barbaric actions are acceptable. Regardless of the justifications used, the infractions still stand and represent a breach of laws that government agencies are sworn to uphold.

Indeed, serious circumvention of statutes should always result in legal proceedings and usually does so unless some affair is settled, to the satisfaction of all parties involved, outside of judicial processes. At the same time, refusal to obey illicit orders, even when commanded to conduct them by superiors, does stand as defense in courts as events related to the My Lai slaughter and similar incidents verify. As such, any claim that one is forced to obey wrongful orders has no weight any more than it did during Stanley Milgram’s experiments wherein subjects assumed that they were electrically shocking others and carried out the action merely because they were told to do so.

Therefore, it seems easy to conclude that anyone either authorizing or implementing illicit and agonizing practices on captives, prisoners legally deemed innocent until proven guilty, needs to be publicly investigated and brought to justice when found culpable. That it is not expedient due to extrajudicial complications, such as pertain to future behaviors of CIA agents and as President Obama alleges, should have no bearing. In the end, the whole matter is this simple.

At the same time, President Obama’s release of the four memos provided a perfect moment to show the world about the true meddle of which America is made after the nation lost its way for the past eight years. So why let Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish counter-terrorism judge who prosecuted General Augusto Pinochet, take the lead against six senior Bush officials condoning torture based on allegations by five Spaniards previously held at Guantanamo Bay?

Instead, US officials, in good faith and with earnest determination, should emulate his actions with the first step taken being to engage in consultations with a number of legal experts, including Lawrence Velvel, who has written briefs for the Supreme Court, and Vincent Bugliosi, who meted out justice to Charles Manson for his egging on associates to commit heinous crimes.

Indeed, these seasoned legal advisors, unlike their underhanded rogue counterparts, well understand acceptable codes of conduct as defined by US Constitutional law, military regulations and international rules of engagement to which the USA is bound as a signatory. Moreover, there are no jurisprudential grounds for coddling these criminals and to do so is, frankly, outrageous, unjust and immoral!

More specifically, it is clear that the use of torture circumvents US law. The Eighth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, particularly, regulates the Federal use of “cruel and unusual punishment” while the Fourteenth Amendment ratifies “equal protection” even at the State level and would, seemingly, apply to all US territorial jurisdictions. Indeed, Justice Brennan, in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), determined that, “There are, then, four principles by which we may determine whether a particular punishment is ‘cruel and unusual.’”

* An “essential predicate” is “that a punishment must not by its severity be degrading to human dignity,” especially as pertains to torture.

* “A severe punishment that is obviously inflicted in wholly arbitrary fashion.”

* “A severe punishment that is clearly and totally rejected throughout society.”

* “A severe punishment that is patently unnecessary.”

At the same time, it is clear from the language used in the Eighth Amendment that it was, in large measure, passed to ban government agents from subjecting incarcerated persons to atrocious forms of corporal punishment. The prohibition is not a nebulous set of loose regulations into which legal teams are free to implant their own spurious understandings of cruelty. Instead, it is a clear-cut prohibition whose meanings and intentions were largely fixed at the time that the Eighth Amendment was sanctioned.

Meanwhile, the Military Commissions Act is equally clear on the issue of persecution and outright prohibits the use of acts that inflict suffering, including extreme mental or physical pain. At the same time, its chief interpreters judge water boarding to be a war crime and an excruciating brutal punishment.

On account of such a viewpoint, Major Edwin Glenn was sentenced to ten years of hard labor for inflicting simulated drowning upon a Filipino prisoner at the turn of the century and a US military tribunal found at least one Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, guilty of war crimes after W. W. II for his use of the “water cure” and other acts of cruelty upon Americans and for which he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. In a similar vein, a US army officer was court-martialed in 1968 after assisting in a water boarding exercise executed upon a Vietnamese insurgent.

Just how could the memos’ authors and the prison torturers have missed the implications of these prior judgments? If appropriate rulings are not applied to law breakers in the event that they are given undeserved dispensations or pardons, what will serve as impediments to these laws being broken again in the future? Moreover, does the military ban on water boarding and other horrors need to be more defined than these prior happenings irrevocably prove?

