Sunday, September 28, 2008

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: ISSUE 34, VOLUME 55
A SHATTERING MOMENT IN AMERICA'S FALL FROM POWER
The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over
by John Gray, The Guardian/UK






















Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.

You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking. With the nationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.

Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future.

Which version of the bail out of American financial institutions cobbled up by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is finally adopted is less important than what the bail out means for America's position in the world. The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess.

In present circumstances, an unprecedented expansion of government is the only means of averting a market catastrophe. The consequence, however, will be that America will be even more starkly dependent on the world's new rising powers. The federal government is racking up even larger borrowings, which its creditors may rightly fear will never be repaid. It may well be tempted to inflate these debts away in a surge of inflation that would leave foreign investors with hefty losses. In these circumstances, will the governments of countries that buy large quantities of American bonds, China, the Gulf States and Russia, for example, be ready to continue supporting the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency? Or will these countries see this as an opportunity to tilt the balance of economic power further in their favour? Either way, the control of events is no longer in American hands.

The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British Empire, whose finances deteriorated from the First World War onwards, and of the Soviet Union. Defeat in Afghanistan and the economic burden of trying to respond to Reagan's technically flawed but politically extremely effective Star Wars programme were vital factors in triggering the Soviet collapse. Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different. The Iraq War and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America's economic primacy. The US will continue to be the world's largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of America's financial system.

There has been a good deal of talk in recent weeks about imminent economic armageddon. In fact, this is far from being the end of capitalism. The frantic scrambling that is going on in Washington marks the passing of only one type of capitalism - the peculiar and highly unstable variety that has existed in America over the last 20 years. This experiment in financial laissez-faire has imploded.While the impact of the collapse will be felt everywhere, the market economies that resisted American-style deregulation will best weather the storm. Britain, which has turned itself into a gigantic hedge fund, but of a kind that lacks the ability to profit from a downturn, is likely to be especially badly hit.

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America's over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.

Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side-effects. Consider Iraq. The success of the surge, which has been achieved by bribing the Sunnis, while acquiescing in ongoing ethnic cleansing, has produced a condition of relative peace in parts of the country. How long will this last, given that America's current level of expenditure on the war can no longer be sustained?

An American retreat from Iraq will leave Iran the regional victor. How will Saudi Arabia respond? Will military action to forestall Iran acquiring nuclear weapons be less or more likely? China's rulers have so far been silent during the unfolding crisis. Will America's weakness embolden them to assert China's power or will China continue its cautious policy of 'peaceful rise'? At present, none of these questions can be answered with any confidence. What is evident is that power is leaking from the US at an accelerating rate. Georgia showed Russia redrawing the geopolitical map, with America an impotent spectator.

Outside the US, most people have long accepted that the development of new economies that goes with globalisation will undermine America's central position in the world. They imagined that this would be a change in America's comparative standing, taking place incrementally over several decades or generations. Today, that looks an increasingly unrealistic assumption.

Having created the conditions that produced history's biggest bubble, America's political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

WTF ISSUE: VOLUME 33, ISSUE 54
COUNTRY FIRST
by Malik Isasis


















Bush’s method of governance is to induce fear so that his cronies can move in quickly to make monumental policy changes while the American people are still in the state of shock. It is nothing short of rape. Fear itself—scare people into submission, if that doesn’t work, threatened them with more fear. September 11th, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and occupations, Terrorists, and now ”Our entire economy is in danger.”

A plot is taking place. Since John McCain's campaign has been infiltrated by George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection team, McCain has taken on that shit-smell. So, Bush and McCain have coordinated two press conferences to upstage Barack Obama and the Democrats. A political ploy that has failed on arrival.

“We can help each other,” I can imagine Bush having told McCain.

McCain’s Press Conference

McCain gave a press conference stating that he was canceling his campaign to fly back to Washington to help iron out a settlement on the bail out of Wall Street. He stated that he spoke to Obama.

"We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved," Mr McCain said, urging Mr Obama to join him.

Obama recognized the attempt hoodwink immediately and stated:

"What I'm planning to do now is debate on Friday," Mr Obama told reporters in Clearwater, Florida, where he had gone to prepare for the high-stakes encounter. "I think that it is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once."

McCain’s proposal is to put the presidential debate off until October 2, 2008. October 2, 2008 is the date of the first and only Vice Presidential debate. McCain’s campaign suggested that debate be put off until further notice, and that the first Presidential Debate take its place.

McCain surrogate Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there's no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

It would appear McCain is hiding the fact that Sarah Palin is a fraud, and is unable to hold her own on the issues—okay, she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.



See how she speaks in circles? Yes, I know it’s embarrassing, but imagine four more years of this. The snow job is melting and the Republicans know it.

Bush’s Press Conference

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign said Wednesday night that President Bush called the Illinois senator shortly before the president was set to address the nation and asked him to come to Washington to discuss a solution to the country’s financial crisis.

You see the coordination, right? Obama didn’t bite. He agreed to go to Washington but will promptly return on Friday for the Presidential Debate.

Country Dead Last

Bush and McCain don’t care about country that much is clear. We are to them, what they leave in the toilet. Look at New Orleans. Look at the huge pit in Lower Manhattan, purposely left so that Bush can scratch open the wound every anniversary to show the American people the blood.

I use to think, if the Republicans hate government so much, why do they run for office and become career politicians? Most politicians are multi-millionaires. We have a billionaire mayor here in New York City. Why would a billionaire want to be a politician? It finally occurred to me that Republicans become politicians to protect their assets, their wealth and obtain more power. You see, this is why bailing out Wall Street is so urgent, and New Orleans was not.

