…we are still left with a disaster of a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and that the country as a whole will not support.

Winning in Afghanistan & Pakistan will require that Saudia Arabia stop using our oil dollars to fund the Taliban, their Wahhbi missionaries.  It will also require that Pakistan have blackout-free electricity and adequate supplies of clean water.  The winner will have to deliver shoes, clothes, food and education to the youth of Pakistan and Afghanistan, as the Taliban now do. Further, population growth has to be accounted for in planning and the governments of the US, Pakistan and Afghanistan must be willing and able to pay more than the Taliban.  Currently, the Taliban use their Saudi funding to be the highest wage payers.  Paying dearly to fight and enemy that we are at the same time superbly funding with our mindless energy policies is the height of folly and puts us squarely on the road to disaster.  To make matters worse, our tax policies are not aligned with our military and political objectives.  In fact, our tax policies demonstrate that we are hooked on the magical thinking that we can have it all:  ”guns and butter” with victory on the cheap.  Our opponents know full well that this confirms our lack of commitment and staying power.  Much the same could be said about our drug policies and their internal contradictions.  Why is none of this being broadly discussed here in the US?  Charlie Wilson and the CIA created the Taliban but then we abandoned our friends with the bitter fruit being a Taliban that has morphed into an out of control  monster.  Lastly, we must confront and reduce the level of deeply entrenched and systemic corruption that bedevils all parties in this conflict. Until we honestly face the ground truths listed above, and eliminate the flow of our energy dollars to Saudia Arabia, we will be locked in an unsustainable and un-winnable conflict, largely of our own making.

Author: Jock Gill

Today, we need to reflect on the lack of meaningful change and the seemingly unchangeable ancien regime of 20th century America.

The Boston Globe ran a front page story on how Corporations invested $100 million per month for ten months, thats a B as in one billion dollars, to stymy change and preserve the legacy approaches of yesteryear. If they could not block Obama’s election, they could make sure no change you could hope for would be enacted.

DailyKos has run an item “No One Is Going To Save You Fools“.

Before I explain the generic insult, let me first make something perfectly clear: I am your enemy. That you don’t know this is understandable: after all, people like me prefer it that way. But until you understand just what you’re up against and why, you’re going to continue to lose, and look like fools in the process.

Barack Obama has indeed sold you out. He and many of his Democratic colleagues have sold you out on healthcare, and they’ve sold you out on financial reform. You were looking for a savior, and you’ve been had–not an altogether atypical result for those looking for a strong leader to “save” them.

He hasn’t done this because he’s a bad guy. In fact, he’s a great guy. I think he’s doing pretty much the best job he can. He’s sold you out because he’s not afraid of you. And really, if I may be so bold, he shouldn’t be afraid of you. You don’t know who really runs the show, and you’re far too fickle and manipulable to count on.

thereisnospoon’s diary :: ::
The first thing you need to understand about healthcare reform is what Jane Hamsher identified long ago: nothing–absolutely nothing–is going to trump the White House’s deal with PhRMA and the insurance industry. The question you need to ask yourselves is: why? If you’re intellectually mature enough to get past “personal betrayal” as your best answer, you’ll be on the right track.

While you ponder that one, you might want to also consider why nothing has been done–nor will anything serious actually be done–about financial industry reform. Standing up to the financial industry in the current political environment should be a no-brainer. So what in the heck is going on here? If you can think past shadowy conspiracy theories and possible personal enrichment for the Obama family, you’ll be doing the kind of thinking that will help actually solve the problem.

The problem is people like me, and the people I work for. I’m what they call a Qualitative Research Consultant, or QRC for short. Here’s my website. There’s even a whole association of us who meet regularly to discuss ideas and tactics. Together with the AAPC, the MRA, the AMA, ESOMAR, and a whole host of other organizations you’ve never heard of, we have more power and control than you know. We’re extremely good at what we do, and we do it all behind the scenes, appealing to and manipulating your subconscious brain in ways that your conscious brain has little to no control over.

Clearly, today, too many politicians are too beholden to corporate money. If we want real change, if we want to spend $1 billion dollars inventing the future and the next release of the Modern Era, we have to begin by getting corporate money out of politics. In a word, we must abolish the entrenched fiction that corporations are persons with constitutional rights. Only when we do this, and restore the prohibition of corporations engaging in political activity, will our elected representatives truly work once again for we the people.