The report from the Senate armed services committee, written at the end of 2008, hints at the answer: “The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

In a similar vein, water boarding and other forms of severe torment are condemned by Geneva Conventions, the Torture Act, the Detainee Treatment Act and United Nations protocol, as Manfred Nowak, U.N. special rapporteur, makes clear, “The United States, like all other states that are part of the U.N. convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court.”

In the final reckoning, it is certain that US operatives rationalized, condoned and carried out acts of torture. In addition, ignorance of the law cannot stand as any sort of credible legal justification! Besides, it is not as if the above information regarding the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, the past military proceedings against water boarders and international prohibitive laws was not easily and publicly accessible through an internet search, a library visit or some other means.

Consequently, there is absolutely no excuse for the perpetuators of this violent conduct to not be brought to justice regardless of the rationale used by the equally liable and devious shysters that devised the memos based on their errant fanciful musings rather than pertinent facts.

So please, let’s all urge US Congressional representatives to hold a public investigation and once again set America right with the world as best as can be done after the debauchery that many detainees endured as a matter of policy that transgressed US edicts in every sense of the word. If American agents cannot abide by clearly defined legalities, then how can the US leadership possibly expect anyone else around the world, including typical US citizens, to do so? Do laws not stand for something more than a sham that only apply when convenient? Is the world to now witness the USA making a mockery of its own judicial mandates and international statutory rulings?

If so, our entire nation, after having lost its way, truly is as bad as any common thuggish pirating lowlife on the high seas or elsewhere. Surely we, as a people and a nation, can collectively rise above that despicably squat, base and deficient stature. If not, all of the underlying principles of our country’s founding fathers, our justice system, itself, and the ethical underpinnings that make our country truly great are without value. They are merely empty platitudes and nothing more.

In addition, many people, including those affiliated with the US military, completely ignore references to Halliburton (a company in which Dick Cheney has stock²) and war profiteering. Why do you think that the entire infrastructure was bombed out? Why do you think that at least hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars and a billion dollars worth of weapons “disappeared” in Iraq?³ How could this happen under military watch unless there were perhaps some sort of calculated collusion and/or gross negligence

Simultaneously, young children and other civilians are dying from contaminated water and malnourishment every day in Iraq as an indirect outcome from this war. At the same time, the Iraqi populous is supposed to be grateful to our troops for liberating them from the potential destruction that Saddam Hussein could have wrought had he maintained his rule? The Iraqis are pleased with the surge results? The Iraqis like the thought of turning over THEIR oil to whatever companies that Bush and his Iraq puppet government select? They like having been invaded by foreign “liberators”, who destroyed their jobs, their schools, their homes, their streets, their way of life? They like offering their children for sex in order to pay for food? Would you? (One only need to type “Iraqi children sex” into a search bar to see the full magnitude of this last particular outrage.)

We are not discussing Disney World or other fantasy spots to which American adults take their own children. We are not discussing relative rates of homicide in Baghdad and NYC. This conversation is about Iraq and the outcomes from US involvement there, and it is damn hard to state anything good about the situation.

As such, the majority of Americans are against this war and want our troops quickly brought home. So, there goes anyone’s argument that this is a democracy and our troops are there because the American population wants it.

No, this plutocratic nation is becoming increasingly undemocratic. All the same, it may become a democracy again.

For now, though, everything that any goodhearted, moral, patriotic troop imagined that he fought for is in jeopardy. So, it is understandable that lots of individuals and groups are upset about the roles of the troops. At the same time, many of them don’t think that the troops are stupid when they choose to stay in Iraq based on wrongful orders involving invasion of a country that had no instigators carrying out 9/11 attacks, nor a huge hidden cache of WMDs. Instead, they just don’t want to see anyone killed.That includes our “own” young people over there for sure. As Admiral Gene LaRocque stated, “I hate it when they say, ‘He gave his life for his country.’ Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.” Our policies and their related actions, also, kill countless others, although primarily civilians.⁴

Unfortunately, the lives of Iraqis are irrelevant to some people. Meanwhile, others are afraid that if the US leaders keep up this bad behavior, American lives across the board will be treated with the same irrelevance by our enemies. Civilians and truth are always the first casualties of war.

