Now it sits there, my ballot opened to the choice for President. There is my morning cup of coffee and a half eaten apple. There is the League of Women Voters Voter Guide and a pile of political junk mail. There is my laptop, its battery slowly dying, while out of the corner of my eye I watch the hourly chart of Wall Street, also slowly dying. The radio plays in the background: the local public radio station is conducting one of its semi-annual fund drives. I hold my pen in my hand and I am thinking.

Contemporary American political campaigns are personality contests and I am an issue-oriented person. I quickly reject the Constitutional Party. It wants to pull out US soldiers from Iraq, which is good; but the party has a thick Christian thread running through its platform which makes it anathema to me.

I consider the Libertarians. I resonate with the Do It Yourself (DIY) ethos and the emphasis on personal responsibility. But I do not like the Libertarians’ exaggerated notions of nationalism, individualism and immigration, or its abject lack of empathy.

I consider Cynthia McKinney, a smart, articulate woman with the heart of a fighter; but her sponsor, the Green Party USA, is so muddled by concepts of consensus and social harmony that it cannot grow out of its political adolescence. It is a party of nice people content to finish last.¹

I look over the palette of socialist and communist party tickets, each with its subtly differentiated name and its subtly differentiated tenets. In light of the succession of economic crises — all predicted by Marx over a hundred years ago — I am tuned in to their messages, but I am tuned out by the stridency. They speak a vaguely antiquarian vocabulary from the early 20th Century that evokes Stalin and Mao and Lenin and Che. They all had very relevant things to say, for their times and for ours, but they are all dead now, and their message needs to be modernized for 21st Century times.

And then there is Ralph. I like Ralph Nader all the more when Zombiecrats, trying to dissuade me from voting for him (again), blather their rehearsed line that Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election. That tactic backfires. It is like McCain labeling the centrist Obama a “socialist.” When Democrats slam Mr. Nader for his “egomania,” it rings so false that it only increases my distaste for that “certain other party” that has shared the power and thus shares the blame for the Republicans’ misdeeds. All the Democratic and Republican mayors, governors, representatives and senators added together do not match the intelligence, understanding and integrity in Ralph Nader’s little finger.

Ralph Nader speaks truth to power.

However, speaking truth to power only makes you hoarse.

Power hears nothing and respects nothing except a greater power. We all say that we want our “leaders” to be intelligent, understanding and honest (although none of these qualities necessarily mean that one can “lead”.) Getting elected is different from leading, and unless we will have “philosopher kings,” the usual measures of intelligence and honesty are not meaningful. Getting “elected” to public office is not so much about intelligence as cunning; not so much about understanding as intuition; not so much about integrity as the appearance of integrity.

I sip my coffee and glance through the rest of the ballot: candidates running virtually unopposed in politically “safe” districts; initiatives to levy real estate taxes for public transportation, public schools and public parks; lists of notable somebodies endorsing this, that or the other. The public radio station continues pleading for donations so it can continue broadcasting. On my laptop, the mainstream news feeds continue to babble about the risk of a “possible” recession that everyone knows started a year ago and that the government will never acknowledge has happened until it’s over.

I recognize that everything has been stood on its head. Public transportation, education, health care, public parks, and public radio should be paid for out of the general revenues. Wars should be funded by local real estate tax levies. “Shall a tax of $9.99 per $1,000.00 of assessed value be levied on your private residence for the year 2009 in order to pay for 6 months occupation of Afghanistan so that we can kill half the population while bringing them the civilizing benefits of Christianity and Capitalism – Yes or No?” War, not public radio, should be funded by semiannual beg-a-thons: “We only need three hundred thousand more callers in the next half hour to meet our goal of $50 Billion for the invasion of Iran! Operators are standing by to accept your pledge of your teenage son’s or daughter’s life! And right now, we have a challenge from Boeing and from Halliburton — for every $250 million pledged by listeners they will match your contribution by building a munitions factory or bio-military laboratory right in your neighborhood; AND they will inscribe your name on a “smart bomb” or a missile fired by a U.S. drone at a school or wedding party in Pakistan, so it really can be done ‘in your name!‘”

I take another bite of the half eaten apple, now oxidized dark brown. My lap top battery flashes that it has only ten minutes to live as the Dow Jones Average, its chart blatantly manipulated, stages another one of its mid-day ersatz “rallies” on the Treasury Department’s promise to inflate another bubble by buying up every rotten Wall Street investment since the Beginning of Time, dropping interest rates to negative 2%, giving every every Fortune 500 executive a $1,000,000 dollar tax-payer financed year end “bonus”, and cutting taxes to absolute zero for those in the top 1% of annual income.

Do issues matter in the United States?

I flip back to the presidential candidates. My coffee is getting cold.

Politics is mostly amoral. It is about power relationships, and how to manipulate these relationships to achieve certain goals. The champions in the amoral manipulation of power relationships are the Democratic and Republican parties… both of which run as far from “issues” as they can.

In democratic countries that have parliamentary systems of government, voting for issues can make a difference. In parliamentary systems, when no single party wins a clear majority, minorities can play the king-makers.

In a parliamentary system, voting can be meaningful because even the smallest splinter party representing the narrowest constituency (if it meets the minimum threshold) can be represented in the legislative body. In a parliamentary system, the smallest party can make or break a government. A Ralph Nader, a Green McKinney, a Socialist, a Libertarian — even a Ross Perot decades ago — can force at least some of their agenda into the political mainstream as the price of supporting a coalition government. Once part of the government, a minority party can threaten to or actually withdraw from the coalition, which, in turn, can cause the government to fall or force new elections.

The downside is that in a parliamentary system a segregationist like George Wallace, who ran in 1968 on the American Independent Party ticket, could become a power broker, just as the National Socialists became the power brokers in 1932 at the tail end of Germany’s Weimar Republic even though the Nazis never won an election majority. Some parliamentary forms of coalition government have proved to be unstable, weak, rudderless, and subject to interim replacement on demand. By contrast, the “American” form of winner-take-all government is stable, strong, goal-oriented… as well as militaristic, authoritarian and impossible to replace on an interim basis notwithstanding the constitutional power of impeachment.²

Well, we do not have parliamentary government in the United States and we never will in my lifetime. I am stuck, therefore, with the usual fashion show that passes for political campaigns. In the absence of any clear debate on substantive issues, I am left to divine what the candidates might do in office. I have to decipher their nuanced speeches, their code words, their ambiguous double talk. The campaign managers and the talking heads on television tell me what I did not hear and what the candidates did not say. I, like all the rest of us, strain to transfer my hopes to the blank slate of the issue-less candidate, believing, as we always do, that the candidates might actually do some of the things that they promised to do. And, just as fervently, we hope that they will not do most of what they promise they would do.

Mr. McCain — the ostensible maverick who would follow in Bush’s burning footsteps — does his damnedest to appease Big Business and the right wing of the Republican party. Mr. Obama — the ostensible agent of small change — does his damnedest to appease Big Business and the right wing of the Republican party.

The “moderate” McCain picks a radical conservative as his running mate. The outside-the-beltway Obama picks a beltway insider as his running mate. Both candidates promise that they will change the way Washington and Wall Street do business while both candidates surround themselves with advisors who epitomize how Washington and Wall Street do business. Both candidates wrap themselves in the flag, flog us with the bible, and swear they will tame the very same lobbyists and moneyed interests who are funding their campaigns. It is anyone’s guess whether, if either candidate, is the more genuinely disingenuous.

I feel myself spiraling down into depression until, God bless her tiny frost-bitten soul, Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann brings me back to reality, channeling the ghost of Joe McCarthy by suggesting that “unamerican” politicians in Washington DC should be investigated.³ I mean, what the hell is wrong with Minnesota? Michele Bachmann in Congress? The state that gave us the late Paul Wellstone replaced him with the Bush-licking Norm Coleman? And the home of Lake Wobegon hosts the Republican National Convention while violating the constitutional rights of every journalist and anti-war demonstrator with a conscience?

I refill my coffee cup. I try to focus on the ballot.

Is Voting Relevant to Political Power and Does Morality Have Anything to do with It?

Electoral politics typically are not about morals. Matters of “morality” sometimes come into play but only when voters’ material interests are not at stake. First comes food, then comes morality, wrote Bertolt Brecht.⁴ Affluent societies can afford morality; societies in economic decay cannot. That isn’t really a knock on voters. They are not paranoid — their fears are justified. It is simple reality, a feature of evolutionary instincts; a reaction to the genuine threats that voters sense now imperil their welfare and the welfare of their families.

Ultimately, they gain political power who provide the greatest material benefit to the greatest number of people who matter.

So who are the people who matter?

To some extent, those who vote matter. Voting is the only political currency regular citizens have, but it is pretty small change. If a vote is a penny, then it is only valuable if amalgamated with other votes – like millions of pennies, or at least a roll of pennies, or rolls of pennies clenched in our fists.

They matter more, however, who register the voters and count their votes. As we learned in 2000 and 2004, the power to restrict access to the polls and to persuade you who you supposedly voted for is greater than the actual power of the ballot.

They matter more who influence other people how to vote because a psychotically self-confident talk show host, “an expert” who is never “right” but always on the air, a deceptive pollster, a raving preacher, a manipulative news media mogul can all tap into those deep veins of primal fear, paranoia and insecurity that twist hearts and minds everywhere on earth.

They matter still more who own the property and money enough to buy the votes, the vote counters, the news media, those who influence others how to vote… and who have the power to dictate what the political leadership will do no matter who wins the elections.

In 1964, Malcolm X said it was a matter of the ballot or the bullet.⁵ Today, it is the ballot and the wallet. This is progress? I drink more coffee. Caffeine clears my mind and the election comes back into focus.

Bush Won. We Lost.

Everywhere I read how stupid George Bush was. Craven, perhaps. Immoral, unethical, unprincipled, malicious… well of course. But not stupid. Bush wanted war, and he got war, an endless war on terrorism that, compliments of the still inexplicable circumstances of 9/11, we all heartily endorsed. We attacked and occupied two countries and made de facto colonies of many more. Eight years later, we’re still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and bombing several others at will. Bush mocked us as an impotent focus group. He was right – we were impotent and we could be mocked with impunity. They took the oil, they took our public money. They deliberately strapped the commonwealth with colossal debt then urged a “balanced budget” on the next administration so that there would be no economic room to fund essential public services. They stacked the courts with Federalist Society conservatives who will outlive the next five presidents. Bush, his cronies and his advisors abjectly lied. They conspired practically in plain view. They falsely imprisoned, tortured, robbed, and murdered people on a level that might have embarrassed Stalin. They and their John Yoos, their Alberto Gonzaleses, their David Addingtons, their Judith Millers, their Lou Dobbses, their Bill O’Reillys, their Rupert Murdochs, their Grover Norquists, all their trained media attack dogs and their politically motivated prosecutors, all of them trivialized the Constitution and trashed all notions of human rights. They did it with malice aforethought and they did it with absolute impunity. They got richer, we got poorer. They live better for it, we live worse. They get the bailouts and we get the bill. If they are stupid, then what are we?

I sometimes think that anyone who wants to be President of the United States cannot be qualified for the job. It’s sobering to realize that four, and probably five presidents have been assassinated.⁶ That means that 8.6% of sitting presidents have been killed in office. If you add in candidates who likely would have been elected had they not been murdered during the run up to the elections — like Robert Kennedy and Huey Long — then the presidency is as hazardous as coal mining, deep sea fishing and door-belling in Texas for gun control.

I think I saw the “shadow government” at work when the most recent financial crisis broke late this summer. There they all were in Washington DC, the blue bloods and white shirts, the masters of the universe and their enablers, working secretly behind closed doors over the weekend, building their own life boats at our expense. They sailed away from the Titanic’s shipwreck. They left us to drown in their debt.

Earlier in the year, I think I saw the powers behind the curtains orchestrating immunity for the telecommunications companies that illegally spied on us for years. I think I saw some folks finagle an off-shore oil drilling bill. I saw them bust Scooter Libby out of jail. I saw them condemn nuclear power for Iran and, without batting an eye, simultaneously promote nuclear power for India. I saw them let New Orleans expire for the sake of politics and lucre. I saw it all in flagrante delicto.

A New Power Base

So, if I saw all this and if I believe all this, what do I really expect from a viable candidate for public office? The world being what I think it is, what politician would last three minutes should s/he espouse the opinions I hold? You want change, but damned if it’s possible to run on a platform for real change. Howard Dean, hardly a radical, was hounded out of politics for as little as a “howl.”⁷ Hillary Clinton and her national health task force in 1993 was torpedoed just trying to address the problem of health care.⁸ What kind of media attention would a candidate get who really was going to end the wars, really wanted to establish a national single-payer health care program, really intended to redirect money from the military-industrial-security complex to programs beneficial to society? Would that candidate be ridiculed or ignored or politically tarred and feathered? If you took those positions in a real campaign, who would put up the half a billion dollars necessary to run the race? You? Me? If we believe that they who hold power will never give it up for something as “trivial” as a democratic vote, why would we believe that a candidate could successfully run against that power playing strictly “by the rules;” for who makes the rules and who enforces them?

My pen starts to circle over the Obama line on the ballot.

Obama is very intelligent and polished, though his stated positions are less than earth-shaking. He has had the savvy to outsmart some of the slickest political machines around. His election would give heartburn to all the people I would dearly love to suffer heartburn. He is not the second (or the first) coming of the messiah, however. He is an “okay” orator, but then the competition isn’t very stiff these days. He certainly is no blue blood. He is a mutt, and most of us are mutts. The more Palin describes Obama as “dangerous,” the more I am drawn to him. McCain, unwittingly evoking the memory of the 2000 and 2004 stolen elections, “guarantees” that he will win in November… which lets me better understand the French Revolution.

Obama has no obvious power base, which naturally makes him lean toward the only power base there is; so he leans right. But he is still a cipher. Who knows what he really stands for other than the slogan “change.” Maybe that unknown leaves some room for hope that he might not be as mainstream as he appears to be. Maybe I’ll just be disappointed.