Bush has jacked this government for trillions before our very eyes, and maybe this will be his waterloo, his Achilles heel that will lead to his and Cheney being convicted and frog marched off to a cell for the rest of their natural lives for crimes against humanity.

As for you McCain …you’ve played yourself, and faded yourself.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

THE PIMP ISSUE: VOLUME 32, ISSUE 53
THE PRIME MERIDIAN
by Malik Isasis


















George W. Bush has created a world where his perversity of failure and anti-intellectualism is the Gold Standard for which the corporate media has used to disseminate propaganda to hide the trillions he has jacked and the millions he has killed and displaced. While tumbling down this rabbit hole for eight years, I have called Bush several names—all very fitting, but none fit as snug as Caligula, who was the third Emperor of Rome, who ruled Rome with brutality, extravagance, and sexual and violent perversity.

Just recently in September 2008 it was discovered that officials from the Bush administration were literally in bed with Big Oil.

Government officials in charge of collecting royalties from oil companies accepted ski holidays and other gifts from the firms they were meant to be regulating, as well as using cocaine and having sex with industry executives, according to an official report released yesterday.

The inspector general's investigation found a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" operating at the mineral management service (MMS), the government agency charged with regulating oil companies.


Writer/Columnist Naomi Klein noticed a trend—or rather a financial scheme by Bush and Cheney that went something like this:

On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate "post-conflict" plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries "at the same time," each lasting "five to seven years."Fittingly, a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction.

Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and then drawing up ad hoc plans to pick up the pieces.


Enter Iraq, and the occupation. During the first three years of the Iraq Occupation, the first Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, and an awardee of the Medal of Freedom, Paul L. Bremer lost $9 billion dollars. $9 billion dollars disappeared into thin air and the media went almost silent, yet they spent nearly two months talking about a black preacher from Chicago.

Nearly $9 billion of money spent on Iraqi reconstruction is unaccounted for because of inefficiencies and bad management, according to a watchdog report published Sunday.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer wrote in The American Conservative on October 24, 2005, “The American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority could well prove to be the most corrupt administration in history, almost certainly surpassing the widespread fraud of the much-maligned UN Oil for Food Program. At least $20 billion that belonged to the Iraqi people has been wasted, together with hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Exactly how many billions of additional dollars were squandered, stolen, given away, or simply lost will never be known because the deliberate decision by the CPA not to meter oil exports means that no one will ever know how much revenue was generated during 2003 and 2004.”

In August 2005 Hurricane Katrina offered another opportunity for Bush and Cheney. On Christmas Day, December 25, 2006, the AP reported, “The tally for Hurricane Katrina waste could top $2 billion next year because half of the lucrative government contracts valued at $500,000 or greater for cleanup work are being awarded without little competition.”

Starving the Beast

Bush’s hatred for government is in line with the modern Republican philosophy of contempt toward the American people, popularized by Ronald Reagan who famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'” So, throughout the Reagan and Bush I administrations, but more significantly in Bush II administration, the government has been deliberately weakened and unresponsive as a self-fulfilling prophecy as evidenced of big government being bad for the people, and it is when run by sociopathic Republicans.

The Republicans would like to destroy social welfare programs like social security, welfare and medicare and medicaid. They could never say that, but they can bankrupt the country, therefore starving the programs out of existence. In Conservative circles, this is referred to as “Starving the Beast”.

The New Rape

After eight years of having his way with the people he governs, Bush has taken the latest manmade catastrophe, the collapse of the American banking system, to ask the American people for $700,000,000,000 dollars…without any strings attached. Just as the rush to go to war on lies on Weapons of Mass Destruction, just as the rush to pass the U.S. Patriot Act , Play-it-Again-Sam Bush is rushing the Congress to pass a “clean bill” without any strings attached for seven-hundred billion dollars---eleven zeroes. This time around Bush hasn’t even attempted to hide his agenda. It is out in the open for the public to see, and he is daring the Congress to not pass it.

Here is some of the language in some of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s proposal:

For example, in his initial three-page proposal, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson advocated giving himself unchecked authority to spend $700 billion in taxpayers’ money without any oversight or review whatsoever. The language of the proposal was stark:

“The Secretary is authorized to purchase … on such terms and conditions as determined by the Secretary …”

“The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary …”

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are nonreviewable … and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”


As Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are the only investment banks standing, they will have first dibs at the trough.

Goldman Sachs Group -- formerly run by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Morgan Stanley, stand to be among the biggest beneficiaries of a $700 billion US bailout.

"Its benefits, in its current form, will be largely limited to investment banks and other banks that have aggressively written down the value of their holdings and have already recognized the attendant capital impairment," Jeffrey Rosenberg, Bank of America's head of credit strategy research, wrote in a report obtained by Bloomberg News yesterday.


The corporate media congratulate themselves daily on their disinformation campaigns and trivialities and ignore the fact that Bush creates chaos in order to pretend to be doing something about it.

French philosopher Voltaire once said, “All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” Bush would be called an extortionist or embezzler, but since it’s on a grand scale, it is call a bail out or rescue plan.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

THE PIMP EDITION: ISSUE 32, VOLUME 52
Moguls Steal Home While Companies Strike Out
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Truthout






















From our offices in Manhattan, we look out on the tall, gleaming skyscrapers that are cathedrals of wealth and power - the Olympus ruled by the gods of finance, the temples of the mighty, the holy of holies, whose priests guard the sacred texts of salvation - the ones containing the secrets of subprime lending and derivatives as mysterious and elusive as the Grail itself.