Adolf Hitler once stated “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” As the writer John James recently mentioned, the same outcome, fortunately, applies to the truth.

Awareness that this is the case provides the motive in writing this piece. On account, it is high time that we see the truth for what it is so that more pressure can be brought to bear to immediately remove our troops from Iraq. No more lives, American or Iraqi, should be sacrificed for such a misguided and miserable fiasco as this war absolutely is. Instead, let us remember General Omar Bradley’s words: “We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.” All considered, it is high time to learn again about the ways to live.

1. This datum derives from: Just Foreign Policy — Iraqi Death Estimate.
2. This outrageous matter is discussed at: “Cheney’s Halliburton Ties Remain, Contrary To Veep’s Claims,” CBS News, September 26, 2003.
3. For further information on this topic, please see: “Paul Criticizes 12000 Missing Weapons in Iraq,” and “Weapons disappeared in a ‘chaotic’ Iraq.”
4. This topic is discussed at: “Study: War blamed for 655000 Iraqi deaths,” CNN.com, and NPR: “Study: 655000 Iraqi Civilians Killed in War.“

On account, it might be easy to miss the connection between the global recession (and possible future depression) with the ongoing decline of environmental well-being and increase in human population. All the same, these three areas are deeply intertwined. Here are a few details concerning the relationship.

Let’s start with the present economic decline: Part of the reasons that there are global jitters involving the weakening of the $ USD is that it provides a means to assess worth of other holdings. In short, many countries and individuals, directly and indirectly, assign their own fiscal strength based on the dollar’s standard. This is especially the case when they are carrying the US public debt, which is currently well over $9 Trillion dollars.

In addition, practically all of the US national debt owned by foreigners is held by private investors except for central banks, which hold 64%. Further, the size of the foreign-owned portion of this amount owed is practically three times the total amount of currency in circulation! Indeed, the numbers given by the Federal Reserve for June 2007 put its amount at US $755 billion.

In tandem, the average US family’s credit card balance is now almost 5 % of its annual income (with a median U.S. household income presently at $43,200), more that 40 % of American families spend more than they earn, personal bankruptcies in US have doubled in the last decade and the overall consumer debt has reached $2.46 Trillion as of June 2007 (excluding the $440 billion of revolving home equity loans, $600 Billion owed for second mortgages and an overall $9 Trillion in mortgage debt). As such, the total US consumer revolving debt grew to $904 Billion last summer.

Why has this happened? In part, it is because real wages of most workers languished or declined since 1975. So, many Americans reacted by taking on loans to maintain or raise their living standards.

As Polonius, Shakespeare’s character in Hamlet cautioned, “neither a borrower, nor a lender be” and, certainly, there is trouble with being either. However, everyone, even an individual with neither role, can be in trouble when the value of the currency that he maintains plummets.

So, why is the American money losing clout? The answer is partly dependent upon the way that it gained worth in the first place and, indeed, its relative merit is created by any number of factors. These include the country issuing it having a robust economy (a trade surplus rather than being a debtor nation), having something of universal worth tied to it for which it stands, such as precious metal from which the $ USD was effectively severed in 1971 when the US government refused to exchange a relative small sum of dollars held by several other governments for gold, or some other coveted resource for which the currency alone must be traded, something like OPEC petroleum. (The latter contingency is the reason that some dollar holders find the Iran Bourse, with its plans to reject the $ USD as payment for oil, threatening and suspect that the recent cable failures were a deliberate attempt to postpone its arrangements being set in place.) In short, without a monetary standard having it’s worth assigned by being attached to something deemed of unquestionable worth, it tends to have uncertain value.

