Underground Essays --Author -- Mark Biskeborn -

Drones Enable Corporate Power

2011-10-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

Several articles have recently appeared in the news about the legality of using drones to assassinate U.S. citizens and foreigners. The article by Jean MacKinzie at the Global Post (1) recently considered the question, “Are our drone attacks legal?” The article provides insight into the legal justifications or lack thereof. However, as attorneys go, they look mostly at the laws on the books or the precedence or juris prudence. This view certainly has its limits.

The military does not need new laws to allow the assassination of people by drones or by any other clever means. As many times in recent events, the Patriot Act allows the U.S. to capture and/or kill anyone considered a terrorist and without a fair trial, due process of the law, or even solid evidence.

Roll up the Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta and bury them in the dust on a dark shelf. These “patriot” laws greatly expand the powers of the president, the military and law enforcement with the ability to assassinate or detain anyone considered associated with terrorism. The laws make it convenient for “authorities” to identify just about anyone as a terrorist by relatively vague criteria and, without due process or evidence, to kill people from a remote control, virtual reality video gaming seat.

This includes the several recent cases in which the FBI coaches and coaxes vulnerable individuals. “Time and again, the FBI concocts a Terrorist attack, infiltrates Muslim communities in order to find recruits, persuades them to perpetrate the attack…only to heroically jump in at the last moment, arrest the would-be perpetrators whom the FBI converted, and save a grateful nation from the plot manufactured by the FBI.” (2)

These dark and dubious FBI sting operations (3) are now being used to trump up justifications to impose sanctions against Iran. For various political reasons, President Obama has jumped on this bandwagon with such casus belli—justifications for aggression. The use of trumped up justifications for U.S. sanctions and military invasions has become a cookie cutter process for presidents throughout American history. (4)

Laws are overwhelmingly made to protect those in power—call it "national interests." Money provides power and power protects those with the money.

U.S. government policies are overwhelmingly skewed to protect the investors and owners of wealth, especially for those dealing in fossil fuels which provide unprecedented returns on investments and even more so as the crude reserves diminish and the profits increase.

Unfortunately, fossil fuel is flagrantly obsolete simply because it causes endless wars for the resources and it destroys the environment on which life depends. Climate change and oil spills cause ecological catastrophes, which in the long, and also in the short run, have begun to destroy the planet. The only way to avoid these lethal and toxic events is to develop alternative technology.

Alas, the country's power elite avoids rapid changes in energy technology because the investments to develop new energy sources, renewable and clean, might require a short-term reduction on their returns on investments. This is a simple rule of capitalism, especially in the "free" and unregulated capitalism in the United States.

If the United States were to develop alternative, renewable, clean energy sources on a massive scale—wind, hydrogen, solar, etc.—and be the first and most advanced in this technology, the investors would gain a huge and global competitive advantage. But this change in technology requires short-term reductions in returns on investments before the profits increase.

While spending trillions of dollars in futile, endless wars in order to control access to fossil fuels, our elected officials ignore the opportunity to invest public resources to develop the renewable energy sources and so too, create more good jobs.

Instead of a national and rational energy policy, our elected officials, motivated by Big Money corporations, cater to the ruling class, which wants to use any type of military actions, drones or otherwise, to defend their access to the highly profitable fossil fuels.

Faceless corporations are ready to stop anyone who stands in their way to harvest the profits from the crude and this applies to any other industry such as healthcare or finance. The owners of wealth—the 1 percenters—are reluctant to reinvest into new energy sources. It's a lot easier to maintain the current and highly lucrative status quo, even when that means the ruling class needs to kill anyone standing in the way of their profits.

The financially powerful ruling class—however irrational their policies—writes the laws that enable the owners of wealth to carry on with their business and maintain their short-term and enormous profits. Or they simply ignore laws such as the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. Their irrational and greedy operations reveal just how short-sighted unregulated, unguided capitalism is. Big Money corporations like Koch and Exxon serve as just one of many examples how the U.S. system favors the rule of powerful men rather than the rule of rational laws that benefit the greatest good of the entire country. Koch and Exxon write state legislation repealing climate change laws.

The purpose of government—at least in a democracy—is to allow rational use of resources for the greatest good of the nation.

Since the Big Oil barons want to control their grip on petroleum no matter where it’s found, the U.S. government's policy, by default, is to support their wishes, despite any democratic process. The simple and obvious truth is that the U.S. government offers the country’s people no rational energy policy for the greatest good of the country. On the contrary, the U.S. elected officials take their commands from the large and financially powerful corporations which, in turn, compensate the elected officials by large campaign contributions.

Since the death of FDR and the New Deal, U.S. elected officials—Democrats and Republicans—have turned their functions away from democracy.(5) The United States has become an inverted totalitarianism—a corporate ruled state—as the government provides services first and foremost to the wants and needs of the 1 percenters, the owners and investors of corporations.(6)

Since the U.S. elected officials—congressmen, senators, president—cater to the wants of the members of their own ruling class instead of the general population, and since the elected officials command the U.S. military, then also the public’s military provides killing services—security or defense—first and foremost for the benefits of the 1 percenters. This New World Order in the United States now resembles a totalitarianism like that of the old Soviet Union, even though it’s called by euphemistic names like “free market.” There’s nothing free about it, especially as the middle class pays the brunt of the taxes to finance these oil-motivated military escapades into endless wars.

As it stands then, any American who joins the military thinking patriotically and heroically that he or she is “serving the country" is gravely—no pun intended—mistaken. You join up with the military, you provide protection for large corporations, most of which are not even American (CACI, Halliburton, KBR to which Cheney gave no-bid contracts in Iraq, and this list of war profiteers is long). (7)

To break this down into pragmatic and simple terms, the military, with all its clever toys, like the drones, only serves the interests of the few, extremely wealthy…the 1 percenters. The military, following commands from the ruling class, which includes the elected officials, enables these patricians to pursue their search for greater profits today in the Middle East and tomorrow elsewhere. The Big Oil lords do so with government subsidies and special tax breaks on top of all other services.

The rest of us plebs—the 99 percenters—have all learned to avert our eyes and thoughts about this simple truth. Our democracy is no longer in the hands of the voting citizens. Us 99 cent-ers are mere subjects obeying the demands of corporate fiefdoms.

So, no matter how you parse the legal arguments about drones or other clever killing tools, the answer to such debates carries a foregone conclusion.

The Big Oil lords, the wealthy barons of Wall Street—the ruling corporate class—this small group of elites makes the rules by simple force of financial power. They determine the laws and often act regardless of the laws.

The unjustified, preemptive invasion of Iraq serves as one blatant example of disregard for the laws. And there are many more such examples from Cheney’s war crimes regarding torture to Rumsfeld’s blind military and nation building blunders.

Likewise, the Supreme Court also demonstrates how the highest ranks of the justice system adjudicates not in the interests of the greatest benefits of the citizenry but rather in favor of the interests of their own ruling class by allowing corporations all rights as individual citizens. Big Money corporations are seldom American and most often global and without any national loyalty.

With the 2010 judgment on Citizens United v FEC, we find again how the “authorities” in America give corporations the right to spend unlimited funds to influence elections despite the wishes of 85% of the citizens. (8) The Supreme Court justices give corporations all the rights of individual citizens, such as free speech, even through they are hardly "American citizens," as they are almost all global and mostly based in tax-evading islands, and they are never prosecuted as individuals when they break the laws.

None of these military policies or the energy policies—not to mention the "too big to fail" policies on Wall Street—serve for the greatest good of the nation but rather for the interests of those who possess the billions and millions of financial force. Elected officials—both Democrat and Republican—serve the barons of industry more so now than ever before and to hell with anyone who stands in their way.

Drones are effective tools as they ultimately enable the tycoons in their pursuit of greater profits.

The well-heeled attorneys can debate all they want about the legalities of drones or Patriot Acts or torture or preemptive invasions based on lies or massive fraud in the banking or in the healthcare industries. Our current perversions of the system of justice and of politics, is determined not by rational laws but by powerful barons of industry.

Bigger forces trump the laws.

Sources:
(1) MacKinzie, Jean. Are our drone attacks legal?, Global Post, Oct. 11, 2011, http://news.salon.com/2011/10/11/are_our_drone_attacks_legal/?source=newsletter

(2) Greenwald, Glenn. The FBI again Thwarts its own Terror plot, Salon blog, Sept. 29, 2011, http://politics.salon.com/2011/09/29/fbi_terror/

(3)Porter, Gareth. Alleged Iranian Assassination Plot Appears an FBI Sting, Real News Network, Oct. 15, 2011. Take a look at this recent report on the Real News Network:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7452

And here is an article explaining how President Obama is running with this dubious FBI sting operation: Feller, Ben. “Obama says Iran must be held accountable for plot,” Associated Press. Oct. 13, 2011.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_AMBASSADOR_PLOT?SITE=AP&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_afternoon&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_afternoon&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet

(4) See my article posted of various blogs: “Church of Later Day Neocons.”
“This is how the American industrial military complex works. It’s become a cookie cutter process for presidents since the Mexican American War when the Thornton Skirmish arose between the U.S. and Mexican military, handing President Polk a justification of war against Mexico in 1846. The sinking of the USS Maine gave Teddy Roosevelt a trumped up reason for the Spanish American War just as the Tonkin incident helped justify the Vietnam War.”

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Church-of-Later-Day-Neocon-by-Mark-Biskeborn-080725-949.html

(5) Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Feb. 2010.
“Before the war, during the first two terms of FDR’s presidency (1933-41), a substantial attempt was made to establish a liberal version of social democracy. Looking back upon that experience, one has difficulty recognizing an America in which, unapologetically, public debate and discussion centered on matters such as planning; focusing resources on the poor and unemployed; bringing radical changes agriculture by limiting production; regulating business and banking practices while not fearing to castigate the rich and powerful; raising the standard of living of whole regions of the country; introducing public works projects that created employment for millions and left valuable public improvements (libraries, schools, conservation practices, subsidies to the arts); and promoting all manner of participatory schemes for including the citizenry in economic decision-making process.”

(6) Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Feb. 2010.
“Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation. …that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.”

(7) See the short lists on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_profiteering

(8) See the video that explains this: http://storyofstuff.org/citizensunited/

Corporations in the U.S. and in Mexico an Inverted Totalitarianism: Devour, Prey, Seduce

2010-09-25T20:55:00.000-07:00

They are mammoth carnivores, dark power brokers, and, as proven time and again, without tough governing, they devour the earth, seduce public officials, and prey on human greed. They can hold everyone in their crushing jaws, smash innovation in one sweep of their tails, and pack off entire nations back in time some 66 million years as hostage for the release of Tyrannosaurus Rex herds, reaping chaos.

Corporations are beneficial forms of business. They provide almost equal investment opportunities for everyone—although without equal decision information—and they sometimes even create "economies of scale" by delivering useful products most efficiently at low, competitive prices. By leveraging capital, they are able to build products otherwise unimaginable, like Adobe software, Boeing aircraft, Apple Computers, and then others like BP, Goldman Sachs investments, AIG insurance, Merrill Lynch investments, or Enron energy.

They are giant businesses. Without regulatory limits, they wield monstrous power. In the U.S., as in Mexico and in other countries, they have become stronger than the government; their money can overrule environmental laws, influence and even control our public officials and judiciary. They prey on our most treasured democratic institutions and values. The patrician owners, leaders of corporations, have their own self-interests and agendas, and they rarely set a priority to improve the greater good of society.

On the other hand, government's job is to balance the competitive markets so that they comply with the needs of society in general such as clean environment, health, or whatever the majority of citizens set as social goals. Today this balancing is not working. And it's a problem we need to fix in our current system of government.

The stewards of industry always spread a certain ideology to protect their interests. Consider the privately owned Koch Industries, valued in the billions, the Koch brothers own patented processes, mostly by inheritance, to convert oil into gasoline; you can guess why they lobby against any awareness of global warming. (1)

The captains of industry believe in magic. They have become the tribal high priests of our culture, while our enfeebled democracy fails to set boundaries and rules to develop our society in general. One of the most glaring ideas that corporate elitists hold close to their hearts is that a "free market"—one that is uninhibited by government policy—always corrects itself to the most efficient conditions. This notion about a "free market" arose from something Adam Smith said way back in the 18th century in terms of "the invisible hand" that guides markets to correct themselves as they satisfy the needs of individuals.

Meanwhile, the neoliberal corporatists ignore that they are neither concerned nor equipped to solve larger economic and social problems. The more contemporary, post-WWII economists, like John M. Keynes, emphasized that government must play a crucial role in markets in order to point industries toward the optimal levels of wealth, the greatest good of society, and away from abuses of power. American has miserably butchered its social development, while nurturing rampant consumerism for individuals and predatory corporatism. Right-wing activists, like the middle-class Tea Baggers, are woefully misguided and unwittingly only abusing themselves.

Corporate managers are generally not wise, altruistic saints looking for the best possible benefits for society at large. No. Their job is to keep their firms competitive and increase profits and stock values by any means. Today, one of the popular methods includes "investing" obscene sums of money in lobbying to slacken labor laws, taxes, and the bridles of government regulations. And as individuals, corporate managers do not possess the will or the power to make rational decisions for an entire society's best interests. They work for their own self-interests to own more preferred shares and to promote their careers, salaries, and bonuses. As they sip martinis at their exclusive country clubs, they joke about the stupidity of middle-class Tea Baggers.

Today's military and economic crises reflect many others in U.S. history. In the 1920s bankers and investors raised speculation into a feeding frenzy of greed leading to a Wall Street bubble, burst, and Great Depression in the 1930s. Likewise, the delusional bubble years of Reagan/Bush led to the same false gods of free-wheeling corporations taking power over the balancing controls of government oversight.

Reagan's empty speeches about "no government is best government" are still praised as great oratory by the wealthy, who benefit from it. The empty discourse continues even after all the hypermedia has crashed down around the ankles of the middle-class workers, who now pay for the excesses of the wealthy and their sycophant policy makers. America's history of bubble-and-bust business cycles allows no one to plead ignorance. No one can act surprised, least of all the well-heeled financial wizards responsible for the premeditated busts for profits.

American politics repeatedly shows the world that brain-dead incompetence is tolerated, the more its consequences are colossal and costly to working-class families.
The dazzling myth in today's America is that the U.S. government is empowered to direct the economy for the benefit of all people since the government is--theoretically--for and by the people.