Do you really think 100,000 contractors and 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan are about do for the Afghans what we will not, cannot, do for ourselves? And if we cannot, do not, what chance of success do we have there? Or Iraq? Or at home? Where is the change we can believe in? When will Obama stand up to the monied interests of Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex?

If what people see is mainly greed and rigid ideologies run amok and contaminating the highest levels of our government, what should they believe? We talk one talk, but we walk quite another walk. In a word, our propaganda and our actions are in conflict and provide no reliable reference point. Would you trust anyone who did this?

What is the “The Trap“?

It is a three part film by Adam Curtis, broadcast by the BBC in March 2007.

Curtis’s narration concludes with the observation that the game theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour is appropriate and useful. In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths.

For the last 50 or so years we have been badly led astray by “the game theory/free market model”. It has become a rigid political dogma strictly adhered to by the majority of Republicans, champions of unregulated free market capitalism, the neoconservative proponents of “The Project for the New American Century“, and the far right. It has been supported by a brilliant propaganda program, as documented by Curtis, that has suppressed critical thinking and turned too many Americans into one dimensional consumers. It was not an accident that right after 9/11 we were urged to simply “Go Shopping”. See here and in 2006 as well.

Can Obama get us out of “The Trap’ with a new model? “The game theory/free market model” has been too well used to justify the current gross excesses of our present “Gilded Age II”. I suggest that we must break free of the gilded age and its dogma. Only if we can reclaim our freedom, will we be able to have any hope of dealing successfully with Global Climate Disruption, Peak Oil, and the end of cheap money. Why? Because this will require very high levels of cooperation and altruism in support of the common good, all values denied by the entrenched dogma of “the game theory/free market model” and the trap it has caught us in.

Standard Operating Procedure

Is it possible for a photograph to change the world? Photographs taken by soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison changed the war in Iraq and changed America’s image of itself. Yet, a central mystery remains. Did the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs constitute evidence of systematic abuse by the American military, or were they documenting the aberrant behavior of a few “bad apples”? We set out to examine the context of these photographs. Why were they taken? What was happening outside the frame? We talked directly to the soldiers who took the photographs and who were in the photographs. Who are these people? What were they thinking? Over two years of investigation, we amassed a million and a half words of interview transcript, thousands of pages of unredacted reports, and hundreds of photographs. The story of Abu Ghraib is still shrouded in moral ambiguity, but it is clear what happened there. The Abu Ghraib photographs serve as both an expose and a coverup.

The trailer for the film is here.

The New Yorker magazine also recently published:

EXPOSURE, The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib.

by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris.

All that the soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, a Reserve unit out of Cresaptown, Maryland, knew about America’s biggest military prison in Iraq, when they arrived there in early October of 2003, was that it was on the front lines. Its official name was Forward Operating Base Abu Ghraib. Never mind that military doctrine and the Geneva Conventions forbid holding prisoners in a combat zone, and require that they be sped to the rear; you had to make the opposite sort of journey to get to Abu Ghraib. You had to travel along some of the deadliest roads in the country, constantly bombed and frequently ambushed, into the Sunni Triangle. The prison squatted on the desert, a wall of sheer concrete traced with barbed wire, picketed by watchtowers. “Like something from a Mad Max movie,” Sergeant Javal Davis, of the 372nd, said. “Just like that—like, medieval.” There were more than two and a half miles of wall with twenty-four towers, enclosing two hundred and eighty acres of prison ground. And inside, Davis said, “it’s nothing but rubble, blown-up buildings, dogs running all over the place, rabid dogs, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable: urine, feces, body rot.”

Read the whole essay here.

And see also:

SOP site

A must read on our current economics

“It is through the newspapers and TV channels that the
socially destructive notions of a small group of
extremists have come to look like common sense.”

The Guardian UK
By George Monbiot
Tuesday 28 August 2007

A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the
economic debate, and now we are dealing with the
catastrophic effects.