Meanwhile, the US economy, itself, can’t grow. Partly, this is due to globalization of industry, which has created jobs in second and third world countries by taking many of them away from Americans, who cannot continue their high rates of consumption of products due to the increasing deficit of employment opportunities, diminished fiscal returns, raising prices for goods (including staples) and advancing inflation. So, it is no wonder that, while oil and food prices are rising, so are the number of home foreclosures while home worth, in general, is depreciating across the board.

Simultaneously, it is no surprise that US wages are kept depressed by the existence of a proliferation of out-of-work laborers relative to the smaller amount of jobs in existence. At the same time, the already huge homeless population, as would be expected, is skyrocketing. In fact, the number of persistently homeless Americans, ones with repeated episodes or who have been homeless for long periods, involves between 847,000 to 3,470,000 individuals, many of whom are children and unemployed veterans. Posed another way, close to 3.5 million people, of whom roughly 1.35 million are minors, are likely to experience homelessness in any given year in the US (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2007).

At the same time, further outsourcing of labor guarantees that more jobs will be cut with the outcome that US citizens will possess even less money to buy either locally manufactured or imported goods. In relation, economic growth in other countries is, also, due to slow down, as exports are no longer quickly snapped up in the US. However, this consequence was long set to develop, given that, since 2000, a total of 3.2 million — one in six factory jobs — have disappeared from the American shores and the lowest rate of US job growth in four years occurred as recently as December 2007 when, simultaneously, the unemployment rate shot up 0.3 percentage points to almost 5 %. By factoring in huge losses in other work positions — such as the ones related to construction, fiscal services and retail sales — it is easy to see that American spending, even for relatively inexpensive foreign made goods, was bound to take a nosedive. How could it not do so when adequate job provision and reasonable salaries have, in effect, largely disappeared?

All the same, this overall arrangement has not been bad for those in the top economic tier as their capacity to pay meager second and third world wages, coupled with receipt of high income from finished products acquired by first world customers, has created an economic boon. Indeed, by mechanisms such as these, the ranks of millionaires and billionaires, during the past few years, has greatly expanded. (The number of millionaires in the world swelled to 8.7 million and the number of billionaires around the world rose to a record 793, the latter of which hold $2.6 trillion in assets and personally garner an extraordinary amount of resources.) So have the overall profit margins of many transnational companies, such as the pharmaceutical, oil and other industrial giants.

All considered, there is no way that many Americans, even with the minimum wage set at a measly $5.85/ hour, can compete with overseas $1/ day wages, nor subsume the fundamental costs associated with their rents, mortgages, the increase in food and oil prices, rising medical insurance payments and other basic expenses. On account, an overall decline in purchases has, recently, taken place in the US and, while this is not good for suppliers, it does give the environment a break.

The reason that it does is that the slow down in business, while ominous from an economic standpoint, is good for the environment, that cannot continue to be assaulted at an ever higher level in order to make an ever higher financial gain off of its largely finite resources. As it is, ecologists anticipate that, if present rates of deforestation continue, rainforests will disappear from the planet within this century, which would kill off an inordinate amount of the world’s animal and plant species while effecting global climate in unpredictable ways. (Presently, the global annual rate of deforestation is .8 percent.)

The outlook for the ocean life is just as grim with currently 71-78 % of it being “fully exploited,” “over exploited” or “significantly depleted” according to the United Nations. In addition, many types of aquatic plants and animals are on the verge of total extermination and 90 % of all big fish are already gone.

Add to this that, according to recent UN studies, arid lands prone to desertification cover more than one third of the planet’s landmass, which supports more than twenty percent of the human population. While requirements from these delicate environments grow, they increasingly become incapable of supporting life. As such, the global rate of desertification is rapidly escalating, although the actual rates vary by locality.

All of this in mind, we cannot keep expecting ever greater economic growth, nor an ever enlarging human population. Instead, we collectively need to drastically cut back on personal resource use, curtail manufacturing (due to stresses on the environment caused by global warming and other industrial impingements) and face a world that is likely to provide a dwindling supply of jobs.

In actuality, we cannot even endure a 5.5 to 7 degree F. (3 to 4 degree C.) rise in temperature due to carbon loading from industry and transportation of goods. This is because our doing so would all but ensure that human life would be unsupportable over much of the globe and likely prevent pollination for many major crops. Along with the resultant changed rainfall patterns, the lack of pollination would prompt a tremendous decrease in food production.