"They argued perhaps naively, that in a democracy, the people were sovereign and government was, by definition on their side. The sovereign people were entitled to use governmental power and resources to redress the inequalities created by the economy of capitalism." (2)

FDR's New Deal supported this conviction and "a wide range of regulatory agencies were created, the Social Security program and a minimum wage law were established, unions were legitimated along with the rights to bargain collectively." (3)

Since the 1950s, the U.S. government has become weaker than corporate power. Its democratic processes no longer serve the interests of its citizens. During the 80s, Reaganomics (a.k.a. neoliberal economic policy) weakened and dismantled most of FDR's New Deal, "socialist" policies, which resulted in less equality. From the time of Reaganomics to the present, government policies distributed 200 times more wealth to the top 1 percent of the population, back to the robber barons—a return to the Gilded Age—while the middle class' income barely increased, if at all.(4)

During the 90s, Clinton continued this neoliberal trend. While looking to gain support from the Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs, he hired Robert Rubin for help, which resulted in Rubinomics—the overturn of the regulatory Glass Steagall Act, thus enabling free-wheeling banking to run off the tracks by 2008. Banks like Goldman Sachs only used this major catastrophe first to fleece the middle class and then to take its tax-paid bail-out as the spoils of a corporate coup d'état.

"Rubin has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having f**ked up virtually every project he ever got his hands on. He went from running GoldmanSachs (1990-1992) to the Clinton White House (1993-1999) to Citigroup (1999-2009), leaving behind a trail of historic gaffes that somehow boosted his stature every step of the way." (5)

Recent crises show us how both Republicans and Democrats sing the same hymns in order to garner financial and political support from corporate lords. Does America now have a single party like, say, China or Cuba? If not, at least the differences are now little more than staged soap-opera dramas to maintain the American myth that voters have a choice—one between the neoliberal or the neoliberal policies—and that America is still a functional democracy, home of the free and the brave.

"Why has capitalism become so triumphant and democracy so enfeebled? Are the two trends connected? What, if anything, can be done to strengthen democracy?" (6)

The U.S. government is weak. It cannot control its own military-industrial complex, which has grown its own power base by lobbying, despite what citizens might vote to stop the endless wars and colonial occupations, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Andrew Bracevich points out in his book, Washington Rules, the American empire has become an unbearable burden, almost impossible to shake off our shoulders.

"The global military presence is ostensibly essential to the defense of American freedom even in places where the actual threat to American freedom is oblique or imaginary. Americans take all this for granted and so are blind to its significance. Like corruption or hypocrisy, this national security consensus has long since become part of the wallpaper of national life, attracting attention only when some especially maladroit escapade comes to light. So, too, with the Washington rules: It's only when something especially egregious occurs—most commonly a botched war—that members of the public take notice, and even then only briefly."(7)

Business leaders almost all sing from the same hymn book of fixed-ideas. Since before the Gilded Age, they have always used their power to lobby against government regulations, except for the few who dare heresy, only to risk their careers. "But Shiller's views conflicted with conventional thinking in a more profound way."(8)
The "smart" economists sing in harmony in order to keep their cushy jobs, they advocate economic policies beneficial for corporate agendas. No. This is not a conspiracy, it's just business as we know it in America.

The ideology has become a religion in America. Many public officials, economists, and industrialists have joined "the Family"—an elitist social prayer group—which cleverly brought God into their ruthless business ideology, where any means justifies their profits. In their world of elitist religion, the idea of the "invisible hand" is not government intervention, but it is God's providence, God's invisible hand guiding His chosen leaders, and to hell with Christ's middle-class morality; theirs is a new world order of "Christ plus nothing." For them, Christ is a God-chosen leader just as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, or Hitler.

"James A. Farrell or Henry Ford, commanding Pinkertons and the police; in Seattle, it was Dave Beck, Teamster, who owned the law, "Beck was living evidence that God's invisible hand blessed the ruthless as much as or more than those whom he considered the deserving." (9)

The wheels have fallen off American democracy. The vast majority of corporations, like religions, are not organized in any profit-sharing, democratic process. Quite the contrary, corporations "manage personnel" much more strictly than churches "shepherd their flock," and neither organization asks their participants to vote on issues.

Does the Catholic Church ask its members to vote on abortion, gay marriage or preemptive war? Pat Robertson asks his congregates for donations, but does he ask his congregation permission to buy a personal jet? Does the CEO of XE ask his employees what mercenary contracts to take on? And yet these are the primary types of organizations to which a large number of Americans voluntarily, and perhaps unwittingly, adhere as if they prefer living as automatons with prescribed moral and behavioral codes that provide simply a veneer of ethical professionalism. Middle-class working families seldom find the time to consider how our democracy hobbles along while industrialists devour any economic equality. Castaneda describes how inequity cripples democracy in Mexico. It directly applies to the U.S.:

"Economic mistakes, political abuses, and the dramatic increase of inequality in what was already one of the world's most unjust societies might not have been entirely avoided through democratic rule and authentic accountability, but they were absolutely inevitable in the absence of representative democracy." (10)

Corporate advertising creates a society with freedom to consume. Many business theorists, like the blundering and famous Milton Friedman, found this "free market" ideology to be highly appealing material for bestselling books. Friedman promoted the fetish of a market enabling consumers a "freedom of choice." This became especially attractive for most captains of industry looking to increase profits by any means, advertising and popularizing unbridled commerce.

At the same time, despite or because of this ideology of "consumer freedom," an eerie conformity—Babbittry—in how people think develops as we Americans behave as consumers more in line with marketing research rather than as citizens with individual critical thinking. Consumerism destroys communities where each individual competes to outdo the other. The alienation leaves people lonely and craving for some source of fulfillment. Drugs, alcohol, shopping or religion become the options in a mass market without any other culture than to work and to consume.

This surreal society, made up of androids, driven by purchase power, reveals itself now more than ever as some corporations in many industries crash after devouring their own food chain.

Many of the Wall Street bankers are terrorists. Al Qaeda's financial investors made millions by "going short" on stock purchases in U.S. airlines before 9/11, because they knew that, after the attack, the value of the shares would plummet. Following the example of the Islamic terrorists, our own investment bankers "went short," investing in the failure of the very same bad mortgage and credit card loans they sold to working families. Many Goldman Sachs employees probably attend mass or synagogue at least once a week, people drinking from our mainstream founts of moral courage and spiritual strength. Nevertheless, they contrive clever methods to fleece the consumers of America's spectacular, neon-lit disposable society—the middle-class workers jostling to buy stuff, living for celebrity bling, driving guzzling SUVs manufactured by an industrial dinosaur.

"The upper classes in this country raped this country. You f**ked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said "This is wrong'." (11)

The American aristocracy sets the rules, not the democratic system. A cabal of elitist economic advisors, like Rubin mentioned above, usually set policies of immense public consequences and more often than not, we--the general citizenry are hardly given a voice in the decision process or, if we do as in the 2008 elections for Obama, our voices were ignored as the campaign promises slipped on the occupation of Afghanistan or the futile 2009 surge in Iraq, and on the promise to raise the minimum wage, or on the mediocre healthcare reform, or the closure of Guantanamo.

In the recent financial catastrophe on Wall Street, policy makers made status quo assumptions, a blind faith in their ideology, and yet, despite their colossal blunders, they still remain in public office with their erroneous policies about free markets, torture, preemptive invasions, endless war, and wire tapping.

"Indeed, major actors such as Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner [Robin's pals] still are in leadership positions, with their past conduct receiving remarkably little criticism despite their having helped design the policies that precipitated the meltdown." (12)

Money trumps reality. Policy makers, like the ones named above, work in government or in think tanks or universities, which are often heavily influenced by the corporations that sponsor their jobs and research. This corporate influence has increased over the decades as corporations pay tax deductible "donations" to organizations and thus find a strong voice in how research findings are presented or not. Consider U.C. Berkeley's findings on how "new microbes" are eating up the oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico and then look at BP's $500 million donations to the same research center. Consider the millions of dollars BP spent on lobbying to both Republicans and to Democrats, and then consider how the White House now fails to pressure BP to pay a high premium for the damages. Consider also how the Supreme Court recently overturned Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, enabling corporations unlimited and direct campaigning for political candidates.

"Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury." (13)

In his book, Democracy Incorporated, Wolin describes how these important institutions from think tanks, universities, and news media as well as the government were taken over or suppressed, and brought into a central control to create a total center of power, a totalitarian state, like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Stalinist Russia, which monopolized the power in order to restructure society.

Wolin considers how a new form of totalitarianism can arise in a superpower, which loses its sense of limits and morphs into an empire out of touch with reality. It's a country where civil rights, due-process of law, and habeas corpus are revoked and imprisonment and torture are sanctioned. It's a place where a vice president can publically boast of supporting this torture and "new world order." Government intelligence agencies produce fictional reports, as happened in W's administration, in order to please the president, who, in turn, pleases corporations, like Big Oil, by attempting to occupy the world's second largest oil reserve. In order to obtain more financial sponsorship, politicians, news media, universities, and think tanks provide corporations with the news and information they want the public to hear.

"Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private' governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power." (14)

Take the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA was signed by George Bush, Sr. in 1992 and put into effect in 1994 by Bill Clinton, making it a bipartisan agreement. It encapsulates many of the false assumptions that the prominent, and, unfortunately, influential policy makers of the last fifty years—from Volker to Greenspan and on to Bernanke—have blindly advocated while advising stately politicians.

Policy makers created NAFTA based on erroneous ideology. The "free trade" part of NAFTA reflects the old hymn that free markets do godly miracles when left to their own entrepreneurial devices. Years later, Canada might boast as a winner relatively speaking, if there was one. Although U.S. businesses justified the agreement as a means to become more competitive by reducing labor costs, even though America lost millions of middle-class jobs, devalued wages, and increased inequality. Meanwhile, other industrialized countries like Japan keep their own citizens employed by innovating and by responding to market demands, instead of the short-term profits gained momentarily by short-term labor cuts for which American management is infamous. Consider the innovative electric car, the Nissan Leaf, compared to the now extinct Tyrannosaurus Rex, GM's Hummer.

Mexico lost the most from NAFTA. Mexico's American-trained economists expected that the agreement would boost manufacturing and economic growth by setting up the maquiladoras. Many peasants moved from their farms to the U.S. factories in border towns and worked with hardly any labor laws to protect their interests only to see that the U.S. firms decided to outsource their work to countries where wages were even lower at the time in India and China. Consequently, many Mexican peasants lost their jobs and they could not return to their peasant farmlands because the U.S. farms began exporting to Mexico large quantities of agricultural products at even lower, subsidized prices.

Castenada describes the affects of NAFTA and how Mexico already resembles an "inverted totalitarian" state:

"And this would happen, they warned, not in a nation magically propelled toward the First World by irresponsible headlines or high-level trade agreements, but in a country as firmly anchored as ever in the Third World, a country consisting of several segregated nations, plagued by injustice and inequality, authoritarianism and corruption, poverty and marginalization. The Chiapas uprising became a symbol of that crisis—which was not, however, confined to Chiapas." (15)

NAFTA motivates peasants to cross the border. The next job opportunity for most any blue collar Mexican worker is to cross the border for jobs paying less than minimum wage or to stay in Mexico to take a job in the only rising industry—the drug cartels that manufacture and traffic illegal drugs. The drug cartels operate much like any large corporation, except that their products are illegal, which attracts entrepreneurs only slightly more ruthless than the leaders at such businesses as XE, Halliburton, BP, or Goldman Sachs.

From Castenada's description, in Mexico, there are few regulations for the large corporations. It is a dream paradise model for many of the American neoliberal elitists. If they visited Mexico they would find that the government even provides guarantees for many monopolies such as Carlos Slim, who became one of the richest men in the world by acquiring almost all—94 percent—of the telephone companies in Mexico. With proper "arrangements" made with the public officials, many billionaire monopolists thrive in Mexican industries. One company owns 70 percent of the tortillas/cornmeal market, another controls Telmex telecommunications, there is the now state-owned Pemex oil, and only two corporations hold 80 percent of all pharmaceuticals, and on and on. Better yet, for the wealthy, even religion holds a monopoly by the Catholic Church keeps the Great Unwashed gullible and submissive to the providence of God's will. Those in power stay in power and garner larger and larger pieces of the pie.

Meanwhile taxes on these monopolies and oligarchies are extremely low compared to income taxes on the dwindling middle class. Almost half the population—more than 102 million—lives in poverty. The rich continue to gain more wealth while the peasants sink deeper into poverty. (16)
NAFTA did serve at least one benefit for Mexico. With the free trade, it is easier to export drugs into the U.S., making it the most lucrative industry, second only to the rapidly depleting oil business. As the drug business increases in value, the Mexican government takes greater pieces of the profits in the form of bribes or "la plaza," in which the drug lords pay government officials not to intervene in the commerce, while legitimate corporations pay a tribute—called lobbyist contributions in the U.S.—to gain favors.

The drug industry overwhelms the Mexican government. Once the drug industry rose into the billions of dollars, the government became weaker, less able to control its own army because the drug lords now earn more money, and able to bribe public officials and law enforcement at all levels, they conduct their business as a true "free market," one without any civil authority, much less regulations, and the competition between the cartels rages to all-out civil war, where drug dealers use all types of violence imaginable--kidnapping, rape, murder, torture, beheadings—to gain market share over the competitors. Since January, 2007, 29,000 people have been killed in drug-related activity. (17) The growing drug violence boosts the U.S. weapons industry, which conducts business without much oversight.

When a country is unable to protect its own citizens' interests, it is a failed state. The Mexican government is too weak to corral the violence and lobbyist money—bribes—to influence public officials, and unable to protect the regular citizens; it is a failed state. Now officials in the Mexican army partner with certain cartels in order to obtain a substantial part of the profits. For the time being, the Mexican army provides favors for the Sinaloa cartel and against the Juarez cartel.

Like all countries, Mexico's history is unique. If it ever had a functional democracy, it was only during brief and unusual moments. Since it transitioned from a monarchy to a pseudo-democracy, it has always been an "inverted totalitarian state," where the elite reign over the lower classes, and where the public officials serve their fellow elites, the barons of industry. If the U.S. continues on its current trend toward a system in which the Democrats and Republicans serve the interests of corporations instead of the citizens, we, too, will reap all the benefits of pseudo-democracy as in Mexico, where lobbyist money speaks louder than votes.