This last couple of weeks, ordinary mortals below could almost hear the ripcords of golden parachutes being pulled as the divinities on high prepared for soft, safe landings - all this while tossing their workers like sacrificial lambs into the purgatory of unemployment.

During the last five years of his tenure as CEO of now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld's total take was $354 million. John Thain, the current chairman of Merrill Lynch, taken over this week by Bank of America, has been on the job for just nine months. He pocketed a $15 million signing bonus. His predecessor, Stan O'Neal, retired with a package valued at $161 million, after the company reported an $8 billion loss in a single quarter. And remember Bear Stearns's Chairman James Cayne? After the company collapsed earlier this year and was up for sale at bargain basement prices, he sold his stake for more than $60 million.

Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron, the former heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - aka the gods who failed - are fighting to keep severance packages of close to $24 million combined - on top of the millions in salary each earned last year while slaughtering the golden calf. As it is written in the Gospel According to Me, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

But let's change the metaphor for a moment and go to our sports desk, because if religion is no longer the soul of capitalism, as Max Weber once taught us it was, we have to venture somewhere else to try to understand the continuing follies of the new gilded age. And so, we travel just a few miles north of Wall Street to the House that Ruth Built. Babe Ruth - the Sultan of Swat - who ruled Yankee Stadium and sired generations of princes after him: DiMaggio and Gehrig, Mantle, Maris, Berra and Jackson. Yankee Stadium, as fabled a place to Americans as Ilium was to the ancient Greeks, is about to be demolished and replaced next year by a brand new stadium.

On Opening Day in 1923, New York Governor Al Smith threw out the first ball and John Philip Sousa led a big brass band playing his famous marches. It was the Roaring Twenties, when the money flowed like bootleg whiskey, the pride before the fall. In 1930, the year after the market crashed, as the Great Depression began, Babe Ruth was taking home $80,000 a year, more than the president of the United States, Herbert Hoover. "Why not?" Ruth asked. "I had a better year than he did."

Yankee star Alex Rodriguez had a better year than both of them. This season, A-Rod is making $28 million, just part of an annual Yankee payroll of $209 million, the richest in baseball. Their owner, George Steinbrenner, is among the Forbes 400, one of the country's richest tycoons.

But when it came to paying for the new, $1.3 billion pleasure dome, the millionaires on the field and King Midas in his skybox came up with some razzle-dazzle plays to finance their new wealth machine - tax-free bonds, requiring ordinary citizens to subsidize the construction, and hundreds of millions more for new parking garages, a train station and parks that supposedly will replace the ones seized by the city to make room for the new stadium. The Little League games that used to flourish on sandlots just outside the old ballpark have been moved miles away, sent down to the minors on a long road trip.

That's O.K., you may think; there will be plenty of room in the new stadium for the tax-paying public to come root, root, root for the home team - even the Coliseum in ancient Rome had bleachers for the commoners. But, in fact, there will be 5,000 fewer seats in the stands. And while the Yankees reportedly promise that half of what's left will cost $45 or less, those seats that used to cost $250, right behind the dugout, will now cost you $850. And if you want to be near home plate, you'll have to cough up $2,500 - per game.

Meanwhile, there will be more luxury suites and party rooms where fat cats can gather, safely removed from the sweaty masses. Corporations and wealthy individuals will be able to rent the luxury suites for anywhere from $600,000-$850,000 a year - tax deductible - assuming they haven't filed for bankruptcy this week.

Why aren't the fans and taxpayers giving the Yankees a Bronx cheer? They did, but city officials rolled over them while making sure local politicians stayed in the lineup. The politicians are getting their own luxury suite at the new stadium for free - and first shot at buying the best available seats.

The new colossus will cast its majestic shadow across the South Bronx, one of the nation's poorest neighborhoods. The residents will watch from the outside as suburban drivers avail themselves of 9,000 new or refurbished parking spaces. Never mind all the exhaust, even though in this part of New York City respiratory disease is already so high they call it "Asthma Alley."

Not that the well-to-do in the infield seats will have to hear the wheezing. They'll have exclusive access to a private club, a private entrance and a private elevator, totems of this gilded age. Let the games begin.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 31, ISSUE 51
BRING OUT THE GIMP
by Malik Isasis






















$6 trillion in losses in 24 months. Where's Bush? Where's the media?

What a world Bush has created. George W. Bush’s financial, domestic and foreign policies have set the world afire, and yet, he’s like a ghost in the machine. Bank after bank collapses, two occupations continue to gauge the federal coffers, and thousands of people are losing their jobs, and Bush is nowhere to be found. The corporate media has put Bush in a parallel universe where no matter how much he continues to fuck up; the media pats him on the head and let him continue to play in his padded room. The corporate media knows that the Republicans’ eight years of running Washington has resulted in the systemic failure, failure that has come home to roost, but in Bush World though, lies carry the same weight as truth.

George Bush is like a plague that keeps on giving. Bush and his Republican army have that sadim touch, where everything they touch turns to shit, you know the opposite of the Midas touch, but the corporate media still let the Republicans go unchallenged in this election season as if they’d had nothing to do at all with the failure George Bush has thrust upon us. Failure pays in Bush World, which is why he’s so adept in it. Bankrupt the federal government by money laundering it through Wall Street. It’s one of the biggest heist the world has ever seen, and is going on right before our eyes.

Bring out the Gimp

Humanity has always been on the precipice of total collapse, there’s nothing new there. Modernity however has made it much easier for us to accelerate our demise. Like in Thelma and Louise, Bush has punched the pedal to the medal and we’re heading right off the cliff. This is Bush’s way of bringing us closer to his God. The Corporate God, which propagandizes the government as the enemy of the people and sees the government purely as a tool to wash its bloody money.