I’ve decided to vote for the slogan. Change. BIG TIME change! It’s not about you in particular, Mr. Obama, though I wish you well. Certainly, it’s not about the tainted Democratic Party, and it is definitely not about the Democratic party leadership. Ultimately, it is about the slogan. I’m going to help make you a new power base, Mr. Obama, a mandate comprised of us. It’s time to lean my way, Mr. President. I’m going to be paying close attention this time and from here on out.

I vote.

1. The Green Party in Europe is an actual player, as it is in Canada. In recent history, the German Greens were part of the government led by the SPD, the Social Democrats.
2. Unlike the democracies of Venezuela and Boliva (where the president literally can be recalled by referendum, or Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf resigned on the mere rumor of impeachment, impeachment is “off the table” in the United States for anything other than sexual peccadilloes.
3. Sam Stein, “Michele Bachmann Channels McCarthy: Obama “Very Anti-American,” Congressional Witch Hunt Needed,” Huffington Post.
4. “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.” Brecht/Weill, The Three Penney Opera (“The Ballad of the Question What Does Man Need to Live”)
5. Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
6. Historian Michael Parenti argues the convincing case that President Zachary Taylor was poisoned in 1850 because of his moderate views on the expansion of slavery. History as Mystery, “The Strange Death of Zachary Taylor.”
7. Howard Dean,” Who2?
8. “1993 Clinton health care plan,” Wikipedia.

Throughout history, the inclination of all leaders everywhere is not to tell you the bad news. You know how it is: the folks who guaranteed you of a chicken in every pot, a war to end all wars, a land of plenty, a war to make democracy safe, a global war on terror, a thousand points of light, no child left behind, a kinder gentler nation, family values, compassionate conservatism, a new prosperity, a new American Empire, or an old stinky empire… these gentlemen do not like it when the facts fail to line up with the rhetoric. Or, to be more accurate, they do not like it when, due to the importune intrusion of reality, those who rent life by their labor start to notice the difference between promise and propaganda.

Bad news leads to bad views, and bad views lead to a surliness in the general population that eventually undermines the legitimacy of the status quo. Leaders do not like that.

So whether it’s global climate chaos, peak oil, the meltdown of a nuclear power reactor core, currency collapse or the fact that the Titanic Ship of State has struck an iceberg and is sinking, the economy and steerage class passengers will always be the last to be told. This, then, is your guidebook to the Signs and Wonders that will confirm what you suspect when everyone denies it.

Diving for Euros. Remember those old Hollywood films that showed Pacific Islanders diving for coins tossed by American tourists from their tour ships? Now that the US dollar has swooned, look for kids in New York, San Diego and Boston diving in their underwear for euros thrown into the harbor by wealthy Europeans enjoying a cheap holiday cruise to the United States. Got Loonies? No longer will shops refuse to take Canadian money when you buy something; in fact, you might get a discount. Better look inside that coin jar you were going to break open to buy groceries; there might be some very valuable Canadian pennies inside!

A Glut of Used Ferraris. When the “good times” rolled it was not uncommon for Wall Streeters to award themselves humongous cash bonuses that, in turn, were converted into modest transportation conveyances like Maseratis, Lamborghinis and Ferraris. You know that something is up (or, rather, down) when you start to see large numbers of these pricey gas-guzzlers listed for sale, cheap, at Joe’s “Qaulity” Used Car Lot (Bad Credit? No Credit? Like Sub-prime Mortgages, We Finance Everyone!). Check out the sticker prices; it is a portent of bad times when a used six-speed Ferrari costs less than a used single-speed “fixie” bicycle.

Nose Prints on Office Windows. It might be an urban legend that during the 1929 Stock Market Crash investors committed suicide by throwing themselves out their office windows. Whether it happened that way or not, stock market investors will definitely NOT be jumping out the windows these days. That is because most office windows in the 21st Century do not open. Instead of stock brokers falling from the sky, look for nose prints on high rise office windows as financially ruined investors throw themselves at the non-opening, shatterproof glass and bounce off leaving the mark of their proboscises posted like no-slip bathtub appliques.

First Class Postage Rises. The Federal Reserve Bank, the Departments of Labor, Commerce and the Treasury repeatedly tell us that “core inflation” is practically non-existent. “Core inflation,” of course, excludes everything absolutely necessary for living, like housing, food and energy. “Core inflation” does take into account the falling cost of computer peripherals manufactured abroad as well as the “hedonic” value of, say, automobiles, that have more gadgets and luxury features than did a Model T Ford. Therefore, according to the economists’ scam, retirees’ Social Security payments that are indexed to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) can be kept low commensurate with the “core inflation” rate. Economists assume that even if seniors cannot afford to eat, have a roof over their heads or pay for heat or electricity, they can always eat their computer digits and sleep in their cars.

On the other hand, we are simultaneously told that rising oil prices are not that serious because (in a classic case of “double think”) when oil is adjusted for inflation (which we were just told is practically non-existent), the price of gasoline is actually less than it was thirty years ago. Therefore, when you pay US$50 for a tankful of gasoline, you are really paying only US$20 in inflation-adjusted dollars; but when you pay US$50 for a bag of groceries that cost US$35 the year before, that is merely an illusion because, according to economists, you could have substituted dog food for hamburger and substituted lawn clippings for lettuce, thereby keeping the cost of groceries the same as in 1987.

Could we be heading for stagflation — an economy where growth stagnates but prices rise? Or, put in more realistic terms, are we in for a “stagflated” economy where everything like apartment rent, medical insurance, national park user fees, gasoline, electricity, bread, clothing, bicycle tires, a cup of coffee and shoes cost a whole lot more, but your salary stays the same?

One of the better indicators of inflation is the ordinary first class postage stamp. As any philatelist knows, in 2002 the cost to mail a one ounce letter was 37¢. In 2006, 39¢. 2007, 41¢. That is a more than 5% increase just between 2006 and 2007, far higher than the official “core inflation” rate described by “economists”.

Watch the postage stamps for signs of where your world is headed. When, for example, the price of first class postage increases exponentially, then we are in a hyper-inflationary period such as existed during the early years of the Weimar Republic in post-World War I Germany.

No One Wants To Be President. What would it mean if no one wanted to be President? No one, not even Michael Bloomberg. I mean, what normal, non-psychopath actually wants to inherit today’s mess? Al Gore, his Nobel Prize money in pocket, has just joined a major venture capital company, Kleiner Perkins, to help greenwash its business enterprises. What if Hilary just chucks it all to re-join the Board of Directors of Walmart? What if Rudy Giuliani’s endless campaign dissimulations cause him to grow such a huge Pinocchio nose that he drops out of the race to work for TSA as a drug sniffer at the airport? What if Obama, packing his bag for Sweden, says that Kucinich and Edwards really are the better candidates… but both of them have abandoned their campaigns so they can emigrate to Cuba for the sake of a half-way intelligent health care system? What if Ron Paul figures out that he doesn’t belong in the Republican Party and moves to China to experience a real laissez faire economy? What if Mitt Romney decides that celibacy is the ticket, drops out of the race and becomes a Catholic Trappist monk? What if Ralph Nader, Elaine Brown and Al Sharpton just throw up their hands and admit that even with a Congress packed with Socialists, Black Panthers, Anarchists and (twinkling) Greens they could not straighten things out? Would it be time to pack your own suitcase if the only candidates who would be nominated for President by Democratic and Republican power brokers are … Pat Robertson or Blackwater’s CEO Erik Prince? Come to think of it, are we — virtually — already there?

The Price of Oil Plunges to More Than $100 a Barrel. When the price of oil rises, it rarely makes the headline news. After rising to a new high, however, the media are quick to proclaim that petroleum has “plunged” to a few cents lower than the record high it set earlier in the day. In 2003, a barrel of the benchmark light sweet crude cost US$25. By 2005, it had it “plunged” to US$60. The price has been “plunging” higher ever since. When petroleum “plunges” to over US$100/barrel, it could be time to be on the look-out for desperate SUV owners prowling the parked cars in your neighborhood with v e r y l o n g soda straws and plastic bottles.

People Give “Practical” Gifts for Xmas. What people give one another for the holidays can be a leading indicator of what is to come. For example, if there is a rise in the sale of flint and steel, bows and arrows, it could mean that a lot of people are anticipating a return to significantly more basic life styles. It means something if people get potatoes in their Xmas stockings this year and are truly grateful because they can plant them to grow their own food. Look for increased seasonal sales of practical gifts like rain barrels in the Southeast, fire extinguishers in California, cans of rust inhibitor in the Mid-West’s “rust belt”, perfume-sized bottles of water in the South-West and coconut tree seedlings in Alaska.

Productivity Increases. The surface media always trumpets the latest increases in worker productivity, as though this is good news for anyone other than big business. For most ordinary people, increased productivity simply means that they have been working harder and longer for the same amount of money. Looking at it another way, increased productivity means that your real wages are dropping.

Proof of the negative in “productivity increases” is that it is usually accompanied by increases in the number of homeless people and people without health care. Obviously, more people would be employed if the other workers were not so damn “productive” by doing the jobs of two people for the price of one! Thus, until and unless the United States ever provides for adequate affordable housing and adopts socialized health care (rather than just “affordable health insurance”) increases in “productivity” can only mean that workers’ real wages have dropped.

Mexico Builds A Wall. As US public schools are privatized, as K-12 curricula are turned into blueprints for the manufacture of sheep and consumers, and as a college education is priced out of the reach of most citizens, Mexico builds a wall along its border to keep out poor Blancos illegally sneaking in from the United States to find unskilled assembly line, construction, garden and domestic work. Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo’s anti-immigration campaign falls apart because no one from any economic class chooses to move to the emerging third world that now is the United States. Could it mean that the US economy is in trouble when Canada passes “Canadian English Only” laws to bar US citizens from seeking employment north of the 48th parallel, eh?

China Moves Its Factories to the United States. If current trends continue, China could soon move its manufacturing plants to the United States to take advantage of the cheap, non-union labor and large reserves of unemployed workers. Take special notice if North American labor unions like the UAW (as contrasted with French and Italian unions that will stage powerful national strikes to preserve their rights) begin to lacerate themselves by cutting their own salaries and benefits and absorbing their own health care costs – all in the name of preserving profits for the owners and maintaining a ‘collaborative’ relationship between labor and capital.

Everyday Is A ‘Buying Opportunity!’ The world’s stock markets are now totally interlocked and the major players are not individuals, but hedge funds loaded up with ethereal assets compromised of collateralized debt obligations of dubious value. The markets rise and fall precipitously as computer programs of one player trigger instantaneous responses by another’s computer program, until the markets lurch and heave like drunkards. Furthermore, a behind-the-scenes “plunge protection team“, aka the “President’s Working Group on Financial Markets”, has artificially managed many late afternoon “rallies” that prop up the illusion of prosperity in a time of collapse. Smarmy stock brokers touting easy roads to riches are a sign of imminent decay. Is it a ‘buying opportunity’ when the markets drop, or a ’selling opportunity’ when the markets rise? For most hedge funds, the President’s Working Group’s engineered rallies serve to pump up equity prices so the Big Boys can quickly dump them, thus effectively bailing out the private financial sector with public money.

Profusion of End Times Societies. Societies tend to polarize when they are stressed. When people feel less financially secure, their cultural moorings become unmoored. They tend to gravitate toward extreme forms of “community” like race supremacy, religious supremacy or patriotism. Some people yearn for the mythical simplicity of a Stone Age Garden of Eden. Some wait to be raptured bodily into heaven like dust bunnies sucked up by a celestial vacuum cleaner. Many simply go into “shock.” In Germany in the late 1930s, as democracy was undermined by world wide economic depression, the nation spiraled rapidly down into totalitarianism. In the United States, economic desperation launched the populist demagoguery of Huey Long and the hate-spewing ministry of the “family values”, anti-communist, Christian Front radio host, Father Charles Coughlin. The Dust Bowl of 1933-1939 decimated the American heartland as global warming might do again in spades. The Nazis prophesied a thousand year Reich at the end of the Second World War. Neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the End of History at the end the Cold War.

Of course, in our own time there are absolutely no populist demagogue wannabes, and no bloviating “family values,” anti-communist, Christian Front radio hosts spewing hatred on the air. Therefore, any resemblance between the early 21st Century and the 1930s surely must be coincidental.

New Reality TV Shows. During the Great Depression, people did funny things to make a buck or to distract themselves from the meaninglessness of their lives. They joined dance marathons. Just before the Great Depression, they sat on flag poles for weeks on end. It was a time when people would undertake extremes of physical endurance for the sake of filling the emptiness within. Today, we have “reality TV,” which is, more or less, the same idea. Instead of dance marathons, we have Dancing With The Stars, American Idol, Donald Trump, torture festivals like 24, and various mind-numbing “survival” telecasts. In our own day, as contrasted with the days of the Great Depression, the acts of extreme physical endurance are not the shows themselves, but watching them. The fact that many people actually do watch them is another “wonder” and a sign of impending collapse.

Iguanas at Iditarod. You should take note when the annual Iditarod sled race is canceled for lack of snow and the new motive power in the Yukon is not mushing Siberian Huskies, but teams of iguanas. Are crocodiles sunning themselves in the St. Lawrence Seaway? Are piranha fish swimming in Lake Superior? Pink flamingos taking up residence in the Pribilof Islands? Saguaro cactus growing in the dessicated corn belt of Middle America? Do bananas grow in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula? Is all of Manhattan submerged under two feet of salt water? All of these are very subtle indicators that the unrelenting use of hydro-carbon fuels may have caused irreversible climate change and it’s time to think about… to think about …. uh, to think about… hmmmmm.