Mexico operates with a truly free market. The government hardly intervenes except to help well-paying organizations. Its religious culture keeps the lower classes submissive and more interested in the next life than this one here and now. It's an ideal business environment for the American neoliberal elitists.

(1) Mayer, Jane, "Covert Operations," The New Yorker, August 30, 2010
(2) Wolin, Sheldon, Democracy Incorporated, Princeton University Press, 2010, Kindle edition. Preface.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Wilkinson, Richard and Pickett, Kate, The Spirit Level, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2010 and at The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
(5) Taibbi, Matt, "Obama's Big Sellout," Rolling Stone Magazine, Dec. 10, 2009.
(6) Reich, Robert, Supercaptialism, New York: Vintage, 2008, page 5.
(7) Bracevich, Andrew, Washington Rules,
(8) Smith, Ives, Econned, New York: PalgraveMcMillan, 2010, pg. 19.
(9) Sharlet, Jeff, The Family, New York: Harper Perennial, 2008, pg. 100.
(10)Castaneda, JorgeG.The Mexican Shock, New York: The New Press, 1995, pg. 34.
(11) Lewis, Michael, The Big Short, New York, W.W. Norton Co., 2010, pg. 197.
(12) Smith, Econned, Ibid., pg. 43.
(13) Hedges, Chris, Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction, Truthdig (blog), January 25, 2010.
(14) Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, Kindle edition.
(15) Castaneda, The Mexican Shock, Ibid., pg. 80.
(16) Llana, Sara, "Calderon's Challenge: Confronting Monopolies," Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 23, 2007
(17) "Mexico under Siege," Los Angeles Times online

Rapture of Charlatans

2010-09-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

The overwhelming readership of the Left Behind series of novels by Lahaye and Jenkins reveals to what extent our “exceptional” American culture cannot distinguish between reality and illusion. A huge swath of the American public has gone out and bought these and other similar escapist novels by the millions. Many Americans seek to escape reality by drugs or by religious fantasies or both.

It may well be a sign that many of us have died morally, spiritually, and intellectually. No other culture of industrialized countries is so hoodwinked by the vagaries of born-again evangelical cults.

Eventually, we Americans will have to wake from our state of self-indulged juvenility. Delusional interpretations of the Book of Revelation, which John wrote as an allegory of his spite for the Imperial Romans, who imprisoned him, has turned into public policy about the most crucial areas of civilization’s survival on earth: nuclear arms and global warming.

We Americans love to avoid the real issues and, instead, focus on sensational gossip about celebrity stories, which pass for news and information. Today’s middle-class Tea Party members participate in mass delusions as they support the despotic right-wing agenda, in the hope that, yes, they too can become multi-millionaires simply by sounding like the wealthy corporatists who, in turn, deteriorate the middle class’s own standard of living. In reality, the original Bostonian Tea Party members of 1773 committed acts of terrorism against the British imperial despotism—taxation without representation.

As the corporatist, neoliberal, economic policies have undermined American ideals and institutions, our government has weakened to the point of losing its ability to bridle the corporations that impoverish our economy and destroy our environment. Many Americans prefer to cling to fantasies that God will snatch us up from this harsh reality and take us to a Disney World in the sky.

In times of despair and turmoil, many Americans have turned to demagogues, like G.W. Bush, who gave lip service to shallow notions of Christian faith, and charlatans like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, or Joel Osteen who entertain us with reassuring wet-dreams of Christ coming down to enable us with wealth and prosperity or to swoop up only those among us who care less about our community and our own political interests so long as we get right with God.

These demagogues—like W —an American president who took a nation to war on the pretext that “God told me what to do”—they have led the gullible middle-class crowds throughout American history to destroy the very American ideals that enable us to become educated, wise, critically astute, and free citizens of a functional democracy, and not enslaved in the stupor of delusions and religious superstitions.

The word “rapture” appears only once in the Book of Revelation, yet, in America, it has taken on a life of its own, far from the actual text written by John. Without critical thinking, without a culture of literate, thinking people, we are doomed to enslave ourselves to the fear stirred up by charlatans, who sell us one version or another of one “sacred text” or another and keep us locked up in the shackles of fear that we might be left behind unless we conform to some televangelist conniver.

Now at the end of the war in Iraq, we have to dig our way out of the hole in which the evangelical, born-again Christians and neoconservatives buried us all. In wagging the preemptive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the policies that W’s administration established only undermined America’s Constitution and its values, from the justice system to national defense.

“When it came to constitutional checks and balances, to the powers of the executive branch, lines had been crossed, fundamental principles violated, putting at risk precisely what made America so special. Dick Cheney had led Donald Rumsfeld and the neocons in creating a separate, shadow national security apparatus to create a disinformation pipeline putting forth its own wished-for reality as a mechanism to start the war.” (1)

The neoconservative, born-again Christians take liberties to invent a reality when it is needed to carry out Armageddon type actions, but creating a reality in order to justify the death of thousands of people and wasting trillions of dollars is nothing less than lying. Lying on a national scale like this equates to criminal fraud and deception.

How did W succeed in misleading the American people only to establish radical, extremist policies that bankrolled our economy and destroyed thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives? W explained why he pursued the policies of radical extremists, “There is a higher father that I appeal to.”

During W’s presidency, the neoconservatives and the right-wing Christians teamed up to manipulate the wishful thinking of an America that no longer knows the difference between TV drama and reality. There are two worlds in America, the fantasy view of right-wing religious fundamentalists who spin their own reality and act on it without considering the consequences even when engaging in war, and the pragmatic, humanists who work from rational sets of known facts as a basis for public policy that serves the greatest good of all citizens, including the poor and the middle class, not just the wealthy.

“Hitler, to the Family [a secretive fundamentalist Christian organization in which many right-wing power brokers participate], is no more real than Attila the Hun as drafted by business gurus who promise unstoppable “leadership” techniques drawn from history’s killers;” (2)

In the hindsight of the W administration, the most dangerous threat from extreme fundamentalists arises not from the Islamists, but the neoconservative, fundamentalist Christians. W’s administration has proven this.

(1) Craig Unger, The Fall of the House of Bush, (Simon & Schuster, 2007) pg. 14.
(2) Jeff Sharlet, The Family, (Harper Perennial, 2008) pg. 3.

Mexico: God Is Murdered Somewhere between the Chihuahua Desert and El Paso

2010-05-14T19:47:00.000-07:00

A drug lord tied him to the back bumper of his old Ford pickup and dragged him across the rugged desert terrain until nothing remained of his carcass.

After struggling for generations to improve their lot, many Mexicanos have stopped praying. Instead, they are selling drugs to the wealthy gringos in el norte. Meanwhile the Mexican government keeps a choke hold on the middle class in order to enrich the ruling class and use a clever public relations machine to conceal their mafia-type operations from the rest of the world.

Operating from Ojinaga, a remote desert pueblo, Pablo Acosta developed the first multimillion-dollar exporting business from the harshest desert in Mexico. As a teenager in 1958, Pablo Acosta saw his father gunned down in the street in a small Texas town for no particular reason. Pablo learned early about toughness. Although his father was illiterate, he taught Pablo about business, how higher business risks often yielded higher profit margins. After his father’s abrupt death, caused by a bullet between his eyes, Pablo began to apply his business savvy to a fledgling drug business during the 1960s.

“Pablo Acosta would later tell how his father and Macario Vazques, the most
famous of candelilla [desert plants used to make wax] smugglers, once shot it
out with forestales [government forest rangers who often robbed peasants] in the
mountains above the river village of Santa Elena.”(1)

Smuggling has a long tradition in the Mexican border towns since before the Revolution of 1910, when guns were brought from the north to fight the authoritarian, almost fascist, government.

Like the violent fights against a tyrannical regime, smuggling also represents one of the links between the popular Villa-Zapata Revolution (1910) and the growing drug industry that first began by selling cactus moonshine, sotol and mescal to Americans during Prohibition in the U.S. The drug business picked up in the 1960s.

“For him [Regela, an FBI agent] the investigative experience became the thrill of traveling backwards in time. Smugglers wearing sombreros and crisscross bandoleers studded with high-caliber cartridges used tactics their forefathers had employed even long before the Mexican Revolution to evade detection.” (2)

The revolution of 1910, like its predecessors, aimed at transforming Mexico’s charade of a democracy into a government for the people, where the regular Mexican citizen might have a chance on an equal economic playing field with the generations of landed Spanish aristocrats, and where peasants might obtain a small parcel of land to cultivate a viable living standard, almost like a middle class.

That never happened. The status quo, elite class picked apart the revolution and then reinforced its authoritarian regime once again and to this day. In place of the failed revolution, peasants, like Pablo Acosta, found a new marketplace, where they have a chance at a middle-class, if not higher, standard of living—despite the risks.

For peasants, ambitious to improve their situation, drug trafficking has become the surest work that pays the mortgage, nice cars, and education for their many children. It’s the Mexican dream. Running drugs north is the ticket to success and, if a guy plays his cards right, he can move up in the organization. It’s the fast track, like earning an MBA or a JD in the U.S., more risky but more lucrative.

Guys like Pablo Acosta hitched their wagons to this gravy train. The more cut-throat and aggressive drug runners learned to branch out, develop their own operations, and, most importantly, earn enough money to dominate la plaza, the marketplace.

¿Quién està manejando la plaza? Who is in charge of the marketplace? To Mexican drug traffickers, this expression takes on special meaning. Who pays the government authorities the license to operate, to kill competitors, and to control a territory?

The protection money goes up the ladder, with percentages shaved off at each level up the chain of command until it reaches the highest levels, including the Mexican presidency, judiciary, police, and military.(3) The more a trafficker pays, the more he gains in territory and latitude to operate. A drug lord like Acosta, a Padrino or Godfather, can dominate an entire state like Chihuahua or Sinoloa, as reported by journalists, who risk their lives to reveal the dangerous secrets.

Contrary to reports in the mass media, the Mexican government has always been complicit in helping certain entrepreneurs to develop strongholds in their marketplaces. Even monopolies like Slim Helu’s telephone business is supported by a government guarantee, so long as the officials are handsomely bribed. Likewise, Mexican government officials all the way to the presidency receive bribes to protect certain entrepreneurs in the lucrative drug industry, as we see in daily news reports ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFDVV1YxKuI ) exposing the government support for the powerful Sinoloa cartel.

“The story of Mexico is a predictable story of absolute power corroding absolutely. It is the story of awesome accumulations of wealth by a miniscule fraction of Mexican society derived through the advantages of power, through the systematic plundering of the wealth of its own people and through the exploitation of weaknesses in the United States. It is the story of a deliberate orchestrating of drug trafficking to flood those neighbors with drugs, for gain but also to satisfy a twisted thirst for vengeance. It is the story of the resulting impoverishment of a potentially great nation whose people are forced out of desperation to flee, bringing about one of the greatest migrations in North American history.” (4)

From its Spanish colonial origins, the Mexican government has grown over centuries into the regime it is today. It is not a democracy for and by the people. It is an extreme right-wing government, holding power by an iron fist. Except for rare anomalies, the presidents are selected among the ruling class and then passed through an electoral charade. Opponents to the selected presidents are not allowed to win the election. The process is fixed one way or another to make this happen. The proof of this lies in scandals that occur during elections, when ballot counting is fixed by various methods or where campaign funds are overwhelmingly stacked against the opposition.

An Evil Use of Branding and Marketing
The word “corruption” does not apply because the government operates by systematic self-enrichment of a dominating ruling class. “Corruption” implies some criminal exception to an otherwise principled government serving the interests of the general public. On the contrary, Mexico’s regime operates in secret from the general public and especially the United States. A clever use of branding, marketing, and public relations strategies, applied in Machiavellian tactics, enables the authorities to maintain a veneer of a disciplined and ethical system, while in reality the plutocracy, unaccountable to anyone, has always profited from operations like the harvesting of candelilla a century ago to supplying cocaine today. Drug trafficking operations in Mexico are now a billion-dollar business and offer so much profit that those in power cannot reject the drug trade as unethical or illegal. It is so attractive to everyone, it is unstoppable.

Today the government—the judicial system, the police, the military, and even the executive branch—participates in trafficking to further its ambition to garner wealth for the ruling class. Over centuries of rule, the Mexican government has developed a steadfast power arrangement in which a tiny group grabs the wealth at the cost of the rest of the population.

The Mexican government corrupts its own people by reaching down to the ambitious peasant classes and enabling and even sponsoring organized crime. Traffickers like Pablo Acosta or Amando Carrillo Fuentes, men from peasant backgrounds, did not buy and intimidate their way into power over la plaza. Rather, the government officials, from the local police all the way up to the president, allowed them to do what they do; they were encouraged, almost employed, to generate wealth for the men in positions of powerful authority, men who normally should protect and serve their country’s citizens. The Mexican government, under veils of secrecy and under-the-table deals, has refined its ability to tap into the ambitions and energies of individuals of lower classes and to channel them to increase the gains of their more educated and powerful masters in authority. When drug lords and others like them reach the end of their dangerous and glorious careers, the same system that sponsored them, now moves to kill them or jail them, and seize whatever wealth they may have accumulated.

Mexican officials and their civil servants fighting the war on drugs are part of a clever illusion, a public relations campaign. They call the media to witness and document how they ceremoniously burn marijuana stalks as a great stride in the battle against crime, but only after they have harvested the lucrative tips of the plants. When staging cocaine burnings, it is almost always corn starch, while the real coke is already sold to a favored cartel. They will seldom ever genuinely cooperate with U.S. drug enforcement officials beyond a mere charade of professionalism.

In one report to the next, from books like Drug Lord by Poppa (5) to Murder City by Bowden(6), Mexican officials vehemently deny any complaint or accusation of involvement. As proof of their commitment to fighting the war on drugs, they will pick out an ineffective drug runner to sacrifice in the name of the law and their own reputation. To hell with the drug-addicted victims in Mexico and much less in the U.S. Business continues, and it is good.

Like centuries before, today’s Mexico is a country of illusions, where public relations and marketed perceptions are tools in maintaining the status quo.

The GOP’s Use of Branding and Marketing
Just as Mexico’s ruling class covers its tracks through the drug industry by staging drug busts and jailing unreliable traffickers, so too, the ruling class in the U.S. creates the illusion that its political party, the GOP, advocates policies to improve the standard of living for the American middle class. The GOP greatly outperforms the Democratic Party by using consistent and harmonized talking points.