This is why the corporate media keeps Bush in the basement. Only in Bush World can he be pardon by the corporate media and the Republican base and other small town, conservative voters, from the shit storm he has caused.

THIS ELECTION IS ABOUT GEORGE W. BUSH AND FAILURE. NOTHING MORE. REMEMBER THAT.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

A LETTER TO AMERICA: YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS
by Ian Bell, The Sunday Herald






















Dear America, Before you say it, I know: presumptuous. No one can speak to a multitude or to a nation, even if your presidential candidates entertain the fantasy. The United States is too big, too diverse, to allow that sort of intimacy. Is it even, from sea to shining sea, a single nation? Does New Hampshire speak much, or clearly, to New Mexico?

So many cultures, races, nuances. Too many variations from the modern media homogeneity norm, or even, dare I say it, from your cherished self-image. You are still, as Europeans too easily forget, a free association of states, each of them proud, each distinct. Some once styled themselves sovereign; most are jealous still of their remaining rights. That can't be easy.

You disagree among yourselves, too, over what America is and what that means. Even at this distance, we pick up the chatter. We glimpse a few of your tensions. Even your "culture wars" have become a cliché in our discourse. We miss the important details, but as often as not we get it. After all, we pay more attention to you than you ever do to us.

Sorry. Did that sound antipathetic, as in "anti-American"? Let's deal with that. I've said a few things down the years. It is likely that I will say a few more. You have a reserve currency, extraordinary military strength, and an unsurpassed cultural reach: people notice. If they have any sense, they also notice that America is no sort of monolith. But when things are done, by a democracy and in a people's name, we call that "America".

The irony is, in any case, that you are not beset on all sides. A great many foreign people spend a great deal of time defending your actions. Sometimes, for my money, the very depth of their loyalty is suspicious. Yours is not their country. I'm more of the Bush-didn't-win-Florida school, but I do not hold every last American responsible for the consequences of a convenient (for some) Supreme Court decision. That would be like blaming me for Tony Blair. (And no, I did not vote for Trusted Ally Number One. I like to think I saw the Blessed Cheesemaker coming).

But you still think the world is against you? Try thinking, if you can, as a Russian thinks. Their country, right or wrong. Their patriotic dead. Their great lost empire, their exceptionalism, their certainty that dark and alien others always wish them ill. So how does a Russian view the world when tiny Georgia fires rockets "pre-emptively" on tinier South Ossetia and finds America taking the side of the rocketman "in freedom's name"? Let's just say that our Russian fails to share your perspective.

Or how about a Palestinian? The world cries injustice, historic, enduring, and a continuing justification for resistance, none of it pretty. You talk peace, but you say Israel - now where did this phrase come from? - right or wrong. Do the moral calculus. Stinking anti-Semites who would wipe Israel from the map do not justify every action Israel takes. But that is not, as the world hears it, the word from America.

This is not, historically speaking, a big deal. The American Century may well be at an end, with only the debts - unfeasibly big debts - to be settled. The Chinese, the Arabs, the Europeans, even the Russians hold your IOUs. When the money runs out, aircraft carriers are window dressing. Besides, no-one in the British islands is in a position to talk. Our empire was far more reckless than yours has ever been, and we could not hold a blood-red candle to Spain, France, Germany, Holland or even little Belgium. No-one ever gave thanks for having the Russians or the Chinese in charge. These things come and go.

But you say - Kipling and Rhodes would have understood - that you are the last best hope for mankind. Speaker after speaker at the Republican convention, and more than a few at the Democrat equivalent, talked (boasted?) of the greatest nation in the world ever. No precedent. I refer you once more to British imperial history. I also suggest, though, that when such things are said sincerely, certain obligations follow. You enthuse over Sarah Palin instead.

Perhaps, like so many modern politico-media phenomena, that will pass. Over here, after all, we thought George W Bush was the most improbable thing your conservatism could contrive. Shows you what we know. A George Bush who was merely stupid and mendacious seemed the extreme edge of what the presidential process might produce when someone's vital interests were at stake. But what do we bystanders now understand? If polls are to be trusted (another story) Mr Bush is profoundly unpopular while Ms Palin, his spiritual kid sister, is homecoming queen. You can sense our puzzlement.

Our disgust is something that many of you no doubt take for granted. A book-banning, anti-abortion, creationist with scant consciousness, if any, of the outside world is not a brand that travels well. Ms Palin reportedly does not travel at all, save to cross fly over Canada. Her personal life is none of my concern. Her lipstick seems to suit her. But am I truly supposed to believe that she is suited for high office? That, surely, is the argument behind her impressive approval ratings.

But I forget. According to those around Mr John McCain, the official Republican general election candidate, your presidential contest is "not about the issues". Come again? Have you run out of things to talk about, America? I can see that Mr McCain might have a long list of things he would rather not discuss, most of them involving the incumbent with whom he shares a party. But does your polity truly intend to suspend all disbelief, all debate, all thought, because of a well-groomed moose-killer?

They tell me the other guy is struggling to cope with this new fact of political existence. That, I would have thought, was the sole point and purpose of Ms Palin's elevation to the ticket. When you cannot cope with another man's fluency, trust to slogans and big pictures and what cynical men call "perceptions".

Let's be clear about that, too. I am not one of those Europeans who succumb to the charisma of Mr Obama. I have watched Mr Blair work a room. Unfashionably, I thought the Democrats should have stuck with a deplorable Clinton. I also thought the Obama Berlin gig an absurdity. I do not trust anyone who answers "hope" and "change" to every hard question. And I have no belief in an "anti-war" candidate who proposes dusty death without end in Afghanistan.