Come to think about it, there really is no life raft to get off the sinking ship once it has begun to list, especially when it lists sharply to starboard. Were there a way off the sinking ship, where would you go, anyway? Where would you emigrate to… and do they want you there? Maybe you could try Mars or Venus or the Moon, but not now, and never in your lifetime. And if we could not solve the problems on this planet, what would give any earthling the right to plop down and redo the same old mistakes in an extraterrestrial environment any more than a Conquistador or a Pilgrim or a colonial land grabber had the right to re-pot Europe into Africa, Asia or the Americas?

There are a lot of people sailing blind in the economy and steerage class bowels of the ship of state. Some wring their hands waiting for the inevitable catastrophe. Most sail on without a clue; some blissfully, most not.

There are only a few people running things on the bridge. Those in the bowels can, and ought to take control before the signs of a shipwreck. The wonder is that they have not yet done so.

Of course, Burt’s Bees is no longer the tiny honey and beeswax candle business that Burt Shavitz and Roxanne Quimby founded in Maine in 1984. In fact, since 1993, the bearded Burt has not even owned the business that markets his face and his bees. More to the point, in 2004, 80% of Burt’s Bees was acquired by an investment group and by 2006 the company had grown into a professionally managed $250 million business selling lipstick, toothpaste and hand cream in grocery store chains throughout the United States and around the world. Thus, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, the brand will survive the Clorox acquisition even though the small cottage industry Burt’s once was will have disappeared like so many honey bee colonies around the world.

I cannot really condemn Burt’s Bees for selling out. For $925 million I, too, might consider letting Clorox use my name to market Zbig-branded cosmetics. On second thought, make that 925 million euros, because if, Gisele Bündchen, one of the world’s best known fashion models, refuses any longer to be compensated in devalued US dollars, I see no reason why classy products like Zbig’s Zlipschtik should be valued for anything less.

* * *

Burt’s Bees is just the latest example of the typical fate of “alternative” local businesses that make the big time. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, once the Vermont poster child of all things good and natural, was purchased by Unilever, the multinational conglomerate, in 2000. In 2001, Coca Cola purchased the California fruit juice company, Odwalla, for $181 million. You simply cannot tell from the package who really profits when you buy what you think is a small, natural, local or organically produced product.

In fact, according to the research of Associate Professor Phillip H. Howard at Michigan State University, a vast number of (apparently) small brand name packaged products – including organic dairy products, chocolate, soup, vegetarian packaged foods, soy products, beverages, cereals, tea, soaps, and condiments – are owned, directly or through holding companies, by the likes of Coke, Pepsi-Cola, Dean Foods, Heinz, Kraft, Nestle, and General Mills. Notwithstanding the comforting names of Horizon, Health Valley, Cascadian Farm, Celestial Seasonings, Naked Juice, Bearitos, TofuTown and others that line the shelves of your local “natural” food stores, behind these brands might lurk some very large, very profit-oriented enterprises, some of whom, for social or political reasons, a person might not wish to patronize. Even “organic” farm produce is often now grown on an industrial scale using petroleum based technology, financed by the usual channels of capital, and shipped all over the world using petroleum based transport. There are, at the moment, just a handful of national independent organic food producers, such as the cooperative dairy Organic Valley, and the few truly local farmers who are constantly under financial pressure.

From news media predators like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, to the 800-pound computer software gorilla, Microsoft, to omnivorous grocery store chains like Whole Foods, the trend is for large companies to gobble small ones and for a few giant corporations eventually to control everything. More than a century ago, Marx described that as the natural monopolistic evolution of capital. Nevertheless, we are not yet at the tipping point of capitalism collapse disorder that Marx predicted. We are not there – yet – because Marx did not fully take into consideration the work value of hydro-carbon energy sources, as in the cheap petroleum that has, heretofore, permitted western civilization to flourish for the past couple hundred years. As natural energy sources diminish, however, the oft prophesied demise creeps closer, and more and more people are feeling the pain that results from economies in actual contraction that is camouflaged as “growth”.

But sitting back and just waiting for the collapse is no more an option than waiting for a left wing version of right wing Christian rapture. Pardon my skepticism, but Christians – especially the militant and materialistic flavor of Christians who spend their moral capital praying for their own personal salvation and the divine slaughter of everyone else – can no more expect to be vacuumed into their eternally boring lyre-strumming paradise in the sky than wistful liberals can expect capitalism to voluntarily transmute itself from a raptor into a chicken.

Capitalism was, and still is, very powerful. Although rooted in rather primitive motivations of greed, acquisition and domination, capitalism remains one of the most successful, innovative… and virulent systems of human socio-economic organization. Capitalism is based on strong, if evil theory. In a Darwinian sense, like America’s Republicans and Democrats who seek to strangle every viable third party that threatens their hegemony, capitalism attacks and kills every potential political-economic competitor as it fights to replicate itself and to remain the king of the hill.

Capitalism survives precisely because there is not yet an alternative system of socio-economic organization that can survive the bruising, no-holds-barred competition with it. Feudalism gave way to capitalism because, in a hydro-carbon world, agriculture yielded supremacy to technology. Organized religion cannot compete. Instead, religion always enters into its customary accommodation with the economic lords of state. Nationalism cannot compete. It eventually morphs into corporatism or fascism. Centralized state communism could not compete. It succumbed to the very organizational rigidity that it championed. General notions of pacifism, love, community, primitivism, individualism, populism and progressivism cannot compete (or have not yet successfully competed) because they, and the like, are abstractions and aspirations, one or two dimensional expressions of an idealized vision, not fully developed systems of organization in themselves.

Systems of alternative and benevolent organization abound. However, none can compete because they have either inadequate theoretical underpinnings or inadequate means of replication. Equally as important, most “alternative” systems of organization lack adequate means literally to defend themselves against, and repel, such a heavily militarized, aggressive, supremely deceptive, thuggish, unprincipled and merciless competitor as capitalism. Still, capitalism collapse disorder approaches unrelentingly. The central problem for us all is to conceive the more benevolent substitute to replace the current decrepit system of socio-political organization.

There is great urgency in this because, if history is our guide, when social and economic systems start to thrash, the natural human tendency is to become more totalitarian, not more democratic; more mean, not less; nastier and more violent, not less; more intolerant, more irrational, more vicious, not less.

Embryonic systems of self-organization, such as exist in the sub-currents of the almost anarchic international community of free and open software (FOSS), or the massively collaborative Wikipedia, offer some hope (which is precisely why the capitalistic, proprietary technology interests seek to squash them)… if only one knew whether and how these models could work with anything other than computer software. So, for now, these are just that – embryonic ideas, and something more mature is desperately needed.

These are the phenomena of our time: the rapidly alternating pumping up and deflating of stock or real estate bubbles; pyramid schemes of collateralized debt obligations; massive inflationary infusions of money into a system paralyzed by a loss of confidence in its own institutions; manic manipulation of interest rates to save the worlds interlocked stock markets; the danse macabre of banks, insurers, hedge funds and the financial services industry inextricably digitally tangled in the morass they made for themselves (thanks to the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act under Alan Greenspan’s and Bill Clinton’s administration); and the intensifying reliance on military force to monopolize the last vestiges of a depleted world’s energy and natural resources. All of these phenomena signal a socio-economic system in deepening crisis.

In the absence of thinking through the details now of a new, probably hybridized, possibly mixed system of social and economic organization, life could get more brutish, rather than less so when capitalism collapse disorder finally occurs. One senses that time is short. Out of the ashes of collapse we could reap… ashes.

Burt’s Bees could not resist the capitalist system that swallowed it. Nor can anything or anyone resist for too long without a theory as powerful as the capitalism that would consume it. It is imperative to concentrate time and energy on the development of a new, viable, alternative theory of social and economic organization before capitalism collapse disorder occurs.

Pharaohs did not build the pyramids with their own hands. No generals dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Kissinger did not personally murder Salvador Allende nor did Nixon napalm kids in Vietnam.

What distinguishes these types of “great” leaders is their ability to get dirty jobs done by getting others to do the job for them. History’s dirty work has always been done by others, like the slaves who hewed stones for Egyptian mausoleums. But the overbearing will of “great” leaders and the manipulation of mass labor does not explain how monumental tasks, especially monumentally dirty tasks, get done. For pharaohs, like contemporary presidents and prime ministers, not only did not build their own edifices, they lacked the basic talents to do the work themselves. “Leaders” typically have no specific “know-how”, just wealth, the luck of birth, the confidence of con men, and the psychopathology necessary to dominate others. Pharaohs, like the leaders of today’s world, employed engineers, managers, social architects, scholars, designers and craftsmen — skilled professionals who did the technical and creative work before anything of historical proportion could be undertaken.

It is no different in our own times. Our age’s “historical monuments” are a mixed bag of good, bad and indifferent. Nevertheless, some of our more remarkable “accomplishments” — aerial bombardment, “shock and awe,” Little Boy and Fat Man, ICBM launch silos, stealth avionics, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, Los Alamos, depleted uranium munitions, psychological torture, mass media propaganda, Enron, disaster capitalism, chemical and biological warfare agents, digital eavesdropping, computerized data mining, transgenic hybridization of species, retina scans, and satellite guided missiles — are more the brainchildren of our professional classes than of our own pharaonic leaders. Indeed, without professional accomplices, most of the more heinous acts perpetrated in the past two centuries could not have been thinkable, let alone possible.

The Crossroads of Power and the Professions

This is not an indictment of science or technology or of the professions, nor is this a Luddite’s lament. There is much that is positive in our world due to the real progress of science. We simply recognize that no oligarchy in any hierarchical society can stand except on the foundation stones laid by that society’s knowledgeable professionals.

There is no such thing as “pure science,” any more than there is “art for art’s sake” or an idealized “rule of law.” All “professional” human endeavors — especially science, technology, economics, law and medicine — intersect with politics or commerce, and usually both simultaneously. Sometimes the connection is only dimly perceived; typically, today, the intersection is blatant, immediate and inseparable.

We already know about the attorneys who split hairs over the definition of torture, who plead for indefinite detention without charge or trial, who argue for retroactive immunity for those who illegally monitored our communications, or who plead “state secrets” as a bar to the redress of government crimes. These lawyers (and the judges who approve their specious arguments) might themselves be accessories to crime. It is not a defense to argue that every party is entitled to zealous representation when that misguided zeal facilitates the crime itself.

We already know about the so-called doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists who help keep kidnapped captives “alive” so that they can be tortured and interrogated again and again. These are not health care professionals but accessories to crime. They have not sworn a Hippocratic Oath, but a Hypocritical Oath, and they should be held accountable.

We already know about the economists and the money managers who boost profits by devising schemes to break unions, curtail jobs, cut wages, cut benefits and “externalize” the detritus of private enterprise. These professionals, as criminal enablers, share the responsibility for the death and pollution and despair caused by their principals.

We rarely think, however, about the other professional facilitators, the ones in white lab coats, that is, the engineers, medical researchers and scientists. They have a special responsibility for their work because what they do can affect especially large numbers of people in particularly horrific ways. Those who design nuclear, chemical or thermobaric weapons; those who weaponize diseases; those who conduct genetic engineering for profit; and those who develop machines for the remote delivery of war, are not mere employees, not just intellectual workers — they are accessories to some of humanity’s most horrific acts of criminality.

I champion the pursuit of knowledge. I applaud that which makes dreams real. But not since Einstein scribbled equations in his spare time at the Swiss patent office has there been any solitary “scientific research” conducted purely for science’s sake. Today, nearly all “science” is conducted in only three environments: the university, the corporate or the government research laboratory. In all three, with few exceptions, directly or indirectly, the funding for the research comes from or serves the interests of the military, big business or homeland security. And because he who pays the piper calls the tune, directly or indirectly, the scientific research that makes dreams real also makes nightmares real.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Should scientists and engineers be held to account for the dire results of their work? Absolutely. The research community thinks of itself as working within the insular and mythical cocoon of “pure science.” But no scientist, no engineer, no computer programmer, no technician has the right to his or her comfortable isolation simply because he or she would rather not think about how his or her work will be used.

There is no excuse for not thinking. If you give your car keys to a drunk, you have to think about the ramifications of what you have done because you have enabled a drunk driver. When you hand a knife and a gun to a psychopathic killer, you have enabled the psychopath’s murders and share the guilt for the carnage he wreaks. When you help design a new missile or bomber technology; when you help develop new means of inflicting physical pain, fear or death; when you help program computers to violate Asimov’s First Law of Robotics¹ or to snoop on people’s phone calls or emails; when you research science for the sake of killing people; then, simply put, you have enabled criminal behavior. When you do so, you share the responsibility for the crimes that others commit with the technology that you helped to create.

Science has always dazzled the majority who regard it with simultaneous feelings of ignorance, awe and fear. Perhaps that is why we have customarily given a free pass to everyone who wears a white lab coat, regardless whether the scientist/doctor/researcher is a genius, a saint, a mediocrity, a charlatan or a maniac. We should be less automatic in our simple reverence for scientists and researchers, reserving adulation for those who genuinely benefit humankind, and healthy skepticism for all the rest.

Knowledge has always been a sweet and a poisonous fruit. Galileo advanced the science of mass and acceleration… but he was also a paid ballistics consultant for the armory at Venice. Wernher von Braun was the heart and soul of the early American space program, but he cut his aeronautics teeth at Peenemünde in Nazi Germany designing rocket bombs. Sure, he dreamed of reaching the stars, but Von Braun’s V2s killed thousands in London long before their progeny ever launched into space. German chemist Fritz Haber invented an efficient process to create ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen, thereby permitting the production of modern fertilizers needed for industrial farming. Fritz Haber also invented and personally supervised the first use of battlefield poison gas used to asphyxiate French soldiers in 1915 at Ypres. Is Robert Oppenheimer a hero or a cur for shepherding the Manhattan Project from laboratory experiment to Hiroshima, even after it was known that Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapons program had failed and after it was known that the Japanese were prepared to surrender?