The GOP claims to stand for Christian beliefs and good, old-fashioned American traditions:

It wants to reduce taxes and maintain fiscal responsibility—even though the last Republican president drove up historical deficits.

It wants to reduce government power and size in order to enable the middle class worker to obtain a higher standard of living, even though weak governmental regulation of big business can ruin the economy for the middle class as we have seen recently.

It wants to give more freedom to big business to create a stronger economy—leading to a further reduction in industry regulations, an increase in economic disasters, and an even more inequitable distribution of wealth.

It seeks to create a unified Christian culture and society based on wholesome values, even though an overwhelming number of recent ethical scandals arise from conservatives such as Catholic and other Christian fundamentalists.

It promotes solid Christian morality as a means to take away individual rights such as women’s choice about abortion and other individual liberties.

As if in a choir, members of the GOP consistently repeat these points of communications through all channels of media to such an extent that a large portion of the middle class voters actually come to believe in these policies, even though they have little to do with supporting the middle class. The GOP has created a propaganda machine so dominating that most Americans believe that any government intervention in the economy is socialism and thus intolerably evil.

The GOP need look no further than south of the border to see their talking points in action. The Mexican ruling class has always maintained the policies that the GOP in the U.S. advocates. Both the right-wing in Mexico and in the U.S. seek to increase power for businesses and to weaken government, which only intensifies the distribution of wealth away from the middle class and into the hands of the wealthy. The policies have made Mexico third-world country it is today.

“Mexicans,” he explains, “know the army is a bunch of brutes. But what is going on now is a coup d’etat by the army. The president is illegitimate. The army has installed itself. They have become the government….The president has his hands tied, and he has tied them.”(7)

Except for a few periods, Mexico’s right-wing plutocracy has succeeded to maintain its status quo since the Spanish conquered the native Indians centuries ago. In the U.S., the right-wing ruling class has also maintained its power to a lesser extent, especially during the period after WWII, when a middle class began to prosper from the industrial expansion.

But this is changing. The standard of living for middle-class families has dropped drastically since the 1960s.

“Most American families are worse off today than they were three decades ago. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 destroyed the value of their homes, undermined their savings, and too often left them without jobs. But even before the Great Recession began, most Americans had gained little from the economic expansion that began almost three decades before. Today, the Great Recession notwithstanding, the U.S. economy is far larger than it was in 1980. But where has all the wealth gone? Mostly to the very top. The latest data shows that by 2007, America’s top 1 percent of earners received 23 percent of the nation’s total income—almost triple their 8 percent share in 1980.”(8)

This economic trend is eroding much of the American middle class. It continues increasing numbers of families will no longer find the means to assure their children’s health and education. This deteriorates our society in general and can destroy our democracy and economy, whose strength depends on critical thinking skills for all citizens. Reducing government means reducing social infrastructure, and leads to the dumbing down of America to the level of a Sarah-Palin culture of ignorance and greed.

By eliminating the social infrastructure that a democratic government is designed to maintain for and by the general population, the right-wing in the U.S., particularly organizations like the Heritage Foundation, has carefully dismantled Roosevelt’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal, and Johnson’s Great Society. These initiatives, and others like them, were created to allow all American citizens access to opportunities to improve their living standard and to level economic barriers restricting access to education and healthcare.

Many of today’s right-wing organizations have their roots in the Christian Fellowship movement, also known as The Family, which took hold initially in the 1930s and grew in strength as it indoctrinated the wealthy as well as powerful politicians, including G. W. Bush.(9) The Family can trace its origins to even older American conservative organizations, including the KKK and Opus Dei, among others.(10) Like the twisted operations of the powerful mafia-style plutocracy that permeates the Mexican ruling class and government, a nefarious religious movement has now begun to seize control over the American government, including all its branches—the executive, Congress, the Supreme Court—and even several state governments.

The Fellowship, like any church, interpretes the Bible and its prophets in ways suited for their own goals. The Family’s agenda focuses on gaining power by furthering the ambitions of many right-wing politicians. Since Jesus is an extremely popular, charismatic prophet, the Family uses Christ as a branding icon, a logo. It helps immensely in gaining votes. A large part of the American population follows most any agenda that includes an association with Jesus. The Family uses Jesus as a branding strategy just as McDonald’s uses the clown Ronald McDonald, although the Family’s political policies and agenda stray far from the ideals of love, peace, and equality that Jesus preached. The Family sees Jesus as a powerful, charismatic leader who captured a following of gullible masses just like other great men of history, including Genghis Khan and Mussolini.

“Look at Hitler,” he [Doug Cole, a leader of the Family] said, “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, bin Laden.” The Family possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.

A quote from Genghis Khan sums up much of the Family’s fascist mission, especially in light of the neoconservative, preemptive invasion of Iraq:

“The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.”

(1)Drug Lord by Terrence E. Poppa, 1998, at 22.

(2)Id. at 222.

(3)Id. at 44.

(4)Id. at 336.

(5)Id.

(6)Murder City by Charles Bowden, 2010.

(7)Id at 204.

(8)The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, 2009; Forward by R. B. Reich, at v.

(9) The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet (2009)

(10)The “Christian” Mafia by Wayne Madsen.

Mexico: What Do Third-world Countries Share with the U.S.?

2010-04-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

Now it’s official. General McChrystal has been placed in the pantheon of American icons, sanctified next to the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and John Wayne. He now aligns with the many American gods that are manufactured as fast as a Big Mac or an Egg McMuffin. Heroes like these are not human. They only play the image of what America wants them to be, but mostly they reflect the self-delusion of the American culture, a bubble where we are morally superior, smarter, and therefore richer.

This month The Atlantic magazine published an article, “Man Versus Afghanistan,” elevating General McChrystal to the heights of a Julius Caesar, the man who determines the course of history and who can rebuild Afghanistan into a democracy as prosperous as many imagine America to be, or as Rome was before it crumbled into history’s dust.

Kaplan describes General McChrystal as a man who “has never submitted to fate” (p. 26). With such a job title for McChrystal, we might believe that he can also leap over tall buildings in a single bound. As our newly anointed Superman, the general sleeps four hours a night, runs eight miles, and eats one meal a day. McChrystal is America: the country no longer conceives new ideas because its vision is blurred by lack of sleep; the country can only run mechanically one foot in front of the other because it no longer innovates; the country eats its daily meal devoid of taste and nutrition.

In his story about General McChrystal, Kaplan takes the predictable and enjoyable job of describing the apparent virtues of the general whose “physical regimen…itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic determination.”

By attempting to create a cult hero of McChrystal—the Army of One—Kaplan enjoys the easy road of fantasy and fanaticism while the rest of us scratch our heads and ponder. Why the hell did the Bush administration spend trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, nor had WMDs, nor harbored terrorists until after U.S. troops invaded. Despite this, Kaplan boldly states his preference for imperial war—“The 2003 invasion of Iraq, to which I subscribed,…”—as he bizarrely twists this invasion into “Balkan antecedents.”

Yet we wonder. Now that the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, almost ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than one million civilian lives, when are we finished? What’s the goal? What results do we expect? When the U.S. leaves Iraq and Afghanistan, will these countries be stable? What’s to stop them from simply returning to despotic, theocratic regimes?

Kaplan doesn’t consider any of these questions. Not once does he mention America’s dependence on oil and, consequently, its dire need to occupy much of the Middle East to ensure a stable supply. Instead Kaplan bloviates about how the most powerful military in the world can overcome fate thanks to the likes of General McChrystal who lacks sleep. Kaplan ignores the atrocities by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who now brags on mass media how he authorized the same sort of torture as Afghan and Mexican authorities use for power and plunder.

Kaplan describes a few characteristics of Afghanistan, which we find also in Mexico and other third-world countries, such as, “the country is so decentralized,…it is extraordinary complex, with different tribal and sectarian reality in each district.”

Likewise, Mexico’s history and current situation reveal how it has always plodded along with a weak central government. Each region in Mexico has always had its autonomous leaders (caciques), which, as in Afghanistan, have become drug lords reaping billions of dollars in the drug trade. As these drug lords gain wealth, they carry more power than their federal governments. The large profits of such unrestrained businesses are able to usurp governmental authority. This has happened in both Afghanistan and in Mexico. Whether they sell opiates, cocaine, or oil, the successful businessmen ply their power to increase their wealth and to impose their own politics, usually fundamentalism to the point of fascism, and ignore the freedom and development of the less privileged classes. The scenario resembles the U.S. Republican agenda.

Kaplan writes, “McChrystal believes that the ‘ideological piece’ of al-Qaeda is ‘truly scary’: that a new brand of totalitarianism—al-Qaeda the franchise—is running amok and motivating small secretive groups around the world, and that victory in Afghanistan is necessary to deliver a ‘huge moral defeat’ to it” (p. 62).

Clearly as we invade and occupy foreign countries in order to control their resources, the more they will resist. Instead of fighting for reliable oil supplies, America must do what it does best: innovate and create renewable sources of energy.

If certain bellicose Americans were so concerned about moral defeats or moral responsibilities to carry the imperial burden and set the world straight, why didn’t the Bush administration invade the dictatorship of North Korea or China, or any other unjust government? Like many other neoconservative knuckle draggers, Kaplan refuses to state the crass and simple truth that the U.S. occupies Iraq and Afghanistan in order to secure stable oil supplies and, above all, to keep our enemies from taking control of the vast wealth the petroleum reserves represent. Making this clear to the otherwise beguiled, American middle class would only shatter America’s moral self-image, albeit mostly self-delusional.

If the U.S. were so altruistically concerned about saving other countries from dysfunctional governments, why not invade Mexico? Instead, under the Merida Initiative, we continue to pour billions of dollars ineffectively into the Mexican government, which morally defeats the U.S. because the Mexican government takes bribes from the various drug lords and explicitly supports the Sinaloa cartel over the others. As Mexico slips over the edge of complete anarchy and unbridled capitalism, the U.S. blindly funnels money without oversight as to how it is used.

Just as the U.S. props up a corrupt and crumbling Mexico, so too, it supports the Karzai government in Afghanistan, a mere racketeer operation. As Kaplan quotes, “’Afghanistan was a cakewalk in 2001 and 2002,’ says Sarah Chayes, former special adviser to McChrystal’s headquarters. ‘We started out with a country that hated the Taliban and by 2009 were driving people back into the arms of the Taliban. That’s not fate. That’s poor policy’” (p. 64).

The U.S. merely empowered the mujahedeen commanders to transform into gangster-oligarchs and drug lords under the American-supported Karzai. So long as the U.S. occupies Afghanistan, the people will enlist and fortify al-Qaeda and the Taliban as a form of resistance to protect their country. That’s exactly what Americans would do if they were invaded.

In the midst of all-out war between competing drug businesses in Mexico, the U.S. Homeland Security Department can only sit on its hands as billions of dollars of illegal drugs cross the border along with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens while millions of dollars of weapons are exported to support the Mexican chaos. Among the illegal aliens crossing the southern border, how many are al-Qaeda operatives carrying various types of WMDs? Let’s ask Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano.

Mexico and Afghanistan rank among the desperate third-world countries. Both countries enjoy strong religious traditions permeate through every fiber of their cultures, if not making them outright theocracies. As God’s dark humor goes, this means that corrupt men rule in an arbitrary legal system with authoritarian misconduct. Like Afghanistan, Mexico has a weak government, unable to control its own military and police, much less the marauding drug gangs grabbing power and wealth. Such weak governments have little to offer their people and are unable to restrain the barbarous greed of unbridled businesses such as monopolies and drug cartels.

In the U.S. a central debate rages. Made wealthier than the Democrats by corporate lobbyists, the Republicans are especially eager to keep government small, even weak, and to oppose regulating the otherwise unchecked greed of big business such as the healthcare industry, Big Oil, and Wall Street bankers. These elitist groups in America argue that large corporations should have more power than government—as if businessmen volunteer selflessly for the development of society. This political ideology, known as neoliberalism, calls for the rule of a small, wealthy social class—the patricians and the ruling political nobility.

This debate rose to a new height when the majority right-wing Supreme Court justices voted to overturn two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations. The mostly extremely conservative Supreme Court ruled that the government may not regulate corporations’ spending for elections. As President Obama said, this court ruling gives “corporations more power to drown out the voices of regular Americans” in political debates where already most have lost their sense of citizenry in the face of mammoth businesses. Now more than ever before, big business can buy the votes of congressmen and senators in the form of campaign contributions and additional investments in political advertisements.

This new, highly political ruling by the Supreme Court moves the U.S. another step closer to a complete coronation of power for 10 percent of the population that owns 80 percent of the nation’s wealth. This class power and inequitable distribution of wealth represents one of the defining characteristics of third-world countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered more power to the corporations while weakening the government’s ability to check corporate greed in the best interests of society.

All over the globe, the rulers of third-world countries from Arabia to Zimbabwe squander and squelch the good will of the broader lower classes. Out of some 200 sovereign countries on the globe, more than half operate with hugely inequitable distribution of wealth, where the vast majority of people live on poverty-line income, live with hardly a chance of education, and consequently live without much self-determination. Ironically, the larger social classes at the lower end of the income ladder are the ones who bear more children who, in turn, have fewer chances of education, and less freedom and autonomy.

Often the lower classes become so beguiled by the media, especially the likes of Fox News propaganda, that they ignore their own place in society and their rights. Instead they behave as if they are part of the highest social class, supporting the political interests of right-wing patricians. Perhaps by playing the part, they sense the tingling sensation that maybe they are affiliated with the wealthy at least for a moment, even as many are paid to badger Democrat congressmen at city hall meetings or choose to participate as Tea-Baggers and White Supremacists revolting against the government instead of taking part in the political system to defend their rights as regular citizens. The same is true for the middle-class, born-again Christians who vehemently oppose abortion, demanding that the government regulate individual women’s choice. At the same time, these confused activists oppose government regulations on the very industries—such as healthcare and banking—that devour them financially.

Meanwhile, a tiny social class rules society. The elite enjoy the power and privileges of education, usually secular, and of wealth. Given this inequality, corruption, and arbitrary rule, the governments of most third-world countries are weak. These governments often lack adequate social infrastructure to provide the broader population, the lower class, with healthcare and an education unfettered by religion, which would allow them freedom to choose more clearly about life-defining decisions such as reproduction, careers, and life-style in general.