Regardless of whether this extreme heat occurs or not, the global population, according to the International Data Base, is expected to increase from 6 billion in 1999 to 9 billion by 2042, an increase of 50 percent that will require a mere 43 years. This, of course, has alarming implications for the maxed out natural world (including its water supplies), the labor market, food availability, product price and ever higher global warming.

So, just how are we to cope with these assorted dismal factors? First, we need to recognize the absolute need to stymie growth of GDP in every country, proactively delimit population and reduce general consumption. Put another way, we cannot have any positive outcomes from expecting myriad environments to yield up an unlimited cornucopia of goods, especially as our very lives depend on our severely lowering greenhouse gases and maintaining a large diversity of healthy intact natural environments. Second, we must, quickly, develop a wide array of “green jobs” to make up for the scarcity of ones that will come to pass on account of policies mandating deliberate curtailment of energy intensive manufacturing. Third, we need to quickly create business capable of providing, on an extensive basis, electricity derived from benign alternatives to fossil fuels.

Further, it would be helpful for people to form into small scale, self-sustaining communities to ride through the recession. Indeed, their establishment would, without doubt, help with the transition away from transnational sweatshops, provide regional employment and curb reliance on oil as less goods, including necessities, would require extensive transportation if produced locally.

The coalescence of a recession, mounting population, peak oil, mass extinction, urgent water shortages, climate change and other disastrous environmental impacts challenge us to take immediate action. Our doing so need not be disastrous if we collectively begin to make the essential changes on the scale needed. If we do not, the results could likely be catastrophic on a scope barely imagined by any of us. With firm resolve, let us all begin to undertake the critical modifications at once.

All considered, life in the natural world, although often brutal, is neither moral, nor immoral. No animal sits around in a circle of his peers debating the relative rightness or wrongness of the act of eating one’s own progeny, nor the ones of other species. At the same time, humans, in certain groups, can also forego ethical underpinnings in their actions.

For example, the Nazis, in a calculated fashion, rounded up children and adults from supposedly undesirably ethnic groups for systematic slaughter. So did European invaders with indigenous people in the Americas. So did Pol Pot in Southeast Asia and so did ancient Romans. There is nothing new in this regard. This sort of behavior has been occurring for times immemorial amongst humankind. So has cannibalism when life gets tough…

As the author Peter Goodchild shared with me, “I sometimes think about a book called The Siege of Leningrad. The healthy people walking the streets were the butchers. But the meat they had to offer wasn’t beef, and it wasn’t pork, and it wasn’t lamb. You figure out the rest.”

Then, too, humans periodically face the types of decisions as did the pioneers at Donner Pass¹ — a walk in the park in some ways compared to the Leningrad events in that there was no deliberate murder involved. As such, much of the difference between the two events hinges on intention and deliberate proactive choices rather than a passive stance to simply make do as had the survivors at Donner Pass. Meanwhile, the aggression inherent in deliberate slaughter of one’s own kind reminds about how well “laws of the jungle” still are extant amongst people unless we are well taught that life, itself, has value beyond self-serving sorts.

Meanwhile, not all people, who are at risk for starvation, resort to dire unconscionable actions. Oddly, we sometimes even see quite the opposite type of behavior wherein underfed people consciously try to share whatever little they have with others. Perhaps surprisingly, such demonstrations are not rare.

As Garda Ghista, the editor of World Prout Assembly, suggests, “One day I had gone with my auto rickshaw driver to the slums, to take photos of the very poorest people, the poorest of the poor who had nothing — no home, no anything. It was to raise funds for a service project, a children’s home, and I needed the photos for the flyer. So we would stop, for example, on a bridge where, on a ten by twenty foot piece of land along the bridge, some cloths were stretched across two poles, and people were living under them. There was no running water in sight. There was no anything. but, when I stepped out of the rickshaw and took out my camera, all these homeless, water-less, nearly foodless, nearly clothes-less people started moving towards me, with utter joy on their faces.