Medicine and Mendacity

Medical scientific research has its heroes, and its villains. Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, was a hero. So was Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization and the rabies vaccination. By contrast, Dr. Josef Mengele, the sadistic Nazi “researcher” of eugenics, was an example of “science” perverted. Mengele’s counterpart in the Pacific was the Japanese Army’s Section 731 which performed inhumane medical experiments on live Chinese prisoners. At war’s end, nevertheless,there was no compunction on the part of the US military community about taking advantage of this ill-gotten “knowledge.”

Within the United States, doctors have conducted “research” on Black Americans by deliberately not treating their syphilis infections. American medical researchers have secretly released clouds of infectious agents on San Francisco in the name of science. In one of the most notorious criminal acts of the last century, American doctors participated in decades of surreptitious “medical research” that consisted of injecting toxic, highly radioactive plutonium into large numbers of unsuspecting patients, feeding radioactive cocktails to unwitting pregnant women and deliberately exposing large numbers of American soldiers to radioactive fallout.²

While the Democrats and Republicans blather indignantly about Iran’s nascent nuclear ambitions, the United States has embarked on an equally pernicious and subtle arms race: biological weapons. There are laboratories in the US — “biosafety labs”, as they are euphemistically called – where some of the world’s most deadly pathogens are being “studied.” According to the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) testimony on October 4, 2007 before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce, much of the research conducted at the various BSL laboratories involves recombinant DNA experiments.³ Depending on their ratings and containment capabilities, these laboratories may house highly dangerous and infectious pathogens such as Ebola, Marburg Virus, Avian Influenza, SARS, Small Pox, Q Fever, Tularemia, Lassa Fever Virus, Foot-and-Mouth Disease, and Anthrax, among others.

In 2001, before the events of 9-11, there were only five BSL 4 laboratories in the United States conducting the most dangerous type of research involving the most virulent pathogens. By 2006, however, that number had tripled to fifteen BSL 4 laboratories, with more on the way. And that only includes the known BSL 4 laboratories. At the present time, there are more than 1,350 known BSL 3 laboratories spread throughout the United States on university campuses, at hospitals, at government research facilities and in private institutions. Forty-six states have at least one BSL 3 laboratory within their borders and some states have multiple laboratories, often on university campuses or near densely populated cities.

There have been an alarming number of incidents that have compromised the safety of people who work at these laboratories. And, by extension, the history of past incidents portend huge risks to the unaware communities in which these laboratories are located.

Obviously, medical research is a good thing, as is the prevention or cure of disease. Unfortunately, most of the money for medical research focuses on the cure for diseases, rather than the prevention of them. That is because people will pay good money — indeed, they commonly are willing to fork over all of their money for medical treatment so that they or their family members may live. But people are far less willing to pay to prevent disease in others or in future generations. So it is inherent in genetically selfish human nature and inherent in that selfish human nature’s economic counterpart — capitalism — that disease research focuses primarily on expensive cures, rather than on inexpensive prevention. Cure, not prevention, is where the money is.

Research into how to cure disease also can teach how to make that disease more deadly, more infectious or more selective in, for example, which ethnicities or racial groups it affects. It is precisely in that murky ambivalence of good and evil where the interests of commerce, the military and homeland security are intertwined.

We Are Who We Work For

Why would someone choose to work on biological issues with military implications? A young, curious and talented researcher might hesitate to research the purely military applications of, say, the 1918 influenza virus, but would feel exalted to research a cure for the illness, should it ever resurrect itself in nature or ever be used as a weapon of terror. Unfortunately, research into the cure for a dormant disease necessarily involves resurrecting it or creating the very terrorist weapon in order to design its antidote. Thus, creating the silver bullet also requires creating the monster that the bullet has to kill. The danger is that the monster will get out or will evolve into something immune to silver bullets; or that the monster itself will be fashioned into a real bullet as an instrument of biological warfare.

Another motive force for biology workers could be simple “patriotism.” Although Samuel Johnson said in 1775 that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, a scientist could genuinely and enthusiastically support a nation’s policies. Such a person might psychologically share the sense of power that the state expresses when it uses a new technology to exterminate its opponents. For example, the eminent German chemist, Fritz Haber (referred to above as the father of modern fertilizer) was proud of his poison chlorine gas. By contrast, Haber’s wife, Clara Immerwahr (also a scientist with a Ph.D in chemistry) was absolutely appalled by her husband’s chemical weapons. Upon learning about Fritz Haber’s involvement in the production of poison gas, she borrowed her husband’s service revolver and shot herself through the heart. Haber, after his wife’s suicide and undeterred in his “patriotism”, then proceeded from the Western Front to the Eastern Front to supervise the “patriotic” use of poison gas by the German army against Russian soldiers.⁴

A more prosaic reason why someone might become a weapons researcher is that s/he simply needs a job. One of the most powerful reasons why American professionals are so politically docile is because they leave graduate school chin deep in debt. Debt makes you malleable because debt makes you timid.

This is the result of decades of social planning that has sucked money out of all public schools and institutions of higher learning. The goal of this social planning was to make college and post-graduate education more expensive and, thereby, make students more dependent on loans, corporate largess and military research grants. A second policy goal was to leave newly graduated professionals desperate for employment to pay off their loans — employment that now mostly is provided by large corporations, the military or universities that are funded by the military or large corporations. The net effect is the same: there are very few work alternatives for an intelligent scientist with a family to support and piles of student loans to pay off.⁵

Someone might get involved in scientific military research simply out of curiosity or, because like playing a video game, it can be fun. Although amoral curiosity is essential to scientific inquiry, mere curiosity detached from empathy and a sense of consequences can be no less destructive than the curiosity of a kid who pulls the wings off a fly. As for the infantile joy some might experience from playing with highly lethal weapons, I can only suggest self-trepanation as a cure.

The Noble Prize or the Nobel Prize?

Although we think of fundamental change as emanating from the top, the whole edifice of power and control actually rests on the participation of those that possess the knowledge and skill to let it function. In short, we get the State that we ourselves have created. We are inmates in the prisons we built for ourselves.

Adolf Eichmann was charged with scheduling the trains that delivered millions to death camps.⁶ He protested that he was merely doing the job that he was employed to do. He claimed that he was unaccountable as a mere instrument of an irresistible state power.

No one is merely doing a job. Short of a general strike, there is always — always– the personal option of simply withholding one’s services. No one makes any scientist or researcher, technician or programmer create anything that one does not want to create. No power is irresistible. No one is unaccountable.

In modern society, the problem of accountability is too often “solved” by bifurcating it: the acts of innovation and creativity are separated from the responsibility for those acts. The concept of responsibility is removed from the scientist and researcher and allocated to the professional “ethicist.” This kind of offloading of responsibility is precisely what led to cadres of otherwise brilliant scientists working day and night on the Manhattan Project to create a nuclear bomb while the ethical consideration whether it was right to devise such a weapon (let alone use it under the circumstances) was wrongly delegated to others. The “others” were the leadership elites, the politicians and the generals who, history has proven, are too often the most egoistical, the most fraught with ulterior motives, the most psychologically unfit and the most ethically challenged.

In addition to separating responsibility from creativity, the intense secrecy imposed by the state or commercial interests shrouds scientific research and engineering, thereby further isolating creativity from its ramifications. Segmenting and compartmentalizing and making confidential the individual pieces of weapons research tends to further divorce the scientist and engineer from seeing any picture bigger than his or her “job.” This, in turn, diminishes the sense of personal responsibility. It enhances the power of those who fund research and who coordinate the professional classes to accomplish our epoch’s monumentally dirty tasks.

If we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, then we are also endowed with certain inalienable responsibilities. The weapons that exist today, and those that are currently under development, are immensely more destructive, more nefarious than what was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Therefore, the responsibility for what they create is accordingly that much greater for the 21st Century researcher, engineer and scientist than for those who built the first nuclear bombs. Certainly, any bright mind that is capable of creativity on this scale must be responsible for thinking through the consequences. The unburdening of the engineer or researcher from the ramifications of how their works will be used makes life easier for them, but only in the sense that they have become Pharaoh’s slaves who work merely for the aggrandizement of lesser and not quite honorable men.

I have twice mentioned the chemist Fritz Haber. Ignoring the fact that he was the father of gas warfare, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded Haber the 1918 prize for chemistry for his work on ammonia fertilizer. Nobel Prizes are a mixed bag and this particular award tells us a lot about the mythology of the foundation and the folks who run it. Nobel peace prizes have been awarded to Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi , but also to the likes of Henry Kissinger (who bombed Cambodia to smithereens), Theodore Roosevelt (who was responsible for the bloody American colonization of Cuba and the Philippines), and to Muhammad Yunus (who pioneered the capitalist model for very high profit, very high interest micro-lending to the poor and downtrodden).

Alfred Nobel endowed his foundation at his death. The money came from the profits from his invention of dynamite and gelignite and other concoctions that go bang. In short, the most “prestigious” awards on earth, including the so-called Nobel Peace Prize, are funded by the profits of an arms manufacturer. Some say that Nobel created his foundation out of remorse because his own brother had been blown up in an explosion at his dynamite factory. Others say that Nobel was moved to salve his conscience because a premature newspaper obituary he read had damned him as a merchant of death who became wealthy from inventing new ways to kill more people.

Alfred Nobel’s remorse gave the world a very nice foundation. It could have been a “nicer” world, however, if, before his death and during his productive years, Mr. Nobel had paid greater attention to the ramifications of his work. That is all we should ask of the scientists, researchers, engineers and technologists of our own times. To think about and take personal responsibility for the ramifications of what they are doing. To think about and take personal responsibility for how their work actually will be deployed. To think more responsibly and more nobly than as mere employees or slaves of pharaohs.

1. Asimov’s First Law of Robotics is that a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. Eileen Welsome has written the definitive book on this subject, The Plutonium Files.
3. The data in this paragraph is derived from the GAO report available as a pdf.
4. Fritz Haber’s career was totally conflicted. His process for creating ammonia aided agriculture world-wide. It also facilitated large scale production of explosives. Haber was also instrumental in the development of the insecticide Zyklon A… which the Nazi regime ultimately “refined” into Zyklon B to gas concentration camp victims (among whom were some of Haber’s relatives). Ultimately, Haber was exiled from the Germany about which he had felt so “patriotic”. He died a stateless man.
5. I highly recommend physicist Jeff Schmidt’s book Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives.
6. Hannah Arendt was, and remains the most insightful interpreter of the Eichmann phenomena, notwithstanding the smear campaign mounted against her. Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil.

But I am still a Journal junkie. Every morning I drink my mug of fair-trade coffee, dunk my trans-fat free doughnut and scour the Dow Jones Company’s conservative business newspaper from section to section. I try to keep my embarrassing addiction a secret from my friends. My subscription is in someone else’s name. I wrap my WSJ inside the local newspaper, just in case someone looks through the window and catches me reading the financial pages. When I am finished reading, I hide my tracks by stealthily dumping my Journal… in someone else’s recycling bin.

Now, however, the business tycoon Rupert Murdoch is angling to buy the Dow Jones Company and The Wall Street Journal that it publishes. Murdoch owns News Corp (as Mr. Murdoch’s transnational business is known in Street vernacular) and News Corp is one of those media conglomerates that everyone loves to hate. Mr. Murdoch, through his company, owns so many newspapers, television stations, magazines, internet outlets, cable and satellite news and infotainment networks that he is the poster child for the Corporate Mass Media. Now he wants to buy my secret addiction, The Wall Street Journal.

I do not read The Wall Street Journal to keep an eye on my non-existent stock investments. I read The Wall Street Journal because I crave data, particularly data about what the economy, the financial sector and the business community are doing. I want to know what they are doing, and what they are thinking, because, sooner or later, what they do or think will affect you and me. I also subscribe to and read the usual alternative media, print and electronic. But there is a limit to how much political orthodoxy I can take (especially when I agree with most of it) before my political gut starts to demand more substance. It is like those damn doughnuts I eat in the morning: one is good, two is okay; but a straight diet of nothing but screeds and doughnuts leaves you with a soft, flabby belly, a soft, flabby brain and a hankering for more nutrition with less fat.

The WSJ, along with The New York Times and The Washington Post, are the three principle “opinion-makers” in the United States. They set the tone and the editorial policy which then quickly percolates through the rest of the US news media. In an age when “local” media no longer have their own national or international reporters, they rely on the “biggies” to set up the stories for them. The Times, The Post and The Journal propagate the official government stories and the “approved” propaganda. If “your government” wants to channel public opinion in a particular direction, it begins with these three papers. You can read it here today, and read it in your local newspaper tomorrow. The Post writes primarily for Washington’s political wonks and The Times for bleeding heart Republicans who fancy themselves “liberals”. The Journal, however, unabashedly caters to the ruling elite, the moneyed class that owns, and, therefore, does not need to hold elected office. This class’s watchdogs monitor what we are saying; it is imperative that we also monitor what they are saying.

Clearly, it is not every story printed in The Wall Street Journal that merits our attention. This quintessentially mainstream newspaper is as skewed to the right as the rest of them, sometimes more so. However, the staff reporters of The Wall Street Journal are a rather professional lot. The reporters are also unionized and have staged at least one little publicized walk-out to protest the sale of the WSJ to Rupert Murdoch. Buried within many of the reporters’ stories are nuggets of pure information. Thus, while a headline might blandly state that “Investors Shrug Off Sub-Prime Mortgage Collapse” or “Bankers Postpone Sale of Debt for Chrysler LBO”, there lie within the articles heart-stopping descriptions of mountains and mountains of bad debt: collateralized debt obligations, collateralized mortgage obligations, securitized financial shenanigans and unhinged hedge funds that carry book values in the billions of dollars but which really may be worth practically nothing. And then you read who ultimately owns all this bad debt – not the banks (who bundle it, slice it, “repackage” it and resell the debt as “bonds” as fast as they can), not the debt brokers, not the financial big wigs on Wall Street. No, the hot potato often ends up in the lap of teacher and union pension funds, mutual funds, city and state investment vehicles, and foreign investment banks. In the quest for the maximum return on their investments, these entities have indirectly snarfed up investment instruments comprised of the shaky mortgages and gossamer securities that have held the American economy together with spit and duct tape for the past business cycle. And, as usual, it is the lesser people who will be crushed when the edifice finally collapses.