Instead as, in Mexico, most of Central and South Americas, in Afghanistan, and in most of the Middle East, religious doctrine proves to be the most available form of education, and its authoritarian rules dictate almost all aspects of individual life, rendering the lower class submissive and ignorant. This, in turn, benefits only the wealthy class.

The various policies of the Republican Party in the U.S. serve no purpose for regular Americans. The American right wing has never worked for the best interests of the middle class. Born-again Christian fundamentalists generally want the government to dictate all aspects of an individual’s personal life from abortion to sexual orientation, and at the same time, they want to reduce government regulations over corporate power. From their contradictory belief system, we discover how their goals resemble closely the same theocratic ideology prevalent in countries like Afghanistan and Mexico. The Republican agenda also includes deceiving Americans to justify invading, occupying, and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring the simple fact that the real purpose these wars is mainly to control the world’s largest oil reserves.

Like the government in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. government is weak. President Obama struggles against the overwhelming industrial power of the defense contractors pushing to sell more invasions while the Big Banks and insurance companies lobby to reduce regulation. As in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. is in the grip of a right wing whose goals are to increase theocratic authority and ensure “less government.” As an icon of America, General McChrystal is fighting a war of morality which only lightly veils a war for power and plunder, while enjoying meals void of nutrition, sleepless nights that blur vision, and long runs on empty.

Mexico: Sex Slavery (Part II)

2010-03-04T07:51:00.000-08:00

As noted below (Part I), Octavio Paz emphasized how Mexico’s economic policies favor monopoly. Industry monopoly and its sister, oligopoly, enable a handful of wealthy business owners to set prices and permit control of certain goods and services to maximize their personal profits. With neoliberalism, otherwise known as Regeanomics, government hardly dares to challenge the power of certain corporations that are so overbearing that they succeed in altering every aspect of our lives, our society, and culture.

In the U.S. this situation has become blatantly clear as the oligopolistic healthcare industry does everything possible to avoid a public option that would only encourage competition in an otherwise tight-knit, ol’boy industry. America’s political leaders and pundits strongly promote the idea of free-market enterprise, although their speeches provide the rest of society with just enough hope only to ponder the American Dream and how the regular guy might achieve a comfortable spot in the sunshine. “Change you can believe in.”

Meanwhile a handful of the world’s largest insurance companies spends billions of dollars to block the public healthcare bill because it would break the oligopolistic choke hold on faceless millions of Americans. Corporations like Cigna, Aetna, WellPoint, and AHIP dominate the industry and consequently increase prices faster than in any other industry or economic trend. They pay the hooligans like Joe Lieberman—via his wife—or the automaton Harvard medical professors, like Joseph P. Newhouse, one of Cigna’s board of directors, and other paid puppets to defend the policies of market domination, stagnation, and out-right highway robbery.

Contrary to their ideals of competitive, efficient capitalism, the salesmen of neoliberalism only talk about the theories while they defend their privileged and protected position, and in doing so, they defeat the very neoliberal principles they espouse about an open, innovative, free market where buyers have choices and suppliers are forced to innovate and cut costs. Politicians and pundits for the corporations lie to the public because the insurance companies pay them to spread the gospel that government is evil, bureaucratic, and inefficient and only big corporations can manage our society and our economy.

The corporate-bought talking heads take the money and live in comfortable houses near the country club and send their children off to expensive schools where they learn corporate etiquette to insure that they land upwardly mobile jobs at powerful corporations. The picture we see in this represents how our society has devolved into a place where materialism overwhelms us while it destroys our environment, our democratic system, and our community.

A vast majority of the middle class dreams of a career in a large corporation because, in America, it’s where the greatest social benefits are offered, healthcare, retirement packages, and vacations. These are all the benefits that the government provides its citizens in European democracies. As this trend continues, American becomes less and less a democracy and more a corporatist welfare state.

The broad chasm between what the paid pundits say and what they do reminds us of the Communist propaganda about how everyone must sacrifice today for a greater, more equitable tomorrow. A free democracy is mere myth when corporations overrule the democratic processes.

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." –Thomas Jefferson, 1812

The U.S. Senate and Congress meekly kneel to the will of the corporations at the cost of the will of the people.

Democratic leaders dropped a government insurance option and the idea of expanding Medicare to younger Americans. Reid also omitted language that would have eliminated the federal antitrust exemption for health insurers -- another nonstarter for Nelson.—The Washington Post, December 20, 2009

The U.S. Supreme Court Justices ruled recently on the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to determine whether to overturn a 1990 ruling that had upheld the ban on direct corporate contributions (1). As the bill has recently passed, corporations can weld immense power over our democracy by paying millions of dollars in propaganda campaigns in which advertisements, as we most often seen, are not held to truthful information.

Likewise, in Mexico the government almost never steps in to regulate the large land owners, much less powerful corporations.

Nothing New about Neoliberal Economic Policies
Variations of what we currently call “neoliberalism” have always existed throughout history. Indeed, history is mostly a study of how the privileged few impose their authority by various shams and tricks to overrule the gullible populace. In the U.S. when an elected official, like Sarah Palin states in a public speech that Obama’s healthcare bill includes “death panels,” a certain part of the gullible public believes the drivel. It’s the depraved and perverted segments of fanatically money-driven Americans that allow dishonest scam artists to continue their criminal careers like Dick Cheney—the former vice president who granted no-bid billion dollar contracts to his own corporation, Haliburton.

Mexico’s history contains its share of such flimflammery in rude and violent acts. Since Cortes dropped anchor in a Yucatan bay, a class of Spanish nobles has always managed to dominate the masses of the poor and uneducated. In many ways, the Spanish monarchy and aristocracy, in cooperation with the Catholic Church, have imposed policies similar to what we call neoliberalism today. And even after Mexico established its independence from the Spanish monarchy and formed a constitutional democracy, it has still maintained a government that strongly promotes the interests of the caudillos, the wealthy few who reign over regions or industries in Mexico.

Even more so in Mexico than in the U.S., a small number of huge corporations dominate the economy and the democratic processes with a heavy political and financial hand.

Monopoly and Neoliberalism
Pemex holds a monopoly on the petroleum in Mexico. As the Wall Street Journal reports on April 7, 2008, any talk of stimulating competition in the oil industry is unheard of in Mexico.

Such heresies cannot even be whispered in Mexico–though not because the Mexican people can't be convinced that there is a better way to run things. The reason is because the guardians of the status quo–politicians, suppliers and labor–would suffer if competition hit the market. Private Mexican contractors who "supply" Pemex are used to business transactions tied to political connections. If there were multiple buyers in competition with one another, those political profit margins would evaporate.

Even though Mexico’s President Calderon delivers noble speeches about breaking up monopolistic industries that dominate its economy, he continues to apply neoliberal policies by privatizing many industries—from petroleum to tortillas and telephones. By definition monopolies own markets and that means they can charge high prices without pressure to improve or innovate. They turn economies into murky swamps that move slowly to a standstill.

At any moment in their daily routine, Mexicans cannot avoid the monopolies that plague their lives. When they fill their gas tanks, they pay homage to Pemex, the only supplier of petroleum (2). When the average Mexican, Jose, makes a phone call to reserve a table at his favorite restaurant, he pays a high price to Telmex, which owns 94% of landlines, a de facto monopoly. And when Jose drives his family to the restaurant—on overpriced gasoline in his car—and then orders tortillas, he pays dearly to the main supplier of corn and flour, Roberto González Barrera, owner of the Maseca flour monopoly and Banorte bank, who controls more than 70% of the market. A desire for tacos leads to extortion, because the price of corn has risen more than 700% since NAFTA’s start in 1994. When Jose’s family watches the news about inflation on TV, their only choice for cable channels is owned by the Grupo Televisa, which controls an overwhelming part of the industry. The denim jeans that Jose wears were most likely manufactured by “Mexico's ‘Denim King,’ the textile magnate Kamel Nacif, who exercises so much power he was able to save himself from a child sex abuse case and get the whistleblower journalist, Lydia Cacho, thrown into jail, but that’s another story (3).

Mexico’s captains of industry, the business elites, enjoy a tight grip on the economy while the country sinks deeper into its original feudal state when the Spanish monarchy ruled. A few dominating corporations own the economy (4). By accumulating power with political contributions and other bribes, these corporations also control most of the government. The distribution of wealth has remained in the hands of the owners of the feudal domains—which in modern terms are the oligarchic corporations. The concentration of wealth in the barons of fiefdoms keeps competition away. Since they own their own industries, they can continue to extort the general population, reduced to peasants in an economy that increasingly resembles the landscape of the Middle Ages.

Carlos Slim Helu, the owner of Mexico’s telecommunications industry, enjoys a government-granted guaranteed monopoly, making him one of the richest men in the world with over $60 billion.

Mexico’s super-rich class includes at least twenty-four billionaires and over 85,000 millionaires, not counting the billionaires and millionaires who prosper from the drugs and sex trafficking. Much of this skewed distribution of wealth began with Mexico’s President Salinas’s privatization and NAFTA policies in the early 1990s. At the same time that a handful of billionaires emerged in Mexico, more and more of the common people fell below subsistence level. More than fifty million Mexicans live on less than $4 per day and another fifteen million live on $1 or less per day (source: CONAPO survey of 2005). In like manner, many American citizens still prefer to live in a Disneyland vision of the U.S. by denying the failures of the popular, though poorly understood Reaganomics, while the middle class sinks deeper and closer to the same situation as in Mexico.

Feudalism and Capitalism
The privileged Mexican lords of industry represent the same special interest groups we know and despise so much here in the U.S. Just as in the U.S., the Mexican government—which is right-wing regardless of its political party and imposes neoliberal policies—blocks liberal groups at every turn when they propose changes to the system for a more equitable distribution of the wealth that reduces crime and creates a more efficient and productive country. The government, in collusion with the captains of industry, crushes any such attempts to chip away at their stronghold, built up over the centuries when Mexico was a closed, one-party state—from monarchy to make-believe democracy.

The authoritarian government in Mexico has continued a centuries-old tradition to serve and to protect the wealthy few. This cozy, collusive relationship between the government and the wealthy began when the Spanish colonized Mexico. At that time the Catholic Church played a prominent role as the governing authority. The encomienda system granted Spaniards with a “trusteeship” over the common people. In exchange for spreading Catholicism, the Spaniards could tax the “blue collar people” for their labor, forcing them to work the haciendas.

As the constitutional government gradually overtook certain authoritarian roles from the Church, similar arrangements continued regarding how the privileged class dominated the common folks. One of the few opportunities left for the destitute middle class is to enter the illegal businesses such as sex and drug trafficking. As the U.S. Border Patrol reveals on its Web site, the practice of slavery has since then grown and now we see that the U.S. is one of the largest markets for sex slavery.

When confronted with these facts, economic theorists, like Milton Friedman, and other neoconservatives from Bill Crystal to Joe Lieberman and to Podhoretz, G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney—or the right-wing religious fanatics of the 700 Club like Pat Robertson or Joel Osteen—defend the neoliberal’s new world order by claiming that the spoils of the wealthy few will eventually trickle down to the masses, so long as liberal politicians do not interfere with the neoliberal policies that, ironically, only intensify the economic calamities. On the contrary, the neoconservatives promote their neoliberal economic policies by demanding a fanatical faith in the infallibility of laissez-faire and unregulated markets.

Large corporations use enormous funds in commercials and public relations to influence mainstream media. As a consequence, the entire U.S. culture is drastically influenced by emphasizing the commercial and consumer motivations in our lives.

Although the neoliberals claim that profits are the essence of democracy, people need to sense a connection to fellow citizens in order to maintain a civil responsibility. Without citizens finding respect for their community, democracy loses its foundation. Instead of citizens, people lose their connection with other people as they become preoccupied with their personal interests as consumers. The neoliberals promote consumerism by means of consumer credit, unregulated finance products, and shopping malls.

In this new world order, people lose sense of their identity. They change their beliefs by following the commercial propaganda and adopt perceptions that they are what they possess. In a culture immersed in commercials and consumer products—one that shows only a marginal resistance—we identify ourselves by our cars, clothes, and other possessions more than by our principles about freedom, democracy and other values that the neoconservatives claim to protect, while, on the contrary, they manipulate and destroy them to such an extent that regular Americans value more what we own than the principles we might be ready to defend to the death in preemptive wars.

Individuals in modern society have always struggled on a balancing line between enjoying the surface of beautiful appearances and considering the underlying reality of our lives. When commercials, like some dogma, overrule our lives, we become alienated and competitive in a struggle to obtain more products than the next guy. We become exactly what corporations want from us, consumers, not citizens of a democracy. As people identify themselves more with products they buy, it becomes easier for us to see each other as products. This makes it easier for us to take the next step by buying one of the fastest growing imports from Mexico, a sex slave.

1) (source: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09251/996295-84.stm#ixzz0bHjivXS3 ).
2) (source: Christian Science Monitor, January 23, 2007, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0123/p12s01-woam.html ).
3) (source: The Washington Post, Sunday, April 1, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/31/AR2007033101359_pf.html )
4) (source: New York Times, June 2, 2009, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/monopolies-holding-mexico-back/ ).
5) (source: http://www.internationalist.org/tortillazo0701.html ).

Mexico: Sex Slavery (Part I)

2010-01-10T19:49:00.000-08:00

Smugglers bring thousands of young women from Mexico into the U.S. and force them to provide sexual services without pay. At any given time, at least 10,000 women from Mexico provide sexual services as slaves mostly for depraved men in the U.S. who just can’t get enough.

Much like the large drug trafficking enterprises, sex trafficking cartels, like Los Lenones, represent a billion-dollar industry that caters to specific orders from American perverts with money to burn. Gangsters prey on girls who dream of going to El Norte. After a gang member cajoles the girl a bit, he gets her alone and then beats, drugs, and kidnaps her. Most of the women sold are Mexican, though hooligans smuggle women from all corners of the globe into the U.S. via Mexico because the border is wide open, the easiest route into the affluent gringo market (1).

It happens on a regular basis. Take the Los Angeles Times story of October 27, 2009. Federal officials arrested almost 700 people, including 60 suspected pimps, in a three-day crackdown on child prostitution. The youngest victim was a 10 years old Mexican girl, authorities say.

Like the drugs Mexican Mafiosos sell to their gringo neighbors, so too, the sex trade signals how impoverished Mexico’s middle class has become, if there ever was one to begin with. Kids don’t become mobsters for the love of a criminal career. Ask most any gangster why they commit horrible crimes, they’ll tell you they join a gang because it’s the family they never had. They live outside the law for the money that gives them some sense of dignity and respect. Almost all have no education, but even if they did, the Mexican economy has always been in such shambles that schooling would not necessarily improve their lot. The most seemingly logical solutions to the poverty of many are the drug and sex trades.