Mr Obama remains - you know this bit - the first African-American to have a serious hope of becoming president. Yet what do we find? Merely journalists adjusting every too-close-to-call poll in their heads to accommodate their certain knowledge of race in American life. We Europeans, some of us, do not therefore form judgments. This continent invented industrialised racism, and persists with the habit of mind. But seriously: a black man talking seriously or a moose-killer forbidden to attempt coherent speech? And your choice is?

Too close to call. America, that is almost beyond words. I have neither a personal nor a partisan interest. Ms Palin and Mr Obama alike are foreign to me. Yet if Mr Bush has been a dangerous absurdity, what is the latest Republican president-but-one? Since I'm asking the questions, I'll answer.

Ms Palin is a symbol of deep American introversion, of the fact that you have ceased to take yourselves seriously and, more important, don't much care who knows it. Arguments over the relationship between the wider world and your choices have become irrelevant. You have detached yourself, finally, from the global community. This is isolationism as never before conceived. "American" in my life has been lingua franca, for better or ill. Now you talk to yourself.

And you talk, my friends, in the sort of gibberish that once you spurned. It's not about Ms Palin, as such. It is about the process that creates a candidate-grin manipulated to serve darkness, ignorance, fear, a war economy, and the flaunting of stupidity.

Nice going.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 31, ISSUE 50
BAMBOOZLED!
by Malik Isasis






















The phenom known as Sarah Palin is a Frankenstein monster created by the corporate media as a counter weight to Barack Obama. She is a ruse, and will be revealed to be so when the house-of-cards collapse from the weight of arrogance. What a piece of shit the corporate media are. What more is there to say when they allow the Republican Party to usurp the mantle of victims and agents of change, while simultaneously dropping shit-bombs to distract the American populace. What has happen since the Republican convention is the complete white washing of the past eight years of George W. Bush, and Republican governance.

Political operatives disguised as pundits at CNN, NBC, MSNBC, FOX NEWS, CBS are like rats jumping a sinking ship, clamoring to criticize Obama on everything from questioning his testicular fortitude to being a sexist while praising McCain for being a reformer and Maverick based on nothing.

Agenda Politics

As I will state over and over, this election is about George W. Bush and the Republicans’ failure over the past eights years. The corporate media is not interested in those failures, because those failures to us are economic windfalls and policy coups for them. George W. Bush was an awesome meat puppet and his political twin John McCain has already greased the insertion area, and that my friends, is a sacrifice John McCain is willing to make.

The corporate media are really showing their contempt toward us as they continue to make shit up and have the Republicans drive the news cycle and pretending they have nothing to do with it.





Bamboozled

In order for Vice Presidential Sarah Palin to rise, the media has to make Obama look clumsy so that voters—rather, so called Working Class Voters® question his judgment. Obama’s skills hasn’t changed, the media is shifting reality with straw man arguments.

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama's problem winning votes from working-class whites is showing no sign of going away, and their impression of him is getting worse.

The media has tried to hem Obama up, much to Palin and McCain’s advantage, making them look about as fresh as a three-day old bowl of fruit. The burden is being placed on Obama to fight back, so when he does they can transform him into just another angry black man, or better yet, just another politician.

The corporate media and political operatives posing as pundits love to put poor Working Class ® whites on a pedestal, massaging their ignorance and lack of education by putting down the education of others so that it provides political cover for conservatives by consistently using code words like inexperience, American, values, community organizer, we don’t know him, and small-town in the place of racial bigotry and xenophobia. The media then makes their racism, Obama’s problem with voters.

Code-switching to kowtow the so-called Working Class Voter ® for being ignorant is their call to arms. The media and Republicans are proud of their ignorance even though it is nothing to be proud of, but it is the key to why Republicans consistently win the South and Rust belt parts of this country. Working Class ® whites are bitter about their situation and have been taught to blame Mexicans and blacks rather than the real culprits. Therefore, they vote with arrogance against their own interests to stick it to those blacks.

Working Class White Voter® your real grievances are the policies that keep you from earning a livable wage, having health insurance, an inability to afford gas…black and Mexican people have nothing to do with any of those things. Corporate America, Republicans are the reason for your condition, but go ahead and cling to your bigotry.

The McCain campaign is stirring up charges of sexism against the Obama campaign and even has the gall to evoke racism against Obama. McCain can say anything because like Bush, the media got his back, no matter how ridiculous the claim. McCain’s purpose for lying out of his ass is to use race and gender against Obama, just as Vietnam was used against former presidential candidate, and Vietnam War hero John Kerry. Like I said, take everything the Republicans say about Democrats and invert it, and you’ll have the true agenda of the Republican Party and the corporate media, which is to bamboozle the American people into giving up their citizenry for pure consumerism.

Every week a bank collapses, every month the two occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan costs $10 billion dollars a month, sustained by a perpetual war with invisible monsters never meant to be caught. The poor will get poorer, creating a stevedore class. Corporate conglomerates intention is to make us blind consumers, indentured servants who are too caught up in paying debt to raise our heads to see the truth: the neo-fascist country we are becoming.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 31, ISSUE 49
THE POST-RATIONAL SOCIETY
by Malik Isasis






















I think I get it now. The Republican Party was jealous of Barack Obama’s popularity, charisma, and celebrity and wanted their very own Obama all along. What else could explain the soaring popularity and celebrity of Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, the corporate media and the Republican Party has thrust upon us. For 19 months now, the Republicans and their media allies have called Obama a celebrity due to his popularity, but fast-forward to the Republican Convention and presto! Instant celebrity. Since the Republican Party believes in only power, they don’t really care if last week political tactics completely contradicts this weeks political tactics.