For the first time the UK’s consumer debt exceeds the
total of its gross national product: a new report
shows that we owe £1.35 trillion. Inspectors in the
United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges
are in the same perilous state as the one which
collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after
Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New
Orleans are still living in trailer homes and
temporary lodgings. As runaway climate change
approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary
action. Booming inequality threatens to create the
most divided societies the world has seen since before
the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by
unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands
out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic
troubles.

These problems appear unrelated, but they all have
something in common. They arise in large part from a
meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa
resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of
government that is responsible for many, perhaps most,
of our contemporary crises.

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its
political project did not have a name. But it knew
where it was going. The society’s founder, Friedrich
von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would
take at least a generation to win, but he knew that
his intellectual army would attract powerful backers.
Its philosophy, which later came to be known as
neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the
ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.

Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by
maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the
state. The role of government should be confined to
creating and defending markets, protecting private
property and defending the realm. All other functions
are better discharged by private enterprise, which
will be prompted by the profit motive to supply
essential services. By this means, enterprise is
liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens
are freed from the dehumanising hand of the state.

This, at any rate, is the theory. But as David Harvey
proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
wherever the neoliberal programme has been
implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth
not just to the top 1%, but to the top tenth of the
top 1%. In the US, for instance, the upper 0.1% has
already regained the position it held at the beginning
of the 1920s. The conditions that neoliberalism
demands in order to free human beings from the slavery
of the state: minimal taxes, the dismantling of public
services and social security, deregulation, the
breaking of the unions; just happen to be the
conditions required to make the elite even richer,
while leaving everyone else to sink or swim. In
practice the philosophy developed at Mont Pelerin is
little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab.

So the question is this: given that the crises I have
listed are predictable effects of the dismantling of
public services and the deregulation of business and
financial markets, given that it damages the interests
of nearly everyone, how has neoliberalism come to
dominate public life?

Richard Nixon was once forced to concede that “we are
all Keynesians now.” Even the Republicans supported
the interventionist doctrines of John Maynard Keynes.
But we are all neoliberals now. Margaret Thatcher kept
telling us that “there is no alternative”, and by
implementing her programmes Clinton, Blair, Brown and
the other leaders of what were once progressive
parties appear to prove her right.

The first great advantage the neoliberals possessed
was an unceasing fountain of money. US oligarchs and
their foundations, Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and
others, have poured hundreds of millions into setting
up thinktanks, founding business schools and
transforming university economics departments into
bastions of almost totalitarian neoliberal thinking.
The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the
American Enterprise Institute and many others in the
US, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for
Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute in the UK,
were all established to promote this project. Their
purpose was to develop the ideas and the language
which would mask the real intent of the programme, the
restoration of the power of the elite, and package it
as a proposal for the betterment of humankind.

Their project was assisted by ideas which arose in a
very different quarter. The revolutionary movements of
1968 also sought greater individual liberties, and
many of the soixante-huitards saw the state as their
oppressor. As Harvey shows, the neoliberals coopted
their language and ideas. Some of the anarchists I
know still voice notions almost identical to those of
the neoliberals: the intent is different, but the
consequences very similar.

Hayek’s disciples were also able to make use of
economic crises. An early experiment took place in New
York City, which was hit by budgetary disaster in
1975. Its bankers demanded that the city follow their
prescriptions: huge cuts in public services, smashing
of the unions, public subsidies for business. In the
UK, stagflation, strikes and budgetary breakdown
allowed Thatcher, whose ideas were framed by her
neoliberal adviser Keith Joseph, to come to the
rescue. Her programme worked, but created a new set of
crises.

If these opportunities were insufficient, the
neoliberals and their backers would use bribery or
force. In the US, the Democrats were neutered by new
laws on campaign finance. To compete successfully for
funding with the Republicans, they would have to give
big business what it wanted. The first neoliberal
programme of all was implemented in Chile following
Pinochet’s coup, with the backing of the US government
and economists taught by Milton Friedman, one of the
founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society. Drumming
up support for the project was easy: if you disagreed,
you got shot. The International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank used their power over developing nations to
demand the same policies.