In the Journal stories you can read between the lines how the Stock Markets have been levitated by manic corporate mergers (also funded by cotton candy bonds and insignificantly collateralized securities); how the Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, acknowledges that interest rates will not drop until the unemployment rate increases (thereby creating a larger reserve of wage-depressing excess labor); how production at Mexico’s Cantarell oil fields, one of the largest in the world and one of the major suppliers of US petroleum, has peaked and its oil yield begun a rapid, irreversible decline.

The newspaper’s financial charts and graphs, once you learn how to read them, describe the raw economic data that clearly indicate whether another war is imminent to keep the profits churning, whether the de facto devaluation of the dollar will accelerate as more foreign holders of US currency diversify out of US treasury instruments and into Eurobonds or hard assets, and whether food and energy costs will continue to skyrocket while the “experts” blandly assure us that “core inflation” (which excludes everything essential to life, like food and energy) is under control.

Should we give a rip about all this technical financial stuff? Karl Marx did. He was not just a pamphleteer and agitator. Although Marx wrote the Manifesto whose specter haunted Europe in the mid to late 19th Century, he was an especially ardent student of capitalism. Indeed, Marx’s major claim to fame is that his voluminous study, Das Kapital, is a thorough definition of capitalism, how it works, and how it fails. Marx understood that in any competition of ideas, you must first completely understand your adversary. Marx spent much of his later life burrowing into the books and financial reports archived in the British Library. Then he dissected what he learned about capitalism from the capitalists themselves, setting forth in his most significant life work one of the most cogent analyses, not of communism, but of capitalism.

Fortunately, it is not all hard work studying the world of the moneyed class. The Wall Street Journal also has its funny pages. The funnies are its Editorial and Op Ed pages. WSJ editorials have a curmudgeonly 19th Century feel to them, as though they are penned by Bedford Fall’s black hatted banker, Henry Potter (of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), or Scrooge of Dicken’s Christmas Tale. The Op Ed articles – most frequently written by “visiting scholars” or “fellows” resident at one of a half dozen or so oxymoronically named “think tanks” – ooze with the prerogatives of wealth and disdain for the uneducated, the poor, and the downtrodden. Here you can read rib-tickling columnists like Mary Anastasia O’Grady who, apparently, never met a Latin American plutocrat that she did not like; guest writers like Berkeley’s reactionary law professor, John Yoo, who preaches the constitutional apostasy of the President as King; former New York Times “reporter” Judith Miller who once proudly touted neocon lies about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction; and Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve and champion of the “cognitive elite” (aka, aristocracy). If ever you find your faith in Enlightenment principles faltering, you need only read these opinion articles and guest editorials to reaffirm your left politics and remind yourself exactly what it is you are struggling against.

As entertaining as this is, you sober up quickly when you realize that the editorials of The Wall Street Journal are, indeed, aimed at a sympathetic and receptive audience… and it is not you or me. As scary as it seems, there are, indeed, many powerful people in the world who share the not-so-funny views of the WSJ editors. This newspaper influences the world’s thin upper crust. Their editorials, moreover, set the “talking points” adopted by the elite as they defend the likes of the occupation of Iraq, beat drums of war against Iran, champion the privatization of health care, social security and education, or justify the commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence for perjury.

It is no wonder, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch wants to add this newspaper to his media menagerie. However, the controlling stock of the Dow Jones Company (the parent corporation that owns the WSJ) lies mostly in the hands of the Bancroft family. The Bancrofts earned their stock holdings the old fashioned way – they inherited it. Ironically for owners of the Dow Jones Company and The Wall Street Journal, the Bancrofts are now faced with a conundrum more familiar to the tightly squeezed American small business owner and family farmer: do they sell their patrimony to be just one more stuffed trophy mounted on the wall of Rupert Murdoch, the Mass Media Mogul; or do they (fancy this!) spurn the big bucks, make a lot less money and keep their pride of independent ownership?

The Bancrofts have floated the idea of selling their family business to News Corp but restricting editorial policy or the power to hire and fire top editors. But it is the reporters, not just the top editors, who need to be insulated from an owner’s influence. Furthermore, no matter what limitations are placed on the deal, does anyone doubt that, sooner or later, the cold finger of Rupert Murdoch will lie heavy on one of America’s few remaining sources of uncensored critical information?

With his money, he can certainly buy up any media he likes. He cannot, however, buy its readers. I am a confessed left wing Wall Street Journal junkie, but Mr. Murdoch has the miraculous power to cure me of my addiction. If the day comes and the deal is done, then so am I. That very day will I cancel my subscription to The Journal. Cold Turkey. Will my daily buck-fifty matter to Mr. Murdoch? Not at all. But it is my money and I – and perhaps many others – would rather deny ourselves our secret journalistic pleasure than be complicit in the continuing agglomeration of all media into fewer and fewer hands.

This was a so-called “lefty” group. I saw the flags unfurl in blinkered eyes, and I cringed.

Maps have national boundary lines. The planet does not. At the intersections of “nations”, except for the cultural and governmental signposts of language, custom, currency and clothes, one cannot really tell one country’s citizens from another. People mix — their genes slopping around a global pool of more or less related folks. Thanks to evolution’s Cuisinart, we are all highly blended bipedal mutts: there are no flags in DNA; the genome knows no borders.¹

Nationals and Transnationals

What is this thing with nationhood? In every aspect of American popular culture the fetishes of Old Glory, the pledge, the singing of the anthem are driven home and driven home and driven home again. Everywhere, one hears the catch-phrases of patriotism: we have the world’s best this and the world’s best that, from health care to democracy. When things are bad, it’s always better here than over there.

Such is the catechism promulgated for commoners. When you scan the economic spectrum from country to country, the national lines blur and finally disappear as you ascend the ranks of power. In the alpine resort of Davos, Switzerland² The economic and political elite regularly meet to kick back, to relax and to share good times among their own. They, like the multinational corporations that they own, owe allegiance to no flags. They sing no anthems. They have the best of everything money can buy, and they jet to wherever in the world they want to get it. They are, on average, healthier. They eat better, live better and more comfortably than than the rest of us.³ They are Black and White, mostly Male and occasionally Female, European, Asian, North and South American , Jewish and Christian and Hindu and Muslim, and they are all of them very rich, very powerful and very determined to stay that way. They all think, if they think about it at all, that it is in our interest, too, that they remain as powerful as they are.

This is not a cabal of conspirators, per se, but a globalized aristocracy. Their natural class interests make them act and think like the transnational citizens they are. Although they share all the usual human foibles of petty jealousies and greed, they will often overcome their competitive vices in the service of common selfish interests. It is a natural collusion because they all want the same thing: ownership and control of everything.⁴ Consequently, they often think alike, they act alike, and they help one another out, so far as they can without undercutting themselves in the process. Theirs is just like a tight little virtual neighborhood of plutocrats. Their international gated community is truly the “best”. Our big national community clearly is not.

How did it happen, that there would be just a few über-wealthy Citizens of the World and the rest of us common citizens relegated to so many divided “nations”? Why do we need passports and visas and currency exchanges, and they need none? How did they become the Internationals Without Borders and we the walled in Prisoners of Patriotism?

National Liberation Movements and their Corruption

In Europe, the royal houses of 18th and 19th Century France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Great Britain and Russia were all “family”, an inter-married clique of “internationals” who viewed “their domains” as incidentally containing the taxed-and-laboring populations of servants and serfs. Their lands’ inhabitants — totally oblivious of any “national” identity — were traded back and forth like so much chattel, exchanged as dowry, gifts, bribes and spoils of war.

Consciousness dawned slowly on the European masses. It began with movable type and printing. The Enlightenment was spurred by microscopes, telescopes, calculus, Spinoza, Darwin and steam. They led inexorably to startling conclusions that the earth was not the center of the universe nor was “Heaven” ten feet above our heads, that the church held no patent on the truth and that those few blue-bloods who stood on top of the heap of humanity were no worthier of their eminence than those at the bottom. In earlier centuries there had been “uprisings” and “rebellions” against feudalism, but never a determined political revolt against the fundamentals of the ruling system.⁵ Now, having tasted of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, there would be the only revolution that matters, a revolution of the mind.

Nationalism was initially an instrument of revolution against the international character of feudalism. Although there were earlier “national” movements in Europe, the modern nationalist trend began, more or less, with the American Revolution. This was, however, primarily a movement of America’s mercantile and property owning classes declaring their independence from English commercial monopolies. The American Revolution was not uniformly “revolutionary” (it served more to solidify than abolish the institution of slavery, for example). Many of the brighter lights of the new nation — like constraints on the development of a standing army, the inalienable right to abolish an abusive government and institute a new one, the power of impeachment, the right of public dissent, and the Congress’s exclusive power to declare war — have, over time, all become severely degraded. The American Revolution did contribute, nevertheless, a valuable rhetoric of enlightened idealism that has beckoned humanity ever afterwards.

The French Revolution of 1789, on the other hand, was a truly radical event. It began with the violent storming of the Bastille in Paris and led, ultimately, to a universal declaration of the rights of mankind, the secularization of society and the public beheading of the French king and queen. The royal houses and financiers who owned most of the world at that time could live with the American Revolution; they were appalled, however, by the French Revolution. They were doubly appalled when in 1791, the Black African slaves in the French colony of Haiti rose in rebellion, inspired by the French Revolution. Ultimately, Haiti’s slave rebellion led to the establishment in 1804 of only the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere — and a Black, former slave nation, at that!

The romantic atheist poet, Percy Shelley⁶ wrote in the preface to his early 19th Century poem “Hellas”:

This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and dread.

The American and French Revolutions inspired more-or-less national liberation movements in Mexico (1810-1821), South America (1810-1825), Italy (1859-1860), India (1857), Hungary (1848-1849), and Greece (1821-1829); and, in the 20th Century, Ireland (1916, 1919-1921), Russia (1917), Indonesia (1945-1950), Vietnam (1946-1975), China (1927-1950), Algeria (1954-1962), Zimbabwe (1970-1978), Eritrea (1961-1993), and Palestine (in progress), among others. Unfortunately, the notion of the universal rights of mankind originally espoused by the French Revolution was lost as one revolution after another degenerated into either the establishment of a new “one-of-our-own” king or aristocracy, or a “nation” based on race, ethnicity, culture or religion. Some began to sense that although nationalism as a doctrine had ‘market appeal’, it really did not mean very much in itself.

In the face of disappointment with the superficiality of “nationalism”, there was a moment in time, bracketing the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries, when working classes, in addition to the elite upper classes, began to think internationally. Barely a hundred years ago, the proponents of socialism, communism, syndicalism, the Industrial Workers of the World and anarchism were tentatively reaching out to like-minded colleagues around the earth. But these movements, too, either proved to be too naive, too impractical, too race-conscious, too doctrinally unfocused, too parochial, or too feeble to resist the temptations of incremental personal betterment. Tempted with a few pennies higher wage over here, working men abandoned coworkers over there. Those who had small emoluments of employment betrayed friends who also wanted to have them. Sentiment for change proved to be broad, but shallow, vociferous but not deeply understood, and, in the end, susceptible to manipulation and perversion.

Finally, in the face of the “patriotic” onslaughts of the First and Second World Wars, the internationalist movements almost completely dissolved.⁷

Post War Nationalism

The bounty of the 20th Century’s age of petroleum began to be harvested in the post War years of the 1950s. Thanks to profits unleashed by energy extracted from cheap, plentiful fossil fuels, there were economic crumbs sufficient for even the Lilliput⁸ majority in the United States. An America fattened on the profits of arming a whole world at war could afford the economic Fordism that facilitated the brief efflorescence of America’s White Middle Class. The impetus toward socialism and anarchism ebbed. American unions’ vision narrowed and became downright provincial, and their membership numbers began their downward slide.

In Europe and Asia, by contrast, the cumulative effects of the First and Second World Wars had destroyed all industry, all commerce, all infrastructure, all agriculture; their economies were dead, their currencies worthless. People were left homeless, unemployed and hungry. Like in the 18th Century, hunger, unemployment and homelessness can provide the sparks of revolution. At the end of the Second World War, the old elite’s power had utterly collapsed in France, Italy, Greece, Germany, China and Japan, and England, too, was tottering. In each, an exhausted people was literally on the brink of electing Communist governments because the old capitalist regimes had been utterly discredited. Contrasted with the likes of Vichy collaborators, Communists could honestly boast that they steadfastly resisted fascist occupation in France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and China. Only through massive US economic intervention, and US subversion of Europe’s and Japan’s elections was the “threat” of communism mostly averted.⁹

Unlike Europe and Asia, the US infrastructure of the second half of the 20th Century was practically untouched by the wars. Except for the United States,¹⁰ The world’s armorer, financier and the only Victor of 1918 and 1945 — life on earth in the early post World War II period was primitive. People outside the United States wanted fundamental changes. Decades of brutal war had scarred peoples’ psyches. Other than in the United States, myths of national or racial superiority had been obliterated, like their battle flags and their cities. After the wars, people might root for their national football teams, or denigrate their neighbors customs, but in the wake of war’s death and destruction, no rational European, for example, believed anymore in his or her national “supremacy”. Thus, in Europe in particular, faced with a surly population that was living on the edge, the remnants of the ruling class had to strike a bargain for their own survival.