Slavery has been a part of Mexico’s history since at least the arrival of Cortez and continues not only as sex slavery but also as a crushing exploitation of the cheap labor from the poor and uneducated.

“Slaves had the royal brand as well as their successive owners’ initials seared into their faces.”—Mexico Unconquered by John Gibler

Out of desperation large parts of the Mexican population have turned to destructive and illegal business operations in order to piece together a viable living in a brutal culture of presidential sell-outs to the wealthy and economic policies favoring the feudal lords.

“Some people claim that the only differences between the North American and ourselves are economic. That is, they are rich and we are poor, and while their legacy is Democracy, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, ours is the counterreformation, Monopoly and Feudalism. But however influential the systems of production may be in the shaping of a culture, I refuse to believe that as soon as we have heavy industry and are free of all economic Imperialism, the differences will vanish.”—The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz.

Why is Mexico so different from its northern neighbor? This is the question that essayist Octavio Paz attempted to answer decades ago. Since Paz’s insights, many developments have widened the gap between Mexico and the U.S. Paz probably never imagined that large organized crime syndicates would generate one of the largest parts of Mexico’s economy by exporting drugs and sex slaves to gringoland’s lucrative buyers who crave exotic experiences to escape the dog-eat-dog reality they inhabit. Yet, the more we look into the apparent chasm between the two countries, the more we find similarities.

Fifty years after Paz’s observations, Mexico is still under the yoke of the Catholic Church. It is still not free of economic imperialism and hardly has any heavy industry. Its economy reflects only increases in monopolized industries. Mexico’s authoritarian theocracy has not evolved much since the Spanish conquistadors converted the Indians to Christianity at the point of a sword and established a feudal society despite a revolution or two.

Meanwhile Americans’ obsession with religious fervor often pulls the U.S. into the same elitist cesspool, as most obviously demonstrated during W’s administration when the neoconservatives had their decade of neoliberal economic policies—liberal only in the sense that a few corporations enjoy unleashed, laissez-faire freedom to dominate our society and to overrun democratic processes. This is what drove the U.S. into its current financial disaster. This is only one of many things that the U.S. shares with its southern third-world neighbor.

The U.S.’s penchant for a theocratic, authoritarian regime resembles the on-off cravings of a cocaine addiction, a hate-love thirst for a self-destructive escape from the real world. Another point that America holds in common with its southern neighbor is the perverse love affaire with neoliberal-style economics shared by its two political parties—the Democrats and Republicans. This has become especially flagrant now that Barack Obama and the Democrat-majority Senate and Congress have not found the will to impose a healthcare bill that meets the standards of other industrialized countries, including Japan and all of Europe. Compared to Europeans, Americans pay double for a less effective healthcare system. Some fifty-thousand Americans die every year because they have no access to healthcare. That’s many times more American casualties than in ten years of the so-called war against terrorism.

Nor has our two-party system been able to solve the financial meltdown. The banks do not want regulation and our government bows in submission to their request. Our government obeys the dictates of the large corporations by not reforming and regulating the financial system that remains in its current status quo of a cannibal capitalism, characteristic of both Mexico and the U.S. Millions of Americans have lost their homes and their jobs. Meanwhile, we do not want “socialism,” cry out the neoliberalists in their billion dollar propaganda machines, so to hell with consumer protections and any other kind of government oversight:

Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign adviser off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people caused the crisis in the first place. The new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle –up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.—Rolling Stone magazine, December 10, 2009, Obama’s Big Sellout, Matt Taibbi.

Obama can now be sautéed in a skillet over hell’s stove as it is ironic that our two-party system resembles the one party system in communist China while we, as voters, have a choice between neoliberal economic policies or neoliberal economic policies. Obama and other Democrat politicians campaigned to offer new alternatives to Milton Freidman’s version of the world. Once in office, though, the promise of “change you can believe in” falls into the shadows as the dominant corporations flash wads of campaign contributions to our political leaders.

Just as in Mexico, where the leaders of as many as three or four political parties are enthralled with neoliberal economics, so too, in the U.S. the leaders of the Democrat and Republican parties act as twins in their lust for the same policies that allow corporations to take over the role of government and that make politicians and the captains of industry richer at the expense of the middle class. Politicians in both Mexico and the U.S. are happy to placate the common, bovine populace with varying forms of comfortable religious spin about their moral foundations.

Counterreformation and Democracy
The Catholic Church began its crusade to hold a strong hand in all aspects of a Mexican’s life from the moment Cortes dropped anchor in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mayan soil, in 1518. At that time, the King of Castile held supreme power under the authority of the Church and his divine right as monarch to a special, direct, and open line with almighty God himself.

It was the same sort of monarchy against which George Washington revolted while struggling to establish a democracy in the late 1700s. Once Washington became immensely popular for his success, many early Americans hoped that he would usurp power and appoint himself king, just as his Mexican counterparts did in the early 1800s, from the priest-king Hidalgo to Iturbide and on through monarchical presidencies of Porfirio Diaz and his successors to the current President Calderon.

One of the single most distinguishing moments in America’s adoption of the Enlightenment Era arose when Washington, a deist, declined monarchy and helped to form a democracy with a legal system of checks and balances, unencumbered from any particular religion and with a state ruled by laws and not by man. This is the fundamental principle that distinguishes America from Mexico, although Americans, especially American politicians and corporatists, often slip and trip on their own foundations, and when they do jump over the laws that form America’s pillars, they pull America into Mexican traditions and into the third world.

Like capitalism, religion has little to do with democracy. Quite the contrary, it most often operates as a pseudo-fascist society in which the participants voluntarily give up substantial parts of their free will in exchange for becoming part of the group and group-think. You visit your local mosque, synagogue or church with the intention to question or change the beliefs, dogmas, rules or leadership, and most often the appointed authorities will eventually impose social sanctions, censors and stigma upon your mortal and spiritual existence until you submit your soul and your critical thinking to those anointed with the powers of God or you will be banned from the society—or worse.

In capitalist, theocratic societies like fascist Saudi Arabia, the consequences of questioning religious authority often leads to capital punishment in public places known commonly as chop-chop square where, among many other cases, a woman loses her head because she’s considered a witch for listening to music by the Beatles.

As in most of Latin America, in Mexico theocratic law has always maintained an authoritarian and pseudo-fascist hold over most of the culture and over almost every aspect of an individual’s life from contraception to birth and to death. By imposing its political authority, the Catholic Church had acquired a majority of Mexico’s land ownership, which included slavery.

“Large numbers of career men came over from Spain to take what they could get out of the newly conquered country, and although slavery was not countenanced, something which was actual slavery was introduced—the Indians came with the land, and they were used with the land.”— Zapata by John Steinbeck

During President Juarez’s administration in the late 1800s, the Catholic Church was prohibited by law from participating in politics, so strong and domineering was its hold on the country. Under President Juarez’s short political career some of the Catholic Church’s land was redistributed to the common people in a noble attempt to develop a middle class in a society where a huge gap divides the wealthy from the poor.

When Porfirio Diaz, Strong Man of Mexico, appointed himself president, he reversed most of Juarez’s short-lived policies and made sure that the land was returned to the Catholic Church and to the wealthy hacienda owners. The feudal lords, caudillos, converted the peasants into slaves again.

President Diaz continued the Mexican tradition of maintaining a strong theocratic regime while imposing right-wing economic policies, the type we now call neo-liberalism or Reaganomics, which made the captains of industry extremely wealthy by doing business in Mexico—such as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil or Morgan and Carnegie’s U.S. Steel. And now, neoliberal economics have brought America, including Mexico, to its knees and bowing to the policies and processes in which a small group of private investors profit from social services—education, healthcare, military, retirement, and housing—that government normally provides or at least regulates for the greatest gains for society in general and not just for the privileged few.

During his thirty-year dictatorship, Diaz controlled the traditional caudillos, feudal lords, to maintain authority in a system of power resembling, if not replicating, organized Mafias. Diaz created Mexico’s Gilded Age, which had first appeared in the U.S. after the Civil War and lasted until the early 1900s, leading up to the Great Depression of the 1930s. By using an alternative to neoliberal, right-wing economic policies, FDR pulled America out of the Great Depression by implementing Keynesian economics that calls on government to bridle corporate greed and power.

As one of Diaz’s “scientificos,” or economic advisors, from the U.S. explained:
The Mexican must be ruled from above because he is not fit for democracy, must be enslaved for the sake of the progress, since he would do nothing for himself or the world if not compelled by the whip.—John Kenneth Turner

As in Diaz’s time, this same neoconservative and theocratic regime continues on in Mexico to the present. Mexico’s current President Calderon, like Barack Obama, may give politically correct lip service to policies that develop the middle class, though he privatizes everything from public utilities to daycare centers, allowing business investors to increase their profits at the expense of the society.
The same can now be said about Barack Obama and the Democrat-majority Congress and Senate, which campaigned on tough regulations to bridle large corporations and on stimulating more competition in the powerful, oligopolistic healthcare industry. Meanwhile backstage of mainstream media, powerful Cigna, WellPoint, AHIP, among other insurance leviathans buy U.S. politicians with advisory salaries and campaign contributions—otherwise known in Mexico as bribes.

1) Source: U.S. Border Patrol, http://www.usborderpatrol.com/Border_Patrol880.htm).

Mexico: Land of Dire Straits and Reaganomics

2009-11-12T21:30:00.000-08:00

For more than the last four decades Mexicans have been risking their lives to migrate in larger numbers every year into the United States, escaping life below the poverty level and seeking better pay. Why has Mexico failed to develop its own people?

On September 23, 2009, according to the Los Angeles Times, a convoy of three vans packed with at least 76 Mexicans sped through the San Ysidro, California, border crossing, prompting police to open fire at the overloaded vehicles, making them crash. Police shut down the nation’s largest border check point, calling it a crime scene. All 76 immigrants were detained or arrested. Most of them will probably find a better method to enter the U.S. next time.

Every year, some half million Mexicans leave their families, communities, and towns to risk their lives trying to enter the U.S. Mostly they seek, at best, the U.S. minimum wage, which can mean as much as 40% more than what they might make in Mexico if they are lucky to find a job in their own country. Per year, they send more than a billion dollars back to their families in Mexico, who depend on the remittances to survive.

Is the U.S. to Blame for This Failure in Mexico?
Is the U.S. at least partly to blame for Mexico’s political and economic disaster? Or is America’s recent economic and military catastrophes the fault of some other country, such as Saudi Arabia or even Mexico? Who is the victim? Is Mexico some passive roadkill on the global highway? Not completely. Each country has its element of self-determination, otherwise what’s the point in calling it a sovereign country? But U.S. policies have pushed Mexico to the brink—and Mexico has returned the favor. The two countries dance to the same macabre song taking them both down.

How Could the U.S. Possibly Contribute to Mexico’s Failure?
The powerful forces of financial institutions, mostly influenced by the U.S.—like the World Bank, the Inter-American Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—have imposed neoliberal—Reaganomic—policies on third-world countries like Mexico. This argument stands on some solid ground, especially in light of cases like Chile, where the CIA supported a coup against the popular Allende regime in 1973 in order to prop up a government sympathetic to U.S. corporate interests.

The U.S. has applied such neoliberal colonizing tactics in many countries, though, without much success. Most recently, this process failed miserably in Iraq after an unprecedented preemptive bombing and invasion—motivated by the prospect of gaining access to the oil reserves (and justified falsely by claims of WMDs, terrorism, dictatorship, and other lame excuses). In carrying out these bellicose acts, the Bush-Cheney administration took neoliberal policies to a new extreme, what Naomi Klein calls the Shock Doctrine.

The term “neoliberalsm” can be confusing and misleading. Political strategists have presented economic liberalism, or neoliberalism, to the middle class in branding terms like “Reaganomics” or “Coca-Cola,” as if it were some friendly, good-tasting sugar-water as compared to “rightwing.” However, economic liberalism—neoliberalism—is rightwing and not friendly to the working class. Over the last forty years, it has shifted the distribution of wealth from the middle class to the elite wealthy class.

In some ways, the largely U.S.-promoted NAFTA program—a neoliberal policy—ultimately affected Mexico negatively as early as its first year, when wages dropped 40 to 50% while the cost of living rose by some 80%.

Likewise, NAFTA also affected the U.S. negatively by moving U.S. manufacturing jobs south of the border. At least in the short term, the cheaper blue collar labor in Mexico did help to maintain U.S. industry status quo and profits, especially the automobile sector. In the long run, though, cheap labor in Mexico was not enough to prop up a lagging, stogy industry that failed to innovate.

On the other hand, Japanese automakers now dominate the U.S. market because they constantly change. Japanese improvements and innovations (kaizen) include government supported developments of their own work force and adapting to market needs such as fuel-efficient vehicles.

The key determining factor is how U.S. policy makers –mostly neocons—drank pitchers full of Reaganomics (neoliberalism) like Kool-Aid. Japan did not implement neoliberal policies, which include relying on the notion of wealth trickling down from the rich and allegedly wise elite. Many of Japan’s industries are supported and guided by its government’s MITI (Minister of International Trade and Industry), which ensures that certain industries (keiretsu) dominate. Likewise, in Germany and France, government plays a key role in maintaining the social infrastructure (transportation, education, healthcare), and in maintaining a stable economy. On the other hand, in America, many political leaders present this type of policy as an evil socialism to be avoided like Satan.

Mexico Especially Vulnerable to Reaganomics
Reaganomics is merely a clever name for an economic policy that is much larger than the B-grade movie actor. Witty political strategists rebranded neoliberalism with the name Reaganomics because, during most of the 1980s, Reagan gained immense popularity among gullible groups of the American middle class. Using his name seemed like a great marketing ploy to promote policies that had little to do with benefiting the working classes. Little did many of Reagan’s fans know at the time that Ronald Reagan used his actor’s shoeshine-and-smile charm to sell an ideology that later would prove disastrous to the American people and cause the worst economic crisis in 2008 since the Great Depression, far surpassing the recession of 1979.