But the most powerful promoter of this programme was
the media. Most of it is owned by multimillionaires
who use it to project the ideas that support their
interests. Those ideas which threaten their interests
are either ignored or ridiculed. It is through the
newspapers and TV channels that the socially
destructive notions of a small group of extremists
have come to look like common sense. The corporations’
tame thinkers sell the project by reframing our
political language (for an account of how this
happens, see George Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an
Elephant!). Nowadays I hear even my progressive
friends using terms like wealth creators, tax relief,
big government, consumer democracy, red tape,
compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats.
These terms, all invented or promoted by neoliberals,
have become so commonplace that they now seem almost
neutral.

Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis
after crisis, all of which can be solved only by
greater intervention on the part of the state. In
confronting it, we must recognise that we will never
be able to mobilise the resources its exponents have
been given. But as the disasters they have caused
unfold, the public will need ever less persuading that
it has been misled.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this ever since the shooting at the Amish schoolhouse several weeks ago. Of all the groups of people that epitomize the idea of not being conformed to this world, the Amish are near the top. I’ve also been thinking about it a bit after some of my recent encounters of some of the negative aspects of group-think online.

A year or so ago, I was at a meeting of grassroots activist leaders in Burlington, VT. We had had a great day talking about ideas and strategies of how to change our country for the better. At the end of the day, we took a boat ride out on Lake Champlain. It was a beautiful day and at one point we gathered near the bow of the boat. One person was bewailing the inside the beltway consultocracy. I posed the question of if we are successful, how we will avoid falling into the same trap that they did and becoming the new insiders. This gave the leader of the group a moment of pause, and I hope that it still causes people to pause.

Early on in the Lamont campaign, when I was the person responding to emails at the ‘info’ account, one person spoke about how Sen. Lieberman had changed. He had lost touch with his constituents and become part of the beltway problem. The writer asked how I knew that Ned wouldn’t do the same thing. I admitted that I didn’t know that. I went on to say that based on my knowledge of Ned, I doubted that would happen, but I also said that if it did, then perhaps in 18 years, I would be working for some new young challenger.

As we launch into the 2008 presidential contest, are blogs going to be part of a new netroots based consultocracy, or will we be able to continue to renew our minds and transform ourselves? I am hoping for the later, but at times, I have my doubts.

Back in October, I wrote about The Political Palimpsest. I had been to the Action Coalition for Media Education Summit in Burlington, VT and had seen the movie The Ad and the Ego. This movie has really influenced my thinking about political messaging and I think applies very nicely to Zephyr and Tim’s Op-Ed.

One point from the movie is that despite claims by many people that they don’t pay attention to advertisements, and that the advertisements don’t affect them, the ads really do have an important effect. That effect is less about the overt message, “Buy this car”, and more about the underlying message, “you aren’t good enough if you don’t consume, if you don’t look like the people in the ads.”

So, what is the underlying message of all the political advertisements that you’ve seen over the past couple weeks? Behind all the negative ads and false information, it seems as if the key message of political ads over this past cycle is “We think you’re stupid”.

Zephyr and Tim write, “With fewer viewers watching campaign ads on TV — thanks to Tivo, iTunes and Netflix — politicians will soon have no choice but to place themselves and their messages directly into popular shows, movies and video games.” I think they are right about political placement and ‘Second Life’ politics. That needs to happen, but those annoying ads on TV aren’t going away.

So yes, let’s ad new media into the mix, but let’s look at the underlying message that is being sent. I think the Lamont campaign provides a good example of the direction I hope to see things going. I admit, I’m biased. I was the technology coordinator for the Lamont campaign. But, I wasn’t part of the team doing the ads, and if I were, I would have pressed the idea of the underlying message even further.

What was underlying the Lamont ads? Perhaps the most important underlying message was one of community involvement. From the first ad where Markos Moulitsas Zúniga burst in with a group of supporters even before the ad was finished to offer their help, to the recurring “And so do we” tag to all the ads, the message was that Lamont supporters are people that believe that by working together in community, we can make our country better.

To me, that has always been the underlying message of American democracy, and a message that I wish we saw more of in all the political messaging. I wish the Lamont campaign had taken this message further, and I had thoughts on how they could have done it. I hope that we’ll see more of this sort of messaging in 2008.