Inside the United States, no bargain needed to be made with a fat-and-happy middle class. In Europe, by comparison, the political and ownership class had no choice but to permit more participation in government for the common classes, more and better safety nets like socialized medicine, free higher education, guaranteed retirement pensions, public transportation, fair wages; shared business decision-making between workers and owners; subsidized or guaranteed housing, state supported retirement homes, stronger unions, and a flattened wealth distribution curve that would make America’s corporate moguls gasp. Thus did stridently unhappy European citizens get what America’s satiated and complacent citizens would not.¹¹ The bargain worked: Europe did not “go communist” and power remained, though somewhat attenuated, in the hands of the same economic class as before the wars. Even the post-war programs of denazification in Germany and the disempowerment of the imperialists clique in Japan was sacrificed on the alter of preserving each as Cold War capitalist bulwarks against the so-called Red Menace.

Among the sacrifices made after 1945 was Europe’s abject failure to repatriate and do justice by the numerous Jewish refugees and concentration camp survivors created by Nazi Germany and its west and east European abettors.¹² Instead of facing up to the sins born of its own nationalism, Europe’s political class (cooperating with Zionism, yet another flavor of “nationalism”) avoided responsibility for having created the problem by passing it… to Palestine. Having thus, in a sense, completed the Nazis’ antisemitic ethnic cleansing of Europe, the stage was set for decades more ethnic cleansing, this time of Levantine Arabs.

Humans transmit technology from age to age, but little wisdom. The failure of Europe and Asia to make clean political and economic breaks with their pasts led to another human trait: that subsequent generations quickly unlearn traumatic lessons learned by their predecessors. Old habits of the worst sort of nationalism crept back into vogue as the war-scarred generations died out. Worse, the heirs to the old feudal aristocracy — the elite community of industrial and commercial monopolists, financial finaglers, and merchants of debt – proved smarter than the old nobility that they supplanted. Rather than butt heads with democratic movements, they learned how to co-opt them and how to subvert them. Rather than fight national liberation movements, they learned how to multiply the fires, then how to set them against each other, and then how to fan them into self-consuming conflagrations. It was the old Roman and British Empires’ rule of divide and conquer, polished and updated for modern times.

On the geopolitical stage, the new, smarter elites used the ugly side of “nationalism” based on religion or ethnicity to dismember the model socialist state of Yugoslavia, encouraging spin-offs of “independent” Croatia, then Serbian, Bosnian, Kosovar, Macedonian and Montenegrin statelets. Likewise did the West dispatch the Soviet Union as a military and economic competitor through “nationalist” disassembly.¹³ So, too, was the fate of India at the end of the English colonial occupation when it fractured into Hindi and Muslim antipodes. Soon, American and Israeli machinations, with the assistance of their allied Arab satraps in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, will have partitioned Palestine into multiple tiny statelets of Gaza, the West Bank and a checkerboard of Bantulands. Before your very eyes, the US, in Somalia and in Sudanese Darfur, will foster the civil wars that it ostensibly decries. Then (in the name of peace, democracy and self-determination), the US will help carve out more oil-juicy mini-states which, if they will survive, will need massive multinational “loans” and technical “aid” … in exchange, perhaps, for a controlling share of the local petroleum reserves and a military base or two.

Such is also the planned-for fate of Iraq, once the most advanced, best educated and most secular Arab state. After its Occupiers will have intentionally fanned the flames of sectarian violence long enough and hot enough, the Sunni, Kurds and Shia may, indeed, find it impossible to coexist. Thus, with crocodile tears, will the US and not-so-Great Britain reluctantly and as a last resort to keep the peace, create a brace of impotent, dependent little statelets, the easier to rake off their profitable resources.

In Asia, the United States is dangerously abating the rise of Japanese nationalism qua militarism. Japan, with America’s blessing, is on the verge of amending its post-war pacifist constitution to allow the creation of much more than a defensive military capacity, and a nuclear one. Japan, too, is forgetting its past, as nationalists again rise to political power while anti-nuclear advocates for peace, like the late mayor of Nagasaki, are squashed.

American Nationalism in the 21st Century

And what of American nationalism? Truth be told, citizens within the United States are manipulated in exactly the same way as are citizens in foreign countries. The State, of course, does not “conquer” its own citizens, it merely keeps them docile and under control. So if foreign policy mandates that other peoples be divided and conquered, US domestic policy fosters not racial or ethnic integration, but separation and reciprocal suspicion. The high pitched “nationalist” reaction to the 9.11 event, for example, with its full racist suite of anxiety, fear and loathing, six years later continues to “justify” US policies that flatly dis-serve citizens’ interests.

A similarly whipped-up nationalism stirs the construction of America’s new anti-immigration walls, which, not coincidentally, serve to wall in parochial Americans as much as wall out the “strange”, the “threatening”, the “foreign” and the “nonwhite” cultures and peoples of the world.

American labor, too, is in thrall of State orchestrated nationalism. Obviously, US economic policy (at least in the present political system) will never, ever seek to “save our jobs”. The primary objective of “free trade” and globalization, after all, was to emancipate capital from national boundaries and to shop labor wherever it is cheapest. This is the legacy of NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO, and they were brought to us courtesy of both Democratic and Republican administrations working hand in hand with the world’s ownership class. It must not be forgotten that whenever the Federal Reserve Bank, the Treasury or Wall Street talk about “inflation,” they mean one thing and only one thing: the cost of labor. Thus, “free trade” and globalization were specifically intended to keep inflation under control by keeping wages down in the US by forcing laboring people everywhere, once again, to be divided against themselves.

Therefore, when workers are egged on to national appeals to “buy American” or to not buy Chinese¹⁴ They should realize that the State’s goal is definitely not to “save good American jobs.” Heaven forfend, real job security inevitably leads to less “freedom” for capital and produces an uppity, demanding, politically engaged working class. Rather, the “buy American” campaign (like every one of the many “buy American” campaigns of the past) is nothing more than a domestic instrument of foreign policy directed against another economic power. If China will not enhance western multinationals’ profits by boosting the value of its currency; if China will not commit to continue buying US treasuries and thus support western militarism; if China will not continue to accumulate and hold hordes of rapidly depreciating US dollars when others are starting to eschew them, then the US will punish China’s business class. Thus were PR campaigns unleashed against “unhealthy” Chinese products and Chinese “slave labor” along with nationalist sloganeering to “save our jobs.” ¹⁵ The point is not whether China’s business practices have sometimes been reprehensible (they have been); the point, rather, is how the prominence of the issue is regulated to coincide with foreign policy objectives. Our emotional, “nationalist” buttons being thus pushed, the mass of people predictably will fall in line with the State’s foreign economic policy. It is also predictable, however, that once the policy goals have been achieved, then the nationalistic “save our jobs” campaign will instantly stop and the “globalization” of “our jobs” will pick up where it left off.

The No State Solution

We should be careful not to throw out the good with the bad when we criticize nationalism. There is a difference between the “government” and the “state”, the former providing ordered and civilized services that most of us need, the latter comprising the elite of anti-democratic aristocrats. We do not desire to return to tribalism and the stone ages, nor should one be deluded about the insensate “joys” of living a hardscrabble life in an isolated village inhabited only by your own blood relatives. We cannot be Luddites, for how could we have communicated without the technology of this age?

There are some within the world’s communities who use nationalism as a psychological defense against feelings of inferiority (sometimes imagined, and sometimes justified). There are some within the world’s communities to whom nationalism gives an identity, a sense of belonging, albeit a rather specious one. Nationalism once served its role as a rallying point in rebellion against colonialism. As a form of group insecurity counseling, nationalism has also served a minor role. But as a stand-alone and complete political theory, nationalism is utterly inadequate. Do we really want a polka-dot world of “states” segregated by race, ethnicity or religion. Does a “Jewish State” make any more sense than a “Catholic State”, a “Shia State”, a “Southern Baptist State”, a “Shinto State” or a “Lutheran State”, each comprised of citizens of just one stripe? Shall we boot out all non-Gallic people from France and all non-Etruscans from Italy in order to preserve a “French State” or an “Italian State”? Are we trying to categorize people by DNA and phenotype so that we can place them within their “proper” national boundaries? Should we have Blond Nations and Brunette, Short and Tall People’s Nations, Does greater Palestine call for a three state solution, a two state solution or a one state solution? The threshold question is to define what exactly is the problem that needs a solution. The next question is: why not a no state solution that would encompass the whole region?

Whatever its legacy, nationalism has devolved into a crude control device. The borders that allegedly protect us from illegal aliens and terrorists are the borders of our own prisons. They are borders of the mind as well as geography.

It need not be this way. The threads of our commoners’ connections can, and should, span the globe, just like the connections of the ownership class. If they collude, then so can we. If they would play off cheap labor against more expensive labor, then let us level the playing field by increasing wages and benefits world-wide, rather than by just trying to hang on to “our” well-paying jobs, the devil take the rest. Only if they live better will we have the right to insist that we live better, too. If they would collude to propagandize us with faux news, then let us collude to disseminate real news.

We simultaneously can be local and cosmopolitan, members of a neighborhood community and members of an international community of like-minded people. Although we share all the usual human foibles of petty jealousies and greed, we, like elite society, must overcome our competitive vices in the service of common self-interest. We should be as knowledgeable, as economically and politically savvy and as networked as the new aristocrats. And more so. For most of us right now, there are national borders. There are none for our warders. We need to rethink why we need nations.

1. Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor’s Tale makes the convincing argument that not only are all living people related to one another, but so are all species. Life appears to be a continuum, and there are no bright lines between species or between ethnicities. As for humans, “race” appears to be mere illusion, for there is no genetic basis for race classification at all.
2. Davos was the model for Thomas Mann’s novel, Der Zauberberg (Magic Mountain) (1924). The novel takes place in an isolated alpine sanatorium set high in the clouds. It is a retreat for the rich and powerful who were treating for, and dying from tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, in Thomas Mann’s literary imagery, was the disease of social and political decay. How fitting, then, that Davos’s reality mimics art.
3. Wealthy people may not be “happier” or “unhappier” than poor people, but objectively speaking, they definitely enjoy more material benefits. It is pure propaganda for consumption by the masses that poor people should not envy the “unhappy” ownership class.
4. See generally C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956).
5. The Peasant’s Revolt in Flanders, 1323-1328; The Jacquerie in what is now France, 1358; Wat Tyler’s and John Ball’s (English Peasant) Rebellion, 1381; The Peasants War in what is now Germany, 1524-1525; The Croatian and Slovenian Peasant Revolt, 1573; The Cudgel War (Finland), 1596, etc.
6. Shelly was the paramour and later the husband of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Percy Shelley’s own “cause” was the Greek Revolt against Ottoman dominion.
7. Some people stayed true to the cause, such as Eugene Debs, arrested and imprisoned (his conviction affirmed by the US Supreme Court) under the Espionage Act of 1917 for publicly opposing World War I. Debs ran for president while in prison in 1920 and received 3.4% of the vote as a socialist.
8. Jonathan Swift’s socio-political satire, Gulliver’s Travels, is as fresh today as it was when first published in 1726. The inches-tall inhabitants of the neighboring islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu are always at war with each other over which end of a boiled egg to eat first.
9. Spain’s fledgling republic was crushed during its Civil War, 1936-1939, when the western democracies took official positions of neutrality while indirectly helping Franco’s fascist insurgency. Even though Franco was a tacit ally of Nazi Germany during WWII, the allied powers left him in power after the war where he remained a fascist (but anti-communist) dictator for decades.
10. The primary beneficiaries of the post-war economic boom were citizens of the United States of European ancestry. The Civil Rights Movement would not really take off for nearly another two decades.
11. In Michael Moore’s excellent movie, Sicko, he contends that the reason why Europeans got socialized medicine is because they care more for one another than American citizens do. I suspect that this is smart politics on Mr. Moore’s part because it caters to American mythology that we are “good people” who were brought up to look out for one another. The reality is probably that in any cross-section of people around the world, here, there or wherever, the percentage of good or bad, responsible or irresponsible people is about the same. Europe’s people do not “care for one another” more than Americans; they made a logical, calculated political decision to implement a rational health care system — which, in the process, made manifest their “caring” for one another.
12. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) for a cogent analysis of antisemitism in Europe.
13. The US financially promoted “national liberation” movements in the Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Tibet and Taiwan — all, of course, in an effort to weaken the Peoples Republic of China and Russia (and its predecessor, the Soviet Union). However, the US absolutely will not support nationalist movements in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Haiti or Guam because they are American colonies.
14. . This is all reminiscent of the campaign years ago in the 1950s, 60s and 70s to bash “shoddy” Japanese imports. Only a few decades ago, the public was whipped to a frenzy over the fear of the Japanese “buying up” America with their accumulated business profits.
15. Chinese companies and business executives who sacrifice human health on the alter of profit deserve to be severely punished. It seems to be a pattern of all rapidly industrializing nations to step on people’s heads as they step on the capitalist accelerator. As demonstrated by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (1906), the American food processing industry has experienced the same type of practices as in China. What is disheartening, however, is that a century after the passage of the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts of 1906, the US has slid back into practices practically as reprehensible as what occurs in China. Thus, the USDA’s inspection for Mad Cow Disease is practically meaningless, the food industry has embraced viral food sprays and irradiation of food (under the misnomer of “cold pasteurization“), Monsanto pushes genetically modified animals and seed crops into every food pantry in the world, soda manufacturers have pedaled potentially carcinogenic ingredients in their pop (like benzene and Nutrasweet), and the fast food industry desperately tries to remove indigestible trans fats from their recipes. As for slave labor in China, it is as abhorrent as slavery was in the US. Generally, big business does not care too much about slavery and tends to turn a blind eye to oppressive labor practices around the globe, so long as the price of that labor is cheap. Inside the US, slavery cases also abound.

At a late-night press conference on the Fourth of July held in a basement broom closet at the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Khopath, flanked by the US Sturgeon General, announced the urgency of the FDA effort: “We don’t know if it’s the War in Iraq, or the President’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence, or if it’s the collapse of the housing bubble, or the cumulative effect of years of business scandals, constitutional dismemberment or economic machinations.” “All we know,” said Dr. Khopath, “is that all these trifling little things used to just disappear and be forgotten, shrugged off, you know, just like water off the proverbial duck’s back; and now everyone is just getting angrier, and they’re getting a bad case of Bastille syndrome, and the public mood is pretty damn grim.”