Watch this Fox News clip below, can you imagine the same hosts carrying on about Michelle or Barack Obama?



This from the same network that brought you gavel-to-gavel on John Edwards' hair cut--oh, wait, he's a Democrat.



THE HUPA SYNDROME®

That’s right. I’m coining a new term. HEAD UP ASS SYNDROME®. HUPA® is the condition that best describes an institution or individual consciously equating lies with truths in order to deceive and advance personal gain, e.g. Fox News or Politico, whose article, “A Maverick Who Now Must Lead” started right out of the gate with bullshit: ST. PAUL, Minn. — If you didn’t know that John McCain was a Republican, you might think he was running against the Republicans.

They really don’t care about the lies they tell do they? Here is the real McCain.



And yet, those in the media insist on referring to him as a Maverick®, or Reformer®, or Maverick-Reformer®. And now, the corporate media has repackaged McCain and Palin as change agents. Why? Because like McCain said, he agrees with Bush 95% of the time, which means, corporate America has a lot to gain financially by having another Republican in the White House. It’s as simple as that.

The Post Rational Society

We understand why corporate media and wealthy Republicans support Republicans, but why does the average, poor and down-trotted? The answer is as simple as the question, posed. Back in the 60s the Republicans, specifically Richard Nixon, seized upon disaffected white voters who began leaving the party in droves when the Democratic Party began supporting a host of social movements, but mainly the Civil Rights Movement.

The Southern Strategy was designed by Nixon and the Republicans to comfort the bigotry, sexism and prejudices of Southern white men who felt disenfranchised by the Democratic Party’s tacit support of minorities’ and women’s challenge to the white male paradigm. The Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights and civil liberties in the 60s during the empowerment movements caused a mass exodus of disenfranchised Southern white men.

The Nixon Doctrine was not adopted to address the misperceptions or heal the grievances of these so-called disenfranchised but to build a voting block of white men by pitting their interests against those of people of color and women. Although all of the disenfranchised shared more in common than not, the Southern Strategy was a euphemism for divide and conquer. This tried and true strategy worked because it fractured communities by individualizing them, if people are fighting rather than discussing their shared grief, a collective revolution is less likely. Politicians and dictators the world over understand this concept.

No matter how horrible Bush is for the country and the world, his support in the polls will never go below 30%- 33% because Nixon laid down the foundation. The poorest of the poor of Republicans are the most dogmatic about wedge issues such as race, gay marriage, abortion, and Mexicans. The so-called wedge issues keeps the Republicans’ poor wrapped up in their xenophobia. These folks have been convinced that they are the moral center of the country. They have also been convinced that being educated is elitism, staying in and living in squalor is noble, and working two or three jobs to make ends meet is American pie.



We live in a society, an American society were politicians lie outright, and despite Youtube, get away with being a Maverick®., or Reformer®., or a Maverick-Reformer®.. This bullshit works because Americans are jackasses, and were trained to be so.

Rationality has nothing to do with voting Republican because voting Republican has been transformed into a belief system similar to that of religion, where evidence is not necessary to believe in the convictions, because it’s all based in emotions and irrationality. For example, when a major conglomerate ships its company overseas for cheaper labor, the Republicans can convinced their base that it is the Mexicans who are stealing their jobs, contrary to reality. After nearly 40 years of indoctrination, Republican and media tested words like Elitist®, Value Voters®., San Francisco Liberal®., The Most-Liberal Democrat®., American Values®., Tax-Cuts®., HardWork®., and many others, trigger a response in the reptilian brain of the Republican voter that keeps them from accepting reality, which is why Republicans have dominated national politics for 30 years with help from their greatest ally, the corporate media.

So now when you hear these dumb asses shouting, "USA! USA! USA!" to their own demise, you know why.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 31, ISSUE 48
HOODWINKING
by Malik Isasis






















It’s not a problem that Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin is a woman; it’s not a problem that she has family drama (who doesn’t?); it’s not even a problem that Sarah Palin has been a governor for less than two years, and has no federal government or foreign policy experience. What is a problem though, is the corporate media and the Republican Party twisting themselves into a pretzel trying to justify Palin’s inexperience after 18 months of criticizing Barack Obama’s so-called inexperience and foreign policy credentials.

The discrepancy is not cognitive dissonance by the corporate media. As I stated in an earlier blog, Jackass Nation, this is what the media does, shit on people’s heads and then tell them that the smell is the truth, legitimate news. The media creates perceptions that becomes a parallel reality and it should be clear that the Republicans are using their media allies and the media apparatus to create a folklore around Sarah Palin’s inexperience as experience to try and bridge their delusions to a parallel reality where we forget that George W. Bush was the worst fucking president, ever.

The fact that Republicans and their political operatives in the corporate media have completely flipped their views on experience or inexperience goes to show that they are only interested in power and would do and say anything to obtain it.

John K. Wilson over at Huffingtonpost wrote an article challenging and breaking down a study of media coverage of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. Here is an excerpt:

By contrast, one of the biggest negatives about Obama was the accusation of inexperience. And media stories in the format of "on the one hand, on the other hand" didn't count as negative in this study, since they're equally balanced. According to the study's authors, "In order to fall into the positive or negative category, two-thirds or more of the assertions in a story had to fall clearly on one side of that line or the other." So many stories might point out a meaningless positive (Obama is popular) and balance it with a devastating negative attack (Obama is inexperienced).