Although the mainstream media rarely uses the word “neoliberalism” in the U.S., anyone can see the effects of its policies today, which became widespread over the last thirty years. It is the direct cause of the massive failures in the U.S. financial system as well as extremely high rates of unemployment, bankruptcy, and foreclosures. Because of neoliberalism, we have seen drastic erosion of the middle class’s standard of living since the post-war boom, while the upper five percentile of the population, the elite plutocracy—CEOs, Senators, Congressmen—has greatly increased its wealth. In short, the rich became richer, the poor, poorer.

Conservative politicians—predominantly Republicans but also some Democrats—might say they hate “liberals”—the political liberals—while they love economic liberals or neoliberals. By using the word liberal in economics—the Milton Friedman type—political strategists manage to dupe many people with the confusing label.

The main tenets of neoliberalism are:

Reducing or eliminating social services like education, healthcare, and other programs to avoid government involvement in maintaining a social infrastructure or the development of the middle class—and doing so while financially favoring large business entities. This destroys any sense of citizenry and civil rights as pressure is placed on the individual to “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” The U.S. culture now has little sense of civility as many individuals believe that our society has to be a dog-eat-dog environment where they can become millionaires by working hard at Starbucks or in a cubicle and by aggressively and rudely competing in the workplace.

In the 1980s Reagan became the poster boy of neoliberalism by cutting taxes and social benefits while loosening government regulations. At the same time, he increased defense spending by more than 40% during a rare period when the U.S. was not waging a war, although he could have invested that same 40% in education or healthcare and still stimulate the economy out of the recession. Reaganomics—neoliberalism—is socialism for the wealthy. Reagan’s policies to cut social services while financing the military-industrial complex only provided a huge government subsidy to defense contractors, infamous for their waste of tax money—the F-22 fighter jet being a more recent and blatant example. In doing so, Reagan gained credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan pushed the communists over the edge. The mastermind behind U.S. support of the Afghan mujahideen’s resistance was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as humorously portrayed in the movie Charlie Wilson’s War.

Avoid government involvement in the social infrastructure. This is most blatant in how the Bush-Cheney administration granted no-bid contracts to private contractors, including Halliburton and, notably, Blackwater, whose mercenaries were sent to Iraq rather than doubling the number of U.S. military. This served to soften public opinion against the war by using uncounted, stealth soldiers. Today, we see how both Republican and Democratic Senators and Congressmen (e.g., Lieberman and Bayh), motivated by lobbyists and industry money, despise healthcare reform, especially the public option—a threat to the oligopolistic industry of private health insurance.

Liberating private enterprise from regulations. The government could impose regulations in order to maintain the highest social benefits but instead, neoliberalism encourages hoarding profit among the lords of capitalism—the CEOs who garner millions in compensation—as was common during America’s Gilded Age at the end of the 1800s. The most recent example of this economic policy is allowing banks free rein to sell confusing balloon mortgages, which increased their profits in the short term while increasing costs over time to homeowners forced into foreclosure. This is the type of laissez-faire economics that was pervasive during the monarchies in Europe, benefiting mostly the royalty, feudal lords, and aristocracy. It was the main reason for the American Revolution, when “taxation without representation” was an operative slogan aimed against the ruling elites who collected the wealth while the workers toiled without any means to determine social policy through election. Today’s oligopolistic corporations in certain industries—such as petroleum, healthcare, banking, and defense—are merely the new fiefdoms of the feudal lords of our global economy.

Mexico has been particularly vulnerable to economic liberalism because monarchy ruled the country for centuries once the Spanish colonized the territory. The monarchy maintained a type of feudal economy in which many peasants worked the land and only the elite Spanish aristocracy owned or managed the land for the royalty. There was little or no social infrastructure for the peasants, the mixed bloods, or the native Indians.

In the last decades, Mexico’s government has implemented several neoliberal policies by privatizing many industries such as telecommunications, which has only allowed large corporations to grow into monopolies and their owners to become multibillionaires—a prime example being Carlos Slim Helu, owner of Mexico’s telecommunications, the world’s third richest man— while the middle class is left with few options other than to immigrate to the U.S. in search of sustainable wages. We can draw many parallels between old Mexico’s feudal economy and its more modern, large haciendas, where wealthy land owners profit from field workers and where large, unregulated corporations benefit at the expense of the greater social good.

Today’s neoliberalism has all the same economic policies as in old Mexico, where there was practically no social infrastructure to develop the poor, to educate them, to provide them with healthcare or programs to give them skills to expand the national economy and create a middle class or, at least, to help them plan their families—the number of children they can afford, despite the Catholic Church’s dogma prohibiting contraception.

Today, although Mexico benefits from some version of democracy with elected presidents, the government has become weak almost to the point of a failed state, especially since the drug lords operate much like the caudillos, regional leaders, whose centuries-long rule resembled the earlier Spanish feudal leaders.

Mexico’s first federal constitution was drafted in 1824, and the first president was elected. Nevertheless, just after Mexico first attempted to gain its independence from foreign monarchs, presidents appointed themselves into office, from Iturbide (1822, Constitutional Emperor) to Juarez (1867), who overthrew the empire that Emperor Napoleon III had established. “It was there that the future of the country would be determined, through military conspiracy, bribery of deputies, the rigging of elections, and the use of public money and institutions to back electoral campaigns” (Mexico by E. Krauze, p. 130). These traditions of corruption continue to the present, and the large haciendas of the old Mexico still exist like remnants of its feudal past.

Neoliberal policies carry on many of the same practices of the monarchy and the hacienda—based economies. Mexico’s President Calderon recently moved to privatize the central electrical utility in Mexico City, breaking up the labor union, a tactic to reduce labor costs and to increase profits for private investors.

"There's no doubt that Light and Power is an inefficient company," said John Ackerman, professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "But the fact that he has decided to go against the union that historically most clearly represents the achievements of union rights and the left in Mexico is very much a political decision."

In explaining the company's losses, Ackerman pointed out that Mexico City and its surrounding areas are the most industrial in the country but harbor a huge informal economy, in which pirating electricity is common.

“The revolutionary intent of the Mexican people, now as then, has not changed. It is a desire for the distribution of the land and resources of Mexico among the Mexican people.” This is one of the observations John Steinbeck made in the 1950s when he researched the story of Zapata for his first and only movie script—a 20-year project. Despite a dramatic history of attempts to revolt against oppressive traditions in Mexico, little progress has been made.

So long as Mexico remains stuck in its feudal, plutocratic traditions, it will never develop its people and pull itself out of its own trap of greedy caudillos, be they church leaders, politicians, drug lords or entrepreneurs and military generals.
Something similar can be said of the U.S., which too often slips into its own self-destructive periods from the Gilded Age to today’s Bailout Age.

Choice Resort Opens the Sanford Juarez Vacation Exclusive

2009-10-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

Press Release—for Immediate Distribution

Choice Resort Opens the Sanford Juarez Vacation Exclusive

JUAREZ, Mexico, Choice Resorts Mexico continues to bring exceptional and charming lodging options to U.S. travelers with the opening of the former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s new resort in Juarez, Mexico—the Sanford Suites Pavilion Resort.

Former Gov. Sanford, who separated from his wife in the wake of his affair with an Argentine woman, has opened a new luxury resort hotel here in Juarez, a franchise with Choice Resorts Mexico. Sanford built a political platform in the U.S. based on staunch religious, family values while fiercely attacking his Democrat opponents as immoral.

“The Sanford Suites,” explains the former governor, “offers 35 Spanish-style guest rooms by designer Alberto Gonzalez, the former Attorney General who resigned his post to pursue a new career. Guests can take advantage of the resort’s tranquil lounge bar, decorated with religious artifacts dating back centuries, while attractive waitresses and waiters cater to your every need in a Christian atmosphere.”

The resort represents the perfect place for both business and leisure travelers visiting the border town. “It’s ideally located in the center of town,” Sanford says, “close to where the action is and near the Cathedral, dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron of the cities.” When asked why the former Governor moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to Juarez, Sanford explains, “Mexico is one of the freest countries. No matter what people say about the drug lords, they have eradicated the government here. And as Ronald Reagan often said in his speeches, and I quote, ‘government is not the solution, government is the problem.’ And,” continues Sanford, “whatever you may have heard, Juarez, Mexico, is full of good people, interesting attractions, fine restaurants, a fascinating history, and very impressive shopping values. Cocaine is less expensive here and so too are the exotic, Latin women who are not only less costly to date, what with the reduced prices in the restaurants, but they also add a spicy twist to an otherwise boring marriage. The women here understand that man holds dominion over them, as laid out in Genesis 1:28. None of that women’s liberation nonsense here. The Church has engrained this as truth in Mexico’s cultural DNA. No need to debate it.”

Sanford notes that, like extended stays, a permanent move to Mexico is financially advantageous for a business owner because the higher the income bracket, the lower the taxes. Plus there are few labor laws and minimum wages, which can sometimes amount to a couple bucks a day to keep the servants happy. “That means higher profits,” says Sanford, who was known, during his political career back in the U.S., for letting loose a group of live pigs in the state house chambers as a visual protest against the Democrats’ ‘pork projects.’ Here, favors can be bought,” he quipped, “without the hassles or having to qualify them as campaign contributions. In fact, there’s hardly any regulation here to speak of. It’s truly paradise for plutarchy, where the wealthy elite rules and can even buy the best men from the military. You think the United States is the purest form of capitalism, look again.”

Sanford adds, “Although there has recently been a spike in competitive struggles between the various entrepreneurs in the drug industry here, the economy is robust. In fact, the drug industry is one of Mexico’s most competitive, innovative, and lucrative, giving a vibrant boost to exports and fueling the overall well-being of a stable GNP. Even the little man on the street has a chance to make a buck by trafficking.”

“I want to clarify also,” says Sanford, “that, despite rumors, this resort has no affiliations with the C Street group or the Family. But like the Family, at the resort we focus on Christian values. Mexico is a God-chosen country where its people, though mostly down and out, take pride in their nation, where the wealthy are the privileged few, chosen by God. Mexico is a Christian nation, ruled mainly by Christian-based laws and centuries of tradition, where the peasant understands the dominion of God’s selected few. The wealthy are tasked with the duty to shepherd the flock. This understanding is in everyone’s blood, as taught by the authority of the Catholic Church that stretches back to the Spanish monarchy whose power originated by divine intersession. Fortunately for Mexico, its founding fathers were disciples of the Baroque era and not the Enlightenment, unlike those agnostic, deist fools who founded the United States.”

To celebrate its opening, the resort is offering an enticing “All in One” package for services. Guests who book this limited package will receive a welcome glass of champagne, complimentary access to the resort’s breakfast buffet, and an invite to a special evening buffet that includes two lines of blow, three hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes, and one free hour of Wi-Fi access.

“I want to stress that the Sanford Suites welcome not just Republicans, but Democrats as well,” says Sanford. “In fact, last month, Congressman Mike McIntyre, a North Carolina Democrat, stayed here. Mike is a good ‘ol boy, believes that the Ten Commandments are ‘the fundamental legal code for the laws of the United States’ and thus ought to be on display at schools and courthouses.”

The Sanford Suites is fast becoming a meeting place for influential U.S. elected officials, the perfect spot where high-powered CEO’s and international business professionals can find a sympathetic ear and broker the kinds of deals that require complete privacy and discretion. Recently, prominent men of influence have taken extended stays at the Sanford Suites, such as John Ensign, Republican Senator from Nevada, who needed a time-out after the media portrayed him as having an extramarital affair.

Other very important people to frequent the resort are Republican Congressmen and Senators Larry Craig, Mike Foley, David Vitter, John Boehner, and Richard Curtis. And, of course, Oliver North, who is well known for brokering deals south of the border. Current prison inmates, Jack Abramoff and former Congressman Duke Cunningham are both planning a visit as soon as their time is freed up. Scooter Libby has leased a permanent suite here where he is free to make a new start. In the eventuality that an indictment might actually be issued against him for war crimes, former Vice Pres. Dick Chaney has bought one of the suites.

About the Sanford Suites
For more information on the Sanford Suites or to book your stay today, visit http://www.biskeborn.com

Choice Resorts, Choice Resorts Mexico, and Sanford Suites International are proprietary trademarks and service marks of Mark Biskeborn’s fictional imagination. Many of the prominent men named here have been involved in public scandals regarding sexual crimes or bribery and other forms of corruption—and many of them are convicted felons. Some of them have been pardoned.

2009 Choice Resorts Mexico International, Inc. All rights reserved for the Foundation of a More Equitable Democracy.

Mexico: the Model Country for Today’s Republicans

2009-09-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

If you like the U.S. right wing and want to see its ruling philosophy in action in its purest form, look no further than the cruel, failing state of Mexico.

The Republican-style, conservative government in Mexico has always favored the wealthy ruling elite, with no real policies to improve its almost nonexistent middle class. The salient characteristic of the Mexican economy is inequality. “Mexico contains one of the greatest, most obscene gulfs between its wealthiest and most destitute citizens of all the nations on the planet,” (Mexico Unconquered, John Gibler).

This gap between the haves and the have-nots has a past reaching back through centuries of history. It’s a tradition where a ruling Spanish elite took power and forever retained its conservative, right-wing reign over the country, much to its detriment. The Mexican ruling class with its authoritarian theocracy, like the Republican Party in the U.S. today, has always been populated with the privileged making policy decisions, those who, for their own profit, widened the economic gap intentionally and continue to push its divide.

“The privatization process created a new class of super-rich in Mexico. In 1991, the country had two billionaires on the Forbes list. By 1994, at the end of Mr. Salinas’s six-year term, there were 24,” (“The Secrets of the World’s Richest Man,” D. Luhow, The Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2007). In the U.S. the Republicans would prefer to privatize practically every aspect of the government, including even the military, as is shown in their penchant for billion dollar contracts with Blackwater, and their disgust for public healthcare.

In Mexico there have always been those who rebelled against the conservative choke hold that represses dissent from groups like the recent Zapatista Army of National Liberation. The on-going desperation of the vast majority of the Mexican people who live in poverty has made the drug trafficking business extremely popular. In many ways it serves as a new platform supporting an ongoing popular revolution for equality. A risky business on the streets, pushing dope helps elevate the poor to some semblance of a middle class where social mobility is otherwise impossible, except for those already in a position of wealth. In today’s Mexico, the rich get richer and the poor learn to make money by selling drugs—though, even in the illegal drug business, the bosses at the top of the Mexican Mafia, the drug lords, or what the media likes to call drug cartels, are making billion-dollar profits.