“I simply could not take the picture. I needed photos of miserable looking people in desperate poverty. They just didn’t look miserable. None of them did. It happened time and again, as when my rickshaw drove past the rock quarries where women with axes hammer at granite rock for ten to twelve hours a day, backbreaking labor — but again, when they saw me and the camera, they moved slowly toward me smiling.

“There is an NGO called Transparency International which rates corruption levels in countries. Bangladesh was coming out number one every year. (I haven’t checked recently.) At the same time, an institute in Great Britain assessed “happiness” levels of populations, and determined that the people of Bangladesh were the happiest in the world.

“We Westerners do not understand all the love that exists in people there — whole families sleeping in one room. It is not a hardship for them. It is the only way to be. It is about staying close and intimate. To them, the way we stick each baby in a separate room is something primitive and backward.

“Here so many Americans forgot how to talk — maybe due to watching so much TV. Even the TV programs and movies have such low levels of conversation. In contrast, go to India or Middle Eastern countries and speaking in poetry is something natural to the people. It is, also, loved and respected.

“When I worked in a college in the Middle East, the students (local Bedu) would sometimes come to my desk to make a phone call. Who would they phone? Again and again, it would be their mothers.

“We, here in the US, can hardly imagine the closeness of the families and the other more extended groups found in third world countries. When my Bedu friends took me to the desert, we used to sit on the ground, and the father would immediately go and milk the camel and bring me a huge bowl of fresh camel’s milk. Simultaneously, the mother (of my student) would cut up fruit and put it in my mouth.

“Does it happen here in the US? . . . and in India, when I visited a family there and at dinner said that I am full, then that mother took the spoon and began feeding me spoon by spoon, putting the spoon in my mouth, ignoring my protestations. Will it happen here? So who is more civilized and who is more happy? I never saw such love, hospitality and happiness as I saw in the Middle East and South Asia. For this very reason, what the American Empire has done to my friends there is painful beyond measure.”

My response to this is that, when people need each other to survive, they tend to act more kindly to everyone else, including outsiders. Indeed, they are especially generous towards those who serve their interests as does a teacher for their son.

Conversely, they tend to develop a state of anomy, callousness, apathy, contempt and disregard in relation to the welfare of others when it is not in one’s own interest to support them. This second state, one of almost complete alienation and independence rather than interdependence, has been shown time and again in various situations.

One of the most notorious episodes involved the murder of Kitty Genovese in NYC.² In addition, the Kitty Genovese incident would seem to indicate that the more people that exist concentrated together, the less likely that individual worth has much merit. Congestion studies amongst many species bear this out as does, in general, crime rates in crowded VS uncrowded regions when variables such as socioeconomic class are factored into the mix.³

The implications relative to urban settings and overpopulation, in general, are clear. As Larry Winn states, “Imagine a group of humans, indeterminate in number, confined in a place of fixed dimensions, wanting for nothing. They have plenty to eat, plenty of water, plenty of places to live, and only the dimmest sort of apprehension of a larger world. They might even think of “the outside” as a kind of malicious fiction perpetrated by malcontents. It’s a circumstance not unlike the one “sustainable development” is supposed to create for us. Also, not unlike the universes of John Calhoun’s rats.”⁴

He goes on to conclude in the same article, “…the rats in Calhoun’s experiments developed social pathologies similar to the behavior of humans trapped in cities. Among the males, behavioral disturbances included sexual deviation and cannibalism. Even the most normal males in the group occasionally went berserk, attacking less dominant males, juveniles and females. Failures of reproductive function in the females — the rat equivalence of neglect, abuse and endangerment — were so severe that the colonies would have died out eventually, had they been permitted to continue.”

At the same time, one could only barely suppose that such happenings as Kitty Genovese’s type or as Larry Winn’s description would have a high rate of prevalent to transpire in small remote villages wherein personal relations are more all inclusive, intimate, relevant and indispensable for maintenance of optimal social welfare. With less people in a community, there tends to exist stronger intact ties across the board — even with strangers, who are merely passing through the environs.