Much like the earlier media tropes about Al Gore (lied about inventing the Internet) or John Kerry (coward and traitor), the idea of Obama as inexperienced was not merely unproven but the opposite of the truth. It scarcely mattered that the accusation of inexperience was untrue; the media made it true by force of repetition. You'll look in vain for any press who pointed out the fact that Obama has more years of experience as an elected public official than Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, or Mitt Romney. It's almost impossible to find any media reporting the fact that Obama has far more foreign policy experience than four out of the last five presidents when they were elected.
.

William Kristol, a neocon and political operative over at New York Times, Fox News and editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, led his own brigade on Obama’s inexperience in all of his media outlets. Here’s one from his own magazine:

Putting Obama's Inexperience Into Perspective

Dan McLaughlin (who blogs as the Baseball Crank) has written what may well be the seminal essay to date on Barack Obama’s experience, or what little there is of it. By all means take a few minutes and read the whole thing, but here’s a sample:

He's never run anything at all, not even a small law practice like John Edwards. Besides his campaign, probably the biggest thing he's ever run was the Harvard Law Review.

He has nothing resembling national security experience or even particularly sustained advocacy on the issue before announcing his candidacy in 2007. The man has apparently hardly even traveled to Europe, to pick one example.

He is running in a contested election outside the insular world of Chicago politics for the first time and has never had any sort of responsibility for political leadership.

He's never served in the military and seems to have scarcely any experience even knowing people who served in the military.

His private-sector business background is negligible.

Are any of these things disqualifying from the Presidency? No. But electing a man who is so seriously lacking in all of them is indeed unprecedented. And that is and should be a central issue in this campaign.


Since Sarah Palin, Kristol has found himself like most of his flying monkey brethren, back-tracking on his most fierce argument against Obama saying this:

There are Republicans who are unhappy about John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin. Many are insiders who highly value -- who overly value -- "experience."

Here’s another example in Kristol’s magazine in a piece titled: The Tales of Two Résumés by Dean Barnett:

WHAT STORY DOES Barack Obama's résumé tell? Obama became the head of the Harvard Law Review in 1990 and graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude in 1991. These accomplishments suggest great intelligence and strong interpersonal skills. They also suggest limitless potential.

So what did Obama choose to do with his limitless potential after leaving Harvard? Not much. His first two years out of law school, he began writing a book, commenced lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School and returned to his old vocation of community organizing. Obama's résumé would probably advertise the fact that he eschewed big money options to better serve humanity in these various capacities. Many members of the legal community would view these claims of selflessness with skepticism. Some cynical readers of his résumé would infer that he spent the time "trying to find himself," and perhaps think of the old Bill Cosby crack that after two years of searching, he should have been able to find not just himself but a couple of other people as well…

As for Palin, she lacks Obama's glittering Ivy League credentials. While that fact scandalizes vast portions of the Bos-Wash corridor, the scandalized neglect the most common purpose for an education--to develop one's abilities to such a point that one can actually begin accomplishing things. And there again is where Palin shines--she has gotten a tremendous amount done everyplace she has been.

In truth, Sarah Palin is the kind of employee virtually every enterprise seeks--the kind who gets things done. And Barack Obama is the kind of employee a company hires only when it's in the mood for taking a risk and willing to wager that the candidate's past performance isn't predictive of his future efforts.


One would think that in a highly technological Youtube society where things are recorded and archived, people like Kristol and other shit throwers in his flock would care about what they’ve said three months, a day or a second ago, but they don’t because their arguments are distractions, meaningless, attached to nothing but pathology—ever notice that when Republicans’ arguments become unraveled, they develop sudden amnesia and argue the complete opposite with the same passion?




Liberal Bias Exposed

The Republicans have often criticized the media for the mythical liberal bias, but you can always tell what Republicans are thinking by taking their criticism about the media and inverting it—kinda like an inverse function (shout out to my math geeks). Everything that they say about the Democrats is the opposite, and can be reduced to what they, the Republicans believe.

Here’s an example of Fox News being indignant about the media scrutinizing and “attacking” Sarah Palin and her family.



Here’s the inverse or opposite: Remember Mary Matilin, a political operative, saying, “They've (Democrats) tried every which way. They've tried the kitchen sink, but all it's done is revealed their elitism, their sexism, their hypocrisy? Well, Matlin stated exactly what they do to their political enemies, and here’s an example of that:



The Real Smear Merchants

Fox News loves throwing around the phrase smear merchants to discredit Demcrats.



A Smear Merchant Being Broken Down to His Very Last Compound



The Hoodwink

Sarah Palin is being used as a distraction from the last eight years of the worst presidency of this country’s history with endless wars and occupations, collapse of banks, deficits the size of black holes, the devalued dollar, domestic spying, torturing, government sponsored kidnappings, systemic corporate corruption, and the lost of a major US city, New Orleans, and a gaping hole 7 years later in Lower Manhattan that seems to perfectly encapsulate Bush’s failures. This is what Sarah Palin’s story is about, changing the topic. If the corporate media has its way, and Bush has set the bar so low that all Palin has to do is not trip over her feet, and string together some coherent words during her speech and she’ll be successful in changing the subject because America’s politically dumb like that.

The Republicans are shining each other’s peckers with grandiosity at their convention and the corporate media will participate in this orgy to deceive the American people because they benefit from Republican Chaos Theory of governance.

I haven't forgotten about you George W. Bush. The economy hasn't forgotten. The families of dead soldiers, and dead Iraqis and Afghans haven't forgotten you either. This election is about you.

Monday, September 01, 2008

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 30, ISSUE 47
Why Do We Keep Letting the Politicians Get Away With Lies?
by Robert Fisk, The Independent/UK






















How on earth do they get away with it? Let's start with war between Hizbollah and Israel - past and future war, that is.