According to a recent medical survey commissioned by the FDA, the general malaise is not related to actual current events (because things like these have been going on for decades, if not centuries, Dr. Khopath noted), but a sharp decrease in the potency of the usual antidotes. Thus, while the life and death of Princess Di easily might have refocused last generation’s attention from significant to insignificant issues, this generation seems to have become over-exposed, and thus inured to the distractions of Paris Hilton, meaningless elections between look-alike candidates feeding at the same campaign contributions trough, and endless sequels of Hollywood escapist cinema.

“This is a critical public health problem,” exclaimed the US Sturgeon General. “It used to be easy to keep the people fat, dumb and happy: a few economic crumbs scattered over here, a lurid sex scandal over there, an occasional media feeding frenzy over something totally inconsequential. Now, however, the usual mind-altering drugs, like the stock market, lurid sex scandals, spectator sports, big screen TV, and cheap gasoline have lost their effectiveness. America needs new drugs to regain its geopolitical equilibrium!”

Among the new drugs that the FDA is rushing to approve are:

* Barfridia. Do you feel nauseous whenever you hear the nostrums of the leading candidates running for President? Does your stomach do somersaults whenever you see politicians like Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney perform somersaults trying to explain away their past actions and positions? Do you lose your appetite at the prospect of watching yet another choreographed presidential “debate” between two mainstream, center-right candidates candidates who serve the interests of the same power elite? If so, then the once-a-day drug Barfridia is for you. Barfridia suppresses the urge to to barf whenever you hear a politician speaking. Barfidia is strong medicine: it can even calm your tummy while listening to Dick Cheney’s snarl.

Barfridia is available in 5 mg, 20 mg, 40 mg, 50mg and 60 mg orally disintegrating tablets. A larger, 2 kg “bricklet” is also effective when used as a projectile thrown at a television screen. Barfridia also is available as a suppository. The molecular weight of barfridium is 387.34 and its active ingredient is dichloropipnocrazylene44. Inactive ingredients are corn starch, processed sugar, dehydrated dollar bills, methylparaben, creme de mucusis, lactose monohydrate and FD & C Pink Polka Dot Dye No. 36. WARNING: Barfidia may cause users who exceed prescribed doses to try to emigrate to Canada. Analysis of 18 placebo controlled trials revealed a 67.3% increase in diplopia, especially when watching Democrat and Republican politicians at the same time on the same stage. Barfidia is not approved for use by children under the age of 65. Barfidia may cause dementia in citizens who are particularly sensitive to fraud and deception.

* Terrogra. Are you feeling a little worn out, tired and impotent? Is imperial over-stretch beginning to make you feel like less of a Man? Then try a teaspoon of Terrogra, the Manly way to restore self-confidence, national exceptionalism and military vigor while increasing your fear of terrorism foreign and domestic. With Terrogra, you will constantly be reminded of the Twin Towers collapsing into dust and you will see Terrorists — Black, Brown, Asian and Arab — lurking behind every flower pot, in every alley and behind every automobile accident. Terrogra stiffens limp wrists, hardens hearts and minds, and gives you the backbone to screw everybody else in the world.

Terrogra is a sterile, brainless elixir that contains 80 proof methyl alcohol for oral administration. Each 25 ml dose of Terrogra contains sodium laurel hydrate 2%, crystalline methamphetamine, confectioner’s sugar, gunpowder, hydrochloric acid and beer. In its injectable form, Terrogra administered by a swift kick to the posterior, causes a rapid onset of action and reaction. Terrogra contains a DNC and GOP thought inhibitor that blocks all rational consideration of data. Caution: Overdose of Terrogra can cause patients to go into hyper-paranoia that includes delusions that one’s parents, spouse, sibling and children are all deep cover terrorists. Terrogra has been tested for safety in 2 patients/subjects, one of whom lived to tell about it. Incidents of adverse effects were extreme and permanent, including recurring doubts about what caused Building 7 to free-fall at the World Trade Center on 9-11-2001.

* Dumberall. Dumberall is a Class VI intelligence reuptake inhibitor (IRI) that is appropriate for preventing excessive thinking about American foreign and domestic policy. Dumberall reduces the IQ to the lowest common denominator and virtually eliminates all curiosity about the truthfulness of mainstream media news stories. Dumberall is most effective when taken in large groups while sitting in front of a big screen television.

The empirical formula for Dumberall is C4H6NO3HCLPbNaH3O with a molecular weight of 1,245. Dumberall is absorbed through the senses, mostly the eyes and ears. Dumberall has been shown to be particularly effective in enhancing generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) in patients between the ages of 12 and 65. Concomitant use of Dumberall and Terrogra may produce a permanent state of psychosis. Dumberall is expressed to the greatest extent on brain cells, causing a 33% gray matter morbidity over a 24 hour period. In clinical pharmaceutical studies, peak plasma levels of Dumberall were achieved in 20-30 minutes after televised dosing. There were no plasma differentiations in Dumberall between men or women, all achieving the same level of dumbness at the same rate. Those taking regular strength Dumberall on a regular basis are advised to double the intake levels during the six months preceding presidential elections.

* Alqaederall. Originally sold during the Cold War under the trade name Redmenance, this medication has been reformulated for the 21st Century and will be marketed as Alqaederall. Similar to the drug widely prescribed to Americans during the 1950s and 1960s, Alqaederall increases anxiety in the general population and induces the salutary perception that everything bad that happens anywhere in the world is caused by the shadowy world conspiracy of “Al Qaeda”.

Alqaederall should be prescribed with care. It contains the Schedule II controlled opiate commiescare (GalAlC6NiOHAu100). Alqaederall has a high potential for abuse and risk of producing paranoia, schizophrenia and hyperventilation. In higher doses, Alqaederall can cause central nervous system depression and a high risk of death to innocent civilians. Alqaderall contains the following inert ingredients: crushed red, white and blue crepe paper, asbestos dust collected from Ground Zero, essence of Anne Coulter’s hair, and micro-shredded excerpts from the Book of Revelations. Alqaederall is contraindicated for nursing mothers, the elderly, children, and post-pubescent men and women. Alqaederall is snorted through the nose as a powder. Pinpoint pupils, a pinpoint head and chronic red eyes are signs of overdose. In clinical studies of Alqaederall conducted on thousands of 18-36 year old white males who drive large SUVs, the most frequent adverse effects were extreme mental constipation, recurrent recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, regurgitation of platitudes heard on talk radio, loss of left-sided hearing, and priapism.

* Vioilgone. Vioilgone is indicated for use in the treatment of “peak oil” and resultant “energy collapse” caused by decreasing energy returns on energy investments. Vioilgone is particularly useful in treating panic disorders experienced by commuting suburbanites who have become hysterical when pumping gasoline. As with many medications of the Type C-24 class, there is considerable variation from patient to patient in the amount of medication necessary for treatment. Initial dosage is determined by the degree of the patient’s dependence on petroleum, the patient’s state of denial and the depletion of the patient’s assets. Vioilgone is initially administered at a filling station, although switchover to subcutaneous injection is recommended within 48 hours. Vioilgone will increase feelings of generalized “well-being” and certain beneficial hallucinations like “technology will save us”.

Vioilgone should be stored in barrels at room temperature. Its active ingredients are biodiesel 2%, lead acid extracted from old Toyota Prius batteries 6%, soy bean oil 12%, GMO ethanol 4%, uranium 235 30% and methane gas 40% from Washington DC. Inactive ingredients are: helium, hydrogen and reprocessed cow manure. Vioilgone is an antidepressant with sedative effects. It inhibits the petroleum pump membranes necessary for energy uptake. Vioilgone is excreted through the exhaust pipe. Care should be taken when reducing intake of Vioilgone due to the respiratory shock that can be caused by the perception of earth’s energy reality.

* Pollyandum. This medication is a reformulation of a medicine prescribed for more Americans than any other drug in the past two centuries. Pollyandrum, in 20mg capsule form, is indicated for preserving the illusion that all was well in the past, and we only have to return to, say, the Bill Clinton Administration, for America to save its soul. Pollyandrum converts cynics into optimists, “activists” into micro-capitalists and progressives/leftists into Democrats. Pollyandrum can also be administered as an aerosol inhaled through the nose. Its active ingredient, historignorance, is a memory-inhibiting truth-blocker that, when taken while wearing rose colored glasses, will enhance one’s belief in national mythology and fairy tales.

The active ingredient of Pollyandrum is a synthetic opiate, ZnCH4oPbNa2. The precise means by which Pollyandrum affects the central nervous system is not known, but is believed to affect the flag-waving neurons located in the right buttocks. In clinical studies of laboratory rats and CIA prisoners held in secret detention facilities, intra-nasal dosing of Pollyandrum has caused even hardened empire-deniers to “love Big Brother” after only three weeks of treatment. Pollyandrum should not be combined with water-boarding, sensory deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions, beating with rubber hoses or other anti-depressant therapeutic treatments administered under the supervision of military psychologists and doctors employed by the Pentagon and CIA. WARNING: excessive use of Pollyandrum eventually leads to muscular Christianity and the perception of American exceptionalism. Pollyandrum should not be prescribed to African Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, Native Americans, South or Central Americans, Women or any other group who has acutely experienced the true history of the United States.

* Oxyconomy. Oxyconomy is a synthetic narcotic indicated for the treatment of panic-stricken Citizens who do not believe in Wall Street’s “Goldilocks Economy – not too hot, and not too cool.” When taken orally as tablet-sized shares of stock, Oxyconomy will induce irrational exuberance and feelings of economic bliss. The principle therapeutic values of Oxyconomy are analgesia and sedation, combined with irrepressible urges to invest in junk value Leveraged Bond Offerings (LBO), Leveraged Debt Offerings (LDO), and similar sub-prime hedge funds and investment vehicles. Oxyconomy relieves moderate to severe pain in the banking and home mortgage industry, although research indicates that it only treats symptoms and not underlying pathology. In case of a complete economic melt-down, Oxyconomy should be administered intravenously in conjunction with pure methyl alcohol, cyanide and saline solution. Oxyconomy is particularly indicated in times of economic stagflation, when stock prices are gyrating, interest rates are rising and industrial production is falling. Oxyconomy changes cortical processes and permits patients to swallow without chewing Federal Reserve Board pronouncements that, excluding food and energy, inflation is under control. Nursing mothers, retired Americans and rehabilitated day traders are not good candidates for Oxyconomy. Caution: Oxyconomy is addictive and inevitably leads to pauperism for middle class people. Oxyconomy must not be taken in conjunction with Pollyandum — terminal and irrational optimism will result.

Oxyconomy can be prescribed by stock brokers, financial advisors as well as physicians. Tests on laboratory rats and shareholders indicate that Oxyconomy works primarily on the gray matter of the brain by increasing the body’s secretion of the neurotransmitter dopamine. In fact, 47% of patients taking Oxyconomy report that their investing behavior has become incredibly dopey. The most frequently observed adverse reactions include light-headedness whenever the DJIA increases more than 10 points, dizziness and nausea when the DJA falls back to earth. Other side effects include euphoria, central nervous system depression, increased liquidity, loss of ability to track M3, and terminal economic optimism. Caution should be taken when reducing the dose of Oxyconomy because sudden withdrawal will cause patients to want to dump dollars for euros and start growing vegetables in their backyards.

* Deludem. Deludem is an intelligence-lowering thought inhibitor that catalyzes the conversion of rational perceptions into quasi-religious and patriotic delusions. Deludem has been field tested during the 2000 and 2004 elections on thousands of American voters, most of whom cannot remember that they voted for George Bush and Dick Cheney. Deludem is indicated as an adjunct to a high cholesterol, red meat, low vegetable diet. Beneficial effects of Deludem, as exhibited by recent behavior of John McCain and numerous Pentagon generals, is a serious mis-perception that Iraqis love Americans and that the US is “winning” the hearts and minds of the peoples of the Middle East (at least those who have not yet been incarcerated, raped, beaten, tortured or killed). Deludem enhances the perception of “democracy” and converts seditious, dissenting behavior into loyal, unquestioning patriotism.

Deludem is a psychotropic medication prescribed for chronic political dissent and similar deviant behavior. Adverse reactions include red, white and blue hallucinations. Its active ingredients are the USA Patriot Act 1%, elixir of petroleum 75%, eye of newt gingrich, tongue of Saddam and white phosphorus. May cause fetal harm when administered to pregnant women. In clinical studies, Deludem has caused increased feelings of nationalism accompanied by extreme reduction of wisdom and judgment. Deludem has been shown to increase suicidal ideation in people aged 16 – 36, and, when taken in combination with the over-the-counter drug, Enlysta, has caused large numbers of young men and women to volunteer for military service. Deludem is also prescribed as a world-trade and neoliberalism enhancer.

* * * * *

Some Citizens may not be appropriate candidates for these drugs. Consult your doctor, your local politicians and your pharmacist whether one or all of these medications might be right for you.

Granted, Ms. Williams did nothing commendable. But did the theft of a multinational corporation’s formula for flavored fizzy water merit a jail sentence three times longer than Scooter Libby’s four count conviction for perjury and obstruction of justice as part of the cover up for outing a “top secret” CIA agent?

Judge Forrester, a 1981 Reagan appointment to the federal bench, gave Ms. Williams the exceptionally long prison sentence because, in the judge’s words: “This is the kind of offense that cannot be tolerated in our society.”

So, let’s do a quick inventory of what other offenses can and cannot be tolerated in our society:

Government wiretapping of its own citizens without warrants and eavesdropping on private email traffic? Apparently not a problem. Happens all the time.

The kidnapping and years-long detention of “suspects” without charge or access to legal counsel or proof of wrongdoing? Hardly intolerable, say our President and Vice President.

The police beating peaceful demonstrators and our soldiers raping and murdering with abandon? Nope, boys will be boys.