In addition, I predict that, with material affluence on the increase in Bangladesh and elsewhere due to globalization of industries, many people there will become more like much of the US population — self-absorbed, largely indifferent to the welfare of the poor, insular, impressed by wealth and signs of wealth (as exhibited by Hollywood starlets and major sports figures), driven to get as much for themselves and their families at the exclusion of others as could be possible, etc. This is largely because cultural values are predicated on whatever serves to maximally support life in a particular set of circumstances.

In other words, people will more readily commune with each other and share if these sorts of behaviors foster their own well-being. If taking as much for oneself with disregard for others does it, then this model, instead, will be the one habitually learned and supported by the public at large. (Just as “necessity is the mother of invention,” it is also the mother of behavioral patterns developing one way VS. another.)

As such, people tend to work together to get water, feed each other, and provide for other material needs in these societies wherein it is necessary for many people to work together as a precondition to fulfill common aims (without which doing they would all die). Opposed to this are the conditions wherein success is primarily and almost exclusively tied to personal fiscal gain rather than mutual philanthropy.

With this alternative in place, there is little loyalty to companions, employees, nor employers. Instead, the overriding concern is simply advancement of one’s own profit and this aim, alone. Hoarding behaviors will, then, be on the rise, too. At the same time, the gap between the haves and have-nots will, also, enlarge. All the while, people will be seen not as having much merit in and of themselves as they will largely be viewed as expendable commodities — as means to an end to add to one’s own financial and other assets.

This being the case, the number of millionaires in the world swelled to 8.7 million. Meanwhile, is there any mystery about whatever most of them are trying to do rather than spread their wealth in service to humanity or improvement of the natural environment? No. Instead of promoting widespread benefits, they are, for the most part, striving to become billionaires (called “kleptocrats” in a related Wikipedia citation below as they are thievishly parasitic on the body politic).

Indeed, many are wildly successful in achieving this objective. ‘The number of billionaires around the world rose by 102 to a record 793 . . . and their combined wealth grew 18 percent to $2.6 trillion, according to “Forbes” magazine’s 2006 rankings of the world’s richest people.’⁵ In addition, their group has been expanding steadily. All the while they, also, command vast stores of resources (obtained through their purchasing power), manipulate their governments (through lobbies and other means) and control others (via military might and other kinds) to keep everything solidly behind their acts of racking in ever more dollars and possessions, including huge tracts of land and factories, for themselves.

The flip side to this situation is that US jobs are disappearing overseas to second and third world countries in which the populations are paid measly salaries of a dollar a day for their hard work. Moreover, these laborers will get fired if they dare to complain about their income, work conditions, or other aspects of their jobs. Furthermore, they are, for the most part, easily replaced as there often exists the condition of large unemployment in their locations. Therefore, they’d better, meekly and gratefully, do as they’re told by management.

Meanwhile, the goods that they produce are sold to eager consumers in first world countries, consumers whose own economies are crumbling due to a growing deficit of work at reasonable wages. For example, one in five Americans now lives on less than seven dollars a day according to fairly recent US census figures.⁶ All the same, it is primarily the near poor, who give the most to charities — not the middle and upper classes. It is because they are almost poverty struck and know the degree that being so can be horrendously grim to the point of being even life threatening.

All of the above in consideration, it might be easy to conclude that capitalism, itself, is antithetical to altruism and benevolent regard for life as its economic program is based on buying low (i.e., raw products, human labor, etc.) and selling high to get ahead FOR ONESELF. As such, there is no mutual regard or tender support for others as this way to go forward is, essentially, carried out by progressively taking greater advantage of others, including other species that are used to make products. At the same time, these predatory conditions are especially evident in countries, like the US, governed by plutocratic corpocracies.

One needn’t even look at cities, like New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina or Detroit in relation to GM plant closings, to see the damage done by such malevolent business and government structures. Any public school in a ghetto, a crowded homeless shelter, hoards of street people in every major urban environment (80,000 in LA alone of whom 1/2 are mentally ill), overwrought food banks strung out across the land, the rate of home foreclosures, the depreciation of the country’s currency and myriad other indicators can amply serve in and by themselves as proof.