Back in 2006, Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers from their side of the Lebanese frontier and dragged them, mortally wounded, into Lebanon. The Israelis immediately launched a massive air bombardment against all of Lebanon, publicly declaring Beirut's democratically-elected and US-backed - but extremely weak - government must be held to account for what Hizbollah does. Taking the lives of more than 1,000 Lebanese, almost all civilians, Israel unleashed its air power against the entire infrastructure of the rebuilt Lebanon, smashing highways, viaducts, electric grids, factories, lighthouses, totally erasing dozens of villages and half-destroying hundreds more before bathing the south of the country in three million cluster bomblets.

After firing thousands of old but nonetheless lethal rockets into Israel - where the total death toll was less than 200, more than half of them soldiers - Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's leader, told a lie: if he had known what Israel would do in revenge for the capture of two soldiers, he announced, he would never have agreed to Hizbollah's operation.

But now here comes Israel's environment minister, Gideon Ezra, with an equally huge whopper as he warns of an even bigger, more terrible war should Hizbollah attack Israel again. "During the (2006) war, we considered the possibility of attacking Lebanon's infrastructure but we never (sic) resorted to this option, because we thought at the time that not all the Lebanese were responsible for the Hizbollah attacks... At that time, we had Hizbollah in our sights and not the Lebanese state. But the Hizbollah do not live on the moon, and some (sic) infrastructure was hit." This was a brazen lie. Yet the Americans, who arm Israel, said nothing. The European Union said nothing. No journalistic column pointed out this absolute dishonesty.

Yet why should they when George Bush and Condoleezza Rice announced that there would be peace between Israelis and Palestinians by the end of 2007 - then rolled back the moment Israel decided it didn't like the timetable. Take this week's charade in Jerusalem. The moment Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni announced that "premature" efforts to bridge gaps in the "peace process" could lead to "clashes" (Palestinians, it should be remembered, die in "clashes", Israelis are always "murdered"), my friends in Beirut and I - along with a Jewish friend in London - took bets on when Condi would fall into line. Bingo, this was Her Holiness in Jerusalem last week: "It's extremely important just to keep making forward progress rather than trying prematurely to come to some set of conclusions." "Some set", of course, means "peace"'. Once more, US foreign policy was dictated by Israel. And again, the world remained silent.

So when the world's press announced that Barack Obama's new running mate, the silver-haired Joe Biden, was "an expert in foreign policy", we all waited to be told what this meant. But all we got was a reminder that he had voted for the 2003 Iraq invasion but thought better about it later and was now against the war. Well, Goddam blow me down, that certainly shows experience. But "expertise"? No doubt in government he'll be teemed up with those old pro-Israeli has-beens, Madeleine Albright and Martin Indyk, whose new boss, Obama, virtually elected himself to the Israeli Knesset with his supine performance in Israel during his famous "international" tour.

As one of the Arab world's most prominent commentators put it to me this week, "Biden's being set up to protect Israel while Obama looks after the transportation system in Chicago." It was a cruel remark with just enough bitter reality to make it bite.

Not that we'll pay attention. And why should we when the Canadian department of national defence - in an effort to staunch the flow of Canadian blood in the sands of Afghanistan (93 servicemen and women "fallen" so far in their hopeless Nato war against the Taliban) - has brought in a Virginia-based US company called the Terrorism Research Centre to help. According to the DND, these "terrorism experts" are going, among other subjects, to teach Canadian troops - DO NOT LAUGH, READERS, I BEG YOU DO NOT LAUGH - "the history of Islam"! And yes, these "anti-terrorism" heroes are also going to lecture the lads on "radical (sic) Islam", "sensitivities" and "cultural and ideological issues that influence insurgent decision-making". It is a mystery to me why the Canadian brass should turn to the US for assistance - at a cost of almost a million dollars, I should add - when America is currently losing two huge wars in the Muslim world.

But wait. The counterinsurgency school, which claims links to the US government, is reported to be a branch of Total Intelligence Solutions, a company run by infamous Cofer Black, a former director of CIA counterterrorism, and Erik Prince, a former US navy seal. Both men are executives with the Prince Group, the holding company for Total Intelligence Solutions and - and here readers will not laugh - a certain company called Blackwater. Yes, the very same Blackwater whose mercenary thugs blithely gunned down all those civilians on the streets of Baghdad last year. So Canada's soldiers are now going to be contaminated by these mercenary killers before they head off to the Muslim world with their unique understanding of "the history of Islam". How do they get away with it?

On a quite separate matter, you might ask the same of Conrad Black, languishing in a Florida prison after his business convictions. Responding to an enquiry from Murdoch's grotty New York Post into body searches and other appalling humiliations at the jail, Uncle Conrad, as I like to call him - for he is among the rogues I would love to have interviewed (others include the younger Mussolini and the older Yeltsin) - responded that the Florida facility was not oppressive, that "many of the people here are quite (sic) interesting" but - AND HERE IT COMES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! - "if saintly men like Gandhi could choose to clean latrines, and Thomas More could voluntarily wear a hair shirt, this experience won't kill me".

Now when Uncle Conrad likens himself to the assassinated Mahatma, the apostle of India, that is mere hubris. But when he compares himself to England's greatest Catholic martyr, a man of saintly honour if ruthless conviction, this is truly weird. "I die the King's good servant but God's first," More reportedly said on 6 July 1535, before they chopped off his head on Tower Hill. And many are there among Uncle Conrad's enemies who might wish the same fate for the former owner of The Daily Telegraph. After all, Henry VIII didn't let Thomas get away with it.