The US government either operating its own or out-sourcing secret torture dungeons around the world? Certainly not intolerable, eh, Professor John Yoo?

Shredding the Geneva Conventions? Not a problem, according to Alberto Gonzales!

Washington’s promotion of civil war¹, invasions and instability throughout Africa and the Middle East in the name of “democracy” and “free trade”? Unh uh.

The Congress’s evisceration of the Bill of Rights and the gutting of the centuries old doctrine of Habeas Corpus? Nope, doesn’t register a blip on America’s “intolerable” meter.

Blatant election manipulation, gerrymandering, vote caging and outright voter disenfranchisement? Ho hum, that’s just “business as usual”.

Lying the nation into an imperial resource war and continuing to fund it in the name of “supporting our troops”? Not a thing wrong with that, say Democratic and Republican party honchos.

Murdering Black New Orleans through not-so-benign neglect, criminal abandonment or malice aforethought? Apparently there’s nothing intolerable about that in our society.

Complicity in the murder of union organizers in Colombia? No, that’s hardly unacceptable, especially as compared to stealing and selling Coca-Cola’s secret formulas.

So, is anything else “intolerable” behavior in our society, other than conspiring to swipe soda pop recipes? We cannot forget that in America the law applies equally to all, high and low, rich and poor.

Well, kinda, sorta.

Come to think of it, there certainly seems to be more law for the masses and less law for more important people. It actually seems like the lower down the rungs of society and the closer “justice” gets to the common people, the tougher and more certain are the legal consequences of stepping out of line. Thus, the exceptional eight year sentence dished out by the judge in Atlanta (not coincidentally, the corporate headquarters of Coca-Cola) to the employee who violated the property rights of her corporate employer. Thus, the seven year prison sentence for Daniel McGowan, an Earth Liberation Front activist, labeled by Oregon US District Court Judge Ann Aiken as an “eco-terrorist” for his property-damaging acts of arson in defense of the environment. But will Boeing be labeled an “eco-terrorist” for the environmental harm wreaked by its war machines? Will Monsanto be charged with “eco-terrorism” for polluting Nature with pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified seed? Has Coca-Cola been held responsible for its property damage to farmland in India because its bottling operations have sucked the water table dry. And as for those individuals and corporations who have pocketed millions, billions of dollars, profiteering from American munitions that have destroyed lives and property all around the globe, will they be prosecuted for the damage they have caused? Nahhh, don’t even think about it.

But all is not gloom and doom in the corridors of the law. There are some bright flickers on the intolerability meter.

Federal District Judge Reggie B. Walton (himself a George W. Bush appointment) sentenced Scooter Libby to 2 ½ years in prison and publicly stated that Libby had “failed to meet the bar” of the high level of respect required of public servants. Time will tell whether Mr. Libby’s friends in high places get him pardoned before he trades Brooks Brothers for an orange jump suit². But it’s encouraging, nonetheless, to recognize that some judges, like the Honorable Reggie B. Walton, are, indeed, able to administer justice without (so far) kowtowing to political patronage.

There have been other instances of appropriately recognized intolerable behavior. In Ali al-Marri v. Commander Wright, Consolidated Naval Brig, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held on June 11, 2007 that the President does not have the authority to strip a person of constitutional rights merely by labeling him an “enemy combatant.” This is good news even though the 2-1 split decision is likely to be appealed to a higher court. An additional bright flicker: former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham is now doing eight years in prison for his conspiracy to commit fraud, bribery and tax evasion³. Unfortunately, the attorney who helped nail Duke Cunningham, Carol Lam, was one of those federal prosecutors forced out of their jobs, apparently because United States Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, considers the prosecution of political crooks and cronies to be another offense that cannot be tolerated in our society⁴.

Messrs. Libby and Cunningham should account themselves lucky that they committed their crimes in the United States. In Japan, Toshikatsu Matsuoka, the Minister of Agriculture, apparently hanged himself hours before his appointed grilling by parliament about corruption in the seamy government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.⁵ On the Asian mainland, in China, a court has meted out a death sentence to Zheng Xiaoyu, The former government minister of Food and Drugs was condemned to die because he had sold out the public’s interest in safe food and medicine in return for bribes. Although I generally oppose the death penalty, one wonders: would the USDA so actively suppress testing for Mad Cow Disease; would the FDA so complacently approve deceptions as labeling irradiated food as “cold pasteurized”; would the FCC so compliantly approve corporate media’s consolidation — would any of this happen if death was the penalty for succumbing to industry lobbying or for dereliction of public duty?

It is a confusing, contradictory situation, with charges and sentences ranging all the way from non-existent to extreme. Ordinary people really want to know: how does the legal system decide what behavior in our society is intolerable, if committed by one person, but worthy of silent pats on the head, clemency or executive pardon, if committed by another person? For most ordinary people aggrieved by the political and economic system that dominates the United States, the road to justice is a twisty, pot-holed path through a dark forest, expensive to travel, full of unexpected tolls, quicksand, and legal cul-de-sacs, all creeping along toward an uncertain destination. For “important people”, however, the road to justice seems to move at a different speed and in an altogether different direction.⁶ Thus, the low level perpetrators of the depravities at Abu Ghraib were prosecuted and sentenced, but not the Secretary of Defense, his toady generals or the doctors and psychologists who facilitated it. Lt. Ehren Watada, refuses an illegal order to deploy to an illegal war and he is prosecuted; yet those who obey that same illegal order and who wreak mayhem in its service, are funded and encouraged with the cry of “Support Our Troops!” How does the legal system determine what is tolerable and what is not?

The answer is that, individually, there are judges, lawyers⁷ and prosecutors of impeccable integrity and courage throughout the country, regardless of their political party affiliations, just as there are, more or less, equal numbers of the opposite cast. Institutionally, however, the justice system’s deck is stacked, deliberately so to preserve the status quo, to maintain in their fixed orbits and relationships the constellations of commerce, class and political-economic power.

Historically, it was the English Court’s role to enforce the King’s authority and domains. Similarly, the American legal system was created to provide a bulwark against democratic (and therefore “demagogic”) tendencies and to provide a bulwark for the protection of commerce and property. Shay’s Rebellion (1786-87) and the Whiskey Rebellion (1791-94) are early examples of the courts working in tandem with the executive branch to squelch, violently if necessary, all non-passive resistance to government oppression.

Take the case of slavery. The English High Court, in Somersett’s Case in 1772, declared slavery morally repugnant and illegal, four years before the Declaration of Independence.⁸ By contrast, the American Constitution institutionalized slavery in 1788 as part of a shabby political-economic accommodation. The US Supreme Court not only did not abolish slavery when it had the chance, but it gave it the Court’s blessing in Dred Scott vs. Sandford in 1856. It took John Brown’s “terrorist raid” on Harper’s Ferry and the Civil War he precipitated to finally end the legal basis for an abhorrent economic institution that the Supreme Court never had the courage nor the wisdom nor the moral fiber to stamp out.

Among those socially conscious in the 1960s, there is a nostalgia for the exceptional years when Justices Thurgood Marshall and William O. Douglas sat on the Supreme Court and championed the causes of social justice. However, the day of the mythical “liberal” Supreme Court was but a thin slice of time sandwiched between prior and later court decisions like those that invalidated restrictions on the use of child labor,⁹matters of anti-labor bias. that endorsed the power to intern ethnic Americans in the name of national security,¹⁰ and that validated the appointment, rather than the election of the President.¹¹

Thus the 1960s might only have been an aberration coincident with years when oil was plentiful and cheap, when middle class standards of living were rising and not falling, when Americans knew no bounds, and when the door to Justice for the oppressed, women and people of color seemed to crack open just a little bit.

But that was then, this is now. The apocalyptic horsemen of resource depletion, rampaging world capitalism, climate chaos, and wars without end stalk the land; and that courthouse door once slightly ajar is now barred, bolted and guarded by a reactionary Cerberus of relatively young, doctrinaire Supreme Court jurists-for-life, nominated by royalty wannabes and confirmed by compliant “bipartisan” politicians who thought (if they thought at all) that the integrity of the third branch of government was not worth the filibuster.

For better or worse, many of the most significant issues concerning personal rights and liberties, social equality, labor, the environment, property rights versus civil rights, police powers, war powers, democracy versus aristocracy, wend their way upward to that same US Supreme Court where “law” is the candy wrapper for a policy of cultural, political and social counter-reformation. Inexorably are the modest judicial gains of the 1960s being deliberately chipped away, and despite the best efforts of those earnestly seeking justice in the highest court of the land, they seem often to be tilting at windmills.

So at this Last Bus Stop of American Justice, have we found the place where the most intolerable legal offenses against our society occur? Is this where idealism and hope are disappointed, where all good causes finally go to die? Perhaps, but it is a salutary revelation to know that not all things can or will be solved in the courthouse. The legal system is simply too grindingly slow, too finely focused and too atavistic to effect the fundamental changes that current crises cry out for.¹² Of course, those who pursue justice in the courts should continue to so for the simple reason that, sometimes, good things can and do come of it. Nevertheless, the legal tack can be only one of many, and, if history is any indicator, it certainly is not the most likely to make the most profound changes. Electoral politics, street protest, petitions to Congress and letters to editors also fit into the same category of well-intended hard work that usually yields less than the effort expended on it.

The truth is that the most intolerable offense in our society is not the theft of proprietary soda formulas, nor lying to a grand jury, nor even the gradual unwinding of good case law from the ’60s. The most intolerable offense in our society is delegating to others — be they lawyers, judges, politicians or the media — the responsibility for changing our world. As Henry David Thoreau said in his essay “Civil Disobedience”: “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”

There is no secret formula. The impetus for change has to effervesce up from below. Like a shaken can of cola. Like a shaken can of cola.

1. The US has funded and encouraged Ethiopian troops to occupy Somalia, disrupting the social stability that had finally been achieved by the Islamic Courts Union. The US is also, directly or through proxies, providing arms to Fatah in occupied Palestine so that it can fight with Hamas, and providing weapons to “terrorist” groups in Lebanon to undermine Hizbollah. In Dafur, the US (and whoever is funding the mega-campaign for the disingenuous “humanitarian” exercise) is determined to prevent the outbreak of peace by fanning the flames of sectarian war. Genocide? No, it’s all about oil.
2. AIM activist Leonard Peltier will not be pardoned. Nor will Gary Tyler, imprisoned in the Louisiana State Prison for a murder he did not commit. But many government officials have been pardoned. President George H. Bush pardoned a half dozen in one fell swoop to cover up the Iran-Contra arms for hostages scandal. In cases like the Iran-Contra conspirators, as in the case of Mr. Libby, the purpose of the pardon is demonstrate to others who might be criminally indited how those who lie in support of one’s conspirators in crime will be protected from any serious repercussions. It is an extension of the Mafia law of omerta.
3. Note that the length of Cunningham’s prison sentence is about the same as the Cola culprit received.
4. Although the Republicans have acted shamefully in firing state attorneys general who would not do their bidding, it is naïve to regard this as purely GOP behavior. Both halves of the ruling party do this type of thing. The reason why Democrats have seized this particular issue is because it is a scandal — unlike the War on Iraq — that does not have any Democratic fingerprints on it.
5. The ruling party in Japan was extremely annoyed that Mr. Matsuoka was prepared to bare all of his (and his party’s) transgressions in testimony before Parliament. His suicide (or was he helped along in his decision to “save face”?) occurred only hours before he was scheduled to testify. Another corrupt businessman involved in the same bribery scandal, Shinichi Yamazaki, committed suicide the very next day by “jumping” out of his condominium, or so it was reported.
6. Who can resist comment on the jailing of Paris Hilton? Bobble-heads like Ms. Hilton are not normally worth serious attention. However, it is fascinating to observe how easily the media can distract the public from a) the implications of the felonies committed by Mr. Libby in furtherance of the cover-up of a political hatchet job to b) the totally insignificant traffic offense committed by Ms. Hilton. Personally, I take no Schadenfreude in jailing the young and feeble-minded, even when they are rich and bratty like Ms. Hilton. Perhaps the neo-con PR onslaught depicting the Passion of Scooter Jesus can be turned on its head by a counter-campaign: Pardon Paris! Lock Up Liar Libby!
7. The pro bono defense attorneys who represent the forgotten souls of Guantanamo are among the heroes of this profession, as are the military defense lawyers who dare to stick out their jaws in JAG judges’ faces.
8. Of course, this happened as England was evolving from a purely agrarian society into an industrial one, as “free labor” was becoming the new beast of capital’s burden, and as the tentacles of empire were beginning to wrap around new overseas resources, markets and, yes, colonial slave-substitutes. Although slavery itself was banned in 1772, Parliament did not eliminate the slave trade until the early 19th Century.
9. Bailey vs. Drexel Furniture Co., 1922. For more references to
10. Korematsu vs. United States, 1944.
11. Bush vs. Gore, 2000.
12. Sometimes individuals ultimately “prevail” after years of civil rights litigation. Too often, however, the monetary damages awarded to successful litigants pale in comparison to the harm that cannot be recompensed. Thus, Mr. Korematsu was eventually “exonerated” in 1998 for his “crime” of not assenting to imprisonment in a Japanese-American concentration camp during WWII. But that did not occur until decades after the government accomplished what it wanted to do: lock up West Coast Americans of Japanese ancestry for the duration of the war. The $20,000 damages eventually paid to Japanese Americans cannot repay them for the lost years of freedom or for their lost farms and homes. Worse, the original Supreme Court case that ruled against Mr. Korematsu, although founded on false evidence presented by government prosecutors, continues to be “good law” that is cited even today in support of the current pograms against Muslims, Asians and people of Arab, African, Caribbean or South American ancestry. Likewise, if those incarcerated by the US in its myriad secret prison sites are ever released, or, at least, ever charged and tried, it will have come too late to spare them the pain of torture, too late to mend the holes in their lives, too late to salvage the myth of due process of law.