So what are we to do in the face of such daunting circumstances? Is the best way to proceed in such a rapacious backdrop to simply claw one’s own way to the top of the economic ladder, scratch out the competition and forget about everyone else left behind? Should we just shrug our shoulders and passively go along with the damaging industrial and governmental plans that are in place because that is all that we know? Certainly not!

In terms of the way to proceed given the conditions that we have in our societies and our personal lives in connection to the social order, I often go back to a comment that E. O. Wilson made to me when I asked him, around fifteen years ago, about the most important action that we could undertake to stymie environmental collapse. His reply was simple. It was that we must educate as many others as possible to the truths regarding the happenings. This, in his opinion at the time, would ultimately provide the best assurance of improvements across the board. In addition, his viewpoint would seem to apply to other areas of concern besides environmental ones.

At the same time, I realize that I, individually and in group efforts, must always resist corrupt authority and any wrongful control (i.e., arising from my dependence on repugnant transnational corporations like Exxon, Monsanto, Bayer and so many others) as best as possible. Yes, many of us are cogs in the wheel (a reference to Mordechai Vanunu’s I’M YOUR SPY at vanunu.org) as we are well integrated into and play a role in destructive systems on which we are reliant for our livelihoods, life maintaining goods and services, etc. So, we keep the status quo (including their affiliated big corporations and political arrangements) as is on an ongoing basis.

However, we can, as Peter Goodchild writes in his essays and many others suggest, get out of it all as much as possible, wean ourselves from some damaging behaviors and develop better methods of self-sufficiency. In other words, we can minimize our involvement with whatever it is that we abhor. We can also always make a point to deliberately stand up for whatever is right when given a reasonable opportunity to do so. There are plenty of ways available through volunteer activities, letter writing campaigns and other forms of protest.

Nonetheless, I realize that I. F. Stone’s comment (located below) is probably dead-on correct for a wide array of goals that many people would want to support towards creating a constructive future. Yet, in the end, it all boils down to a matter of conscience. As such, one has to do whatever one does simply because it does seem right and because there is no better alternative even when the outcomes AREN’T likely to be the sorts that one would ideally wish to have transpire. Then again, getting overly concerned about results in endeavors can take one’s attention away from any hard struggle towards betterment, itself. So, one deliberately has to maintain focus on the beneficial action, whatever it comprises, regardless of any other factors.

So, yes, we’re “stuck” in some ways because we need oil, drugs, food (of which the majority is GM), clothing (often made by poorly paid laborers), etc. This being the case, though, does not excuse us one iota, I would think, from doing whatever we can, even if small and seemingly inconsequential, to improve the way that we go about our lives.

Even if imperfect at it, we owe it to ourselves and each other to strive to create a better world as best as we can given our underlying circumstances. Then, who knows? Maybe at a certain point, we can, as Stone implies, reach a point in the far ahead times where some benefit has accrued on account of our seminal action. Maybe we can be one of the snowflakes that provides the weight to reach that final tipping point. (The NAA Voice)

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing – for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.

– I. F. Stone

1. For details, please refer to: Donner Party — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
2. To learn more about this incident, please see: Kitty Genovese@Everything2.com, Bystander effect — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Kitty Genovese – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Thirty-Eight Saw Murder, and A Picture History of Kew Gardens, NY – Kitty Genovese.
3. An overview of this topic is supplied at: The Real Picture of Land-Use Density and Crime: A GIS Applic….
4. A description of John Calhoun’s findings, along with their implications, is located at: Universe 25.
5. Data on wealth can be found at: FOXNews.com — “Number of Billionaires Up to Record 793,” “Number of billionaires grows, Gates stays on top,”
   Billionaire – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Number of Billionaires, and Number of Millionaires in the World Swells to 8.7 Million.
6. Related information can be found at: Thomas Paine’s Corner: “American Dream Now a Nightmare for Mi…” and Some Statistics on Poverty in America.