Perhaps it will come through in the new media that Zephyr and Tim talk about. Perhaps it will also come about in service politics that people like Howard Dean, John Edwards and Matt Dunne have spoken about.

It is time that we move away from a message of “we think you’re stupid” to a message of “working together in community to make our country better”. John McCain may be leading the pack in political placements with his cameo in “Wedding Crashers” but people like Howard Dean, John Edwards, Matt Dunne and Ned Lamont are leading in presenting a more important underlying message.

Among items provided by the Bush administration to news stations was one in which an Iraqi-American in Kansas City was seen saying “Thank you Bush. Thank you USA” in response to the 2003 fall of Baghdad.

The footage was actually produced by the State Department, one of 20 federal agencies that have produced and distributed such items.

The article linked above, from the New Zealand Herald, notes that these Video News Releases (VNRs), either unattributed are barely attributed, are also used by corporations to manage news about their products.

“300,000 to 500,000 people marched in Chicago to protest The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005.”

Or this major development:

“Now comes the conservative American Bar Association–400,000 lawyers–whose House of Delegates has overwhelmingly approved a task force report accusing President Bush, in polite legal language, of violating both the Constitution and federal law. ABA President Michael S. Greco sent it to Mr. Bush with a cover letter dated February 13, 2006.” — Ralph Nader.

Why is the Mainstream Media [MSM] failing to report these stories? Google these stories and you will see that the MSM are missing in action. A conspiracy of silence.

Is it because they fear the restoration of the primacy of the people over Mammon’s market?

It is clear once again that the proposition that the “market” is the best, if not only, solution for all problems is false. Just as in the “Roaring 20s,” Mammon’sMarket has, in fact, created one train wreck after another: healthcare, the environment, education, international relations, the middle class, justice as fairness, social equality, the rule of law, our Constitutional civil liberties, — you name it. Our Civic and Economic viability and health are in deep trouble as a consequence.

The question is simply this: Is the market meant to serve humanity or is humanity meant to serve the market?

Mammon will always answer that we are the servants of the market. We have now tried Mammon’s corporatist approach since 1980. After more than a quarter century, it is manifestly emerging as a massive failure, as it always has and always will.

A significant consequence of accepting Mammon’s argument is that it replaces the functions of government with the operations, short time horizons, and metrics of the market. Dick Cheney’s quip in the 2000 VP debate that “the government had nothing to do with his success” is a pure example of Mammon’s value proposition. Government is incompetent and bad. The Market is supremely competent and good.

The British gave into Mammon even earlier: The policies of Margaret Thatcher, and earlier, in the 1960s, The Mayfair Set, including David Stirling, Jim Slater, James Goldsmith, and Tiny Rowland, rapacious take over con men who corrupted British political ethics and sold off England’s Industrial assets for Mammon’s short term profit imperative.

Until we once again assert the primacy of citizens over the market, and thus the validity of government’s role in human affairs, we will remain in the thrall of Mammon’s false prophecy. This can only lead to our demise, just as it did last century with the great market crash of Black Friday in 1929.

Can we afford another unregulated market inspired economic crash?

The false prophet Mammon sets up an equally false dichotomy: The Market or The Commons. From this, Mammon creates the tautological arguments that have powered the radical right and their corporatist paymasters for the past 25 years. At root, this is their attack on FDR’s politics that clearly gave citizens primacy over the market. This attack on FDR was exactly the mission that the National Association of Manufacturers gave to Eddie Bernays in the 1930s. Bernays was Mammon’s genius hand maiden. His successor and disciple, Karl Rove, is the same.

This is NOT to say that we do not need a market. We do. But one clearly and firmly dedicated to the service of all humanity: A market that respects and encourages the public good as its essential partner in sustaining both civic and economic well being.

When will the Democratic party wake up and reject Mammon? When will the Democrats declare the obvious: The market is not sufficient for civic and economic health and well being. It is necessary, but not sufficient.

The truth can only be found in the synthesis of and/both: The Commons and the Market: The citizens with primacy over the market but respectful of it, as they recognize and value its essential and necessary role.

I look forward to a political leader who will articulate this as the basis for claiming a brighter future for all of us: An extraordinary future full of promise, opportunity, and innovation.