Sow’s Ear Policy
Mexican drug trafficking has grown to an enormous industry and a force that outstrips the country’s military, with revenues exceeding $40 billion per year and rising. It’s the country’s top export. Mexico’s drug business is one of the most important economic generators. Were the drug trafficking shut down today, it would contract the Mexican economy by at least 63% by some estimates. The same study found that the U.S. economy would shrink by 19% to 22% without the illegal drug business (Down by the River, Bowden).

“A 2007 U.S. government study found that Mexican drug cartels earn about $23 billion in revenue, making illegal drugs Mexico’s number-one export, bringing in more money than either oil or the remittances sent home by Mexicans living in the United States,” (Mexico Unconquered, John Gibler, pg. 54).

Considering its history and economic impact, the so-called “war on drugs” is not a war at all—it is the use of law enforcement agencies, and the military, to regulate an overwhelming underground market which operates as one of the purest forms of free market enterprise. The demand for the products is unstoppable. The drug industry in Mexico enables millions of people to survive and to crawl out of the abject poverty that the conservative, right-wing Mexican government created for them by economic policies enriching only more millionaires in the elite, ruling class than ever before. The illegal drug lords prosper so well as to afford employing not only the Mexican police as well as the army but also the Special Forces units, luring them with higher salaries than their meager government paychecks.

The greed that motivates the drug merchants resembles the “sow’s ear,” a phrase that Adam Smith coined to characterize the worst aspects of capitalism for which he, and later John Keynes, called for government intervention “to transform the sow’s ear into a silk purse.” In the case of illegal drug trade, there is no such “silk purse,” a metaphor for how government regulation tames humanity’s bestial greed to yield the highest benefits for all of society. The obvious result of this “sow’s ear” policy, favoring the wealthy, is the currently failing state of Mexico.

We read news reports daily about criminal, violent avarice in most every aspect of Mexican society, including more casualties in the drug wars than the fallen U.S. soldiers in Iraq. And this extreme self-interest has also become a prominent feature in U.S. culture, where high-ranking political leaders such as G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied to the American public in order to wage a preemptive war where they granted no-bid contracts to select corporations (e.g., Blackwater, Halliburton, and others) that returned the favor with lavish campaign contributions.
Bestial Greed Not Contained at the Mexican Border

One of their favored CEOs was Bush’s former classmate at Yale, Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, who paid Bush $1.2 million in campaign contributions as tribute for Bush having brokered a $4 billion investment in Schwarzman’s Group.

For their own benefit, Bush and his GOP lied to allow banks complete freedom to sell high-interest-rate mortgages and push consumer credit to middle-class Americans who obviously could not afford them. Ameriquest, one of the nation’s largest mortgage banks, paid Bush and his GOP $7.8 million as tribute for having promoted the Ownership Society initiative, marketing it as a means for poor people to own their own home. Despite its lofty title, the policy only enabled Ameriquest and the rest of the mortgage industry to act like sharks in a collective feeding frenzy, selling more loans that increased the prices of homes, inflating the housing bubble until it burst into a national financial failure with unemployment and foreclosure rates higher than those during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Meanwhile in television news interviews, Dick Cheney often said, “Our economy is robust,” the strongest in the world because of its free enterprise system. In the U.S. the Republican Party has made it clear in its unified, well coordinated messages that it calls for small or no government intervention, except in military matters that benefit large defense contractors.

In step with the GOP policy, Bush cut tax revenues by $1.3 trillion in a war-time economy, creating a rapidly deepening deficit while 33% of those tax cuts favored the top 1% of the wealthiest people. The result of these policies merely allowed that top 1% to become richer without benefiting the larger part of society. This “sow’s ear” policy is based on the theory that if government allows more wealth to rich capitalists, they will use the money wisely to benefit the general well-being of the country. As Dick Cheney explained during a television interview:

“We are generally not enthusiastic about big tax increases. Big tax increases impose burdens on the economy, and the money being taken out of the hands of private citizens and spent by government, and government oftentimes doesn't spend it nearly as efficiently or as effectively from the standpoint of long-term economic growth and the creation of jobs and so forth as will the private sector.”

This theory has been proven false over and over again in history and in third world countries like Mexico.

Presidents with Sow’s Ears

“Twenty days after Salinas left office on November 30, 1994, the Mexican economy crashed; on December 22, the peso fell by 20%, $5 billion left the country in forty-eight hours. By the time the benefits of Salinas’s economic design had time to trickle down, two million farmers had left their land, poverty had risen from 45 to 50% of the entire population, and some 3.3 million children under the age of 14 had been forced to work,” (Mexico Unconquered, John Gilbert).

Despite the destitution, malnutrition, and total lack of affordable healthcare, the theocratic culture that reigns over the spiritual state of virtually all Mexicans still promotes large families and condemns the use of contraception. Little wonder now that many Mexicans living in poverty rebel even against the Catholic Church to worship their own Santa Meurte, patron saint of those who struggle outside the law to survive.

Similar to Salinas’s legacy, a striking parallel of disaster occurred when G. W. Bush left office in the U.S., having squandered trillions of dollars on an unjustified war. Where once there was the largest economic surplus in U.S. history, now the deepest deficit falls lower than ever before. The financial industry’s collapse caused millions of middle-class workers to lose their homes to foreclosures, to lose their jobs by the millions (over 7 million unemployed to date), and to lose their healthcare, if they even had it to begin with, while the rich became wealthier than ever before in American history.
G. W. Bush is responsible for an economic inequality in the U.S. surpassing even that of the Roaring '20s:

“In 2007, the top .001 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages— about twice the figure for 2000,” notes Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at University of California—Berkeley. Saez also found that the top 10 percent of American earners pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages: a level "higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928," (“Another Legacy of G. W. Bush,” Peter Cohan, DailyFinance, August 14, 2009).

Following the Mexican tradition of running a country into ruin, the Republican Party used the public treasury to feather their own nests over the last eight years and sent the bill to the American middle class to pay for generations to come while bailed-out banks continue to pay million-dollar bonuses to their employees. The sow’s ear policies of the GOP make the drug wars in Mexico pale in comparison. But the worst of this is that an unusually high percentage of the American middle class believes in the policies even when they work against their own interests.

The GOP has applied powerful consumer marketing techniques effectively to American consumers. Many Americans believe that national healthcare is socialism. Few people consider the fact that the industrialized countries least harmed by the current economic collapse are places like Germany, France, and Japan. The ones hardly engaged in the preemptive Iraq war. The ones with more stable economic policies. The ones where citizens enjoy efficient national retirement pensions, healthcare, education, and transportation.

Despite their so-called socialism, Japan and Germany own the global automobile industry. Toyota could acquire GM and Ford in a heartbeat, if the company decided it was a good investment. Probably not.

Mexico: Heads Will Roll

2009-08-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

These days we see news reports on a regular basis describing how members of one Mexican drug gang behead members of another gang or the police. “Mexican President Felipe Calderon hailed eight soldiers who were decapitated in Guerrero state as heroes who died at the hands of criminals growing increasingly desperate amid his government’s crackdown on drug cartels,” reports Andres Martinez (LA Times). Yet, throughout most of Mexico’s history, heads have been rolling as a tactic among battling factions.

“The heads were displayed in cages on the four walls of the Alhondiga de Granaditas, where the Spaniards of Guanajuato had been massacred. There they remained for ten years until Mexico won its independence in 1821” (Krauze, Mexico, Biography of Power). Hidalgo led the first battles in Mexico’s war of Independence until Spaniards captured and killed him, and then placed his head along with those of his three closest aides in public display as a message to terrorize the insurgents. Despite the buzzing flies swarming around the decaying caged heads hung on the city walls, the War continued under the command of Morelos and his ragtag groups of parish priests, mostly mestizos.

By leading the earliest revolts, Hidalgo became the George Washington of Mexico. These two revolutionary giants shared courage and leadership, yet their differences shine brightly on how the foundations of the two countries contrast in culture and ideologies.

Once Hidalgo gained popularity, he allowed his followers to treat him as royalty. “He lavishly made official appointments; he lived surrounded by guards; he would walk arm in arm with a lovely young woman and allow himself to be addressed with the title Most Serene Highness” (Enrique Krauze, Mexico, Biography of Power).

Hidalgo replaced the pomp of King Joseph Bonaparte (one of the last Spanish kings to rule over Mexico) with his own. Many considered him the Sun King. Hidalgo showed a dubious interest in religion despite his being a priest. Nevertheless he used the image of the Virgin Mary, the most powerful religious symbol in Mexico, as his military standard in an opportunistic ploy to garner a fervent militia, ready to die for their ardent devotion to Her Lady.

Hidalgo’s military successor, Morelos, was a passionate believer in the Virgin as protector of his cause, attributing his victories to the Empress of Guadalupe, as the Zappatistas would do a century later. He used the emblem of the Virgin of Guadalupe as the seal of the Congress of Chilpancingo to which he stated: “New Spain puts less faith in its own efforts than in the power of God and the intercession of its Blessed Mother,…that had come to comfort us, defend us, visibly be our protection.” As they did to Hidalgo, the Spanish crushed Morelos, forcing his crumbling rebellion into guerilla warfare.

As a sign of hard times, today’s downtrodden peons are showing more faith in the Holy Death (Santa Muerte) than in the Virgin for the same sort of intercessions, only more tailored to fit the needs of the poor, the alienated, the street hookers, criminals, and drug traffickers.

Mexico Founded on Conservative Religion—U.S. Founded on Progressive Elitism
A half century earlier, George Washington led an insurgency similar to those waged by Hidalgo and Morelos, but with a much different philosophy. Like Hidalgo, many of Washington’s admirers expected him to take the role of king or emperor. He refused for the higher purpose of establishing a constitutional democracy, and when asked to serve a third term as president, he set the custom that a president serves only two terms (later ratified as the 22nd Amendment).

An enthusiast for Thomas Paine’s deistic treatise, The Age of Reason, Washington had little interest in any one religion, although baptized at birth in the Church of England, the official church of Virginia before the revolution. He strongly supported the separation of church and state.

“Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.” (George Washington, letter to Edward Newenham, October 20, 1792; The Great Quotations, G. Seldes, ed.).

Like many European and American philosophers of the time, Washington, a deist, had learned how religious dogma could be exploited to serve nonsense (consider today’s creationism) such as the divine right of kings, against which the United States had waged a bloody revolution. The revolutions in France and the United States, however, arose as much from disgust for the whimsical laws of religious faith as from a growing bourgeoisie, educated in empirical philosophy and science. They wanted the entrepreneurial and financial freedoms that were otherwise greatly limited under the British monarchy, whose very authority rested with its assumed privileged communion with God. Frenchmen invented the guillotine as an efficient way to behead the royalists, tyrannical gluttons of financial and political power.

Freedom and Democracy? Or Financial Interests?
Most of the leaders of the American Revolution lived as members of a liberal bourgeois class. For many years only the white male landowners enjoyed privileges such as the right to vote. After the revolution the “Founding Fathers” and their class of mostly nouveaux riches enjoyed the benefits of social, financial, and religious freedoms, including ownership of slaves. For as much as possible, the fifty white men who were signers of the Constitution, mostly deists, took their destiny into their own hands and relied less on God for whatever providence they might eke out by praying.

“In short, said Beard [an historian] the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates. Beard applied this general idea to the Constitution, by studying the economic backgrounds and political ideas of the fifty men…to draw up the Constitution. He found that a majority of them were lawyers by profession, that most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out at interest” (A People’s History of the U.S. by Howard Zinn). These fifty “Founding Fathers,” were mostly men who took charge, made things happen, and if obstacles arose, they nevertheless found ways to create the country they wanted.

Washington and his American colleagues were disciples of the Enlightenment. In contrast, the people of Mexico, as Morelos explained, placed less faith in their own actions than in the power of God and the intercession of the Blessed Mother. The popular revolutions in Mexico lasted at least a century (from the 1820s to the 1940s) and, in many ways continue to this day. Current struggles take the form of sporadic guerilla warfare, in the guise of underground movements against the mechanized modern state: guerilla insurgency—Zapatista Army of National Liberation; religious resistance through anti-Catholic cults—Santa Muerte; and the power struggles among the so-called drug cartels.

This devotion to religious faith in providence as the cause of events, as Morelos revealed long ago, undermines free will and tends to knock the wind out of a person’s lungs. To fill that void, the Catholic Church plays an authoritarian role in Mexican culture to this day, determining almost every aspect of the individual’s life, as does the government. A ruling class has always subjugated the working class to such an extent that hardly any middle class has ever existed, while the poor struggle against the elite’s status quo.

The colonizing Spaniards took possession of valuable land and later the Haciendas made land grabbing from the peasants a Mexican tradition. The Catholic Church became one of the largest landowners and had no charitable scruple to loosen its grip on its assets for the poor. “The Conservatives were supported by the onerous bureaucracy of the capital city, by the ‘respectable people,’ and of course, by the clergy” (Krauze).

Like the new American aristocrats, the Catholic Church and the landowners in Mexico owned the poor as indentured slaves. The situation created a complicity between the landowner and the priest, at the cost of the peon. As Ocampo wrote, “As in the times of Abraham, the peon and the workers born in the haciendas belong to them and are bartered or claimed and exchanged and sold and inherited as are herds, tools and lands” (Krauze). The forces of the Catholic Church continue to make a large part of the Mexican people docile. Today’s peons tolerate their economic plight by the soothing belief that things will be easier in heaven.

Most of human history is a saga about how those in power constrain personal and economic freedom so they can gain more control of wealth, enabling only a few to benefit. The revolutions in Mexico, as anywhere else in history, were motivated not so much by the ideals of democracy and freedom, as by the lack of economic opportunity. The rebellions in both the United States (1770s) and in Mexico (1820s) for independence were motivated by an uproar against economic tyranny. The popular phrase “no taxation without representation” expresses this sentiment.

When Mexico finally did attain independence, it anointed and elected Iturbide as the “Constitutional Emperor of Mexico,” meaning that with his coronation on July 21, 1822, he ruled the country by authority of the Catholic Church as well as of the Congress. During his military campaigns, Iturbide gained a reputation of extreme cruelty. He ordered the beheading of women of disloyal fathers, husbands or brothers in order to gain control of the many groups of insurgents by sending a terrorizing message to the entire population. The new and independent Mexican government merely continued Spain’s conservative and theocratic position.

Beheading as a Tradition
Throughout Mexico’s history, the conservative government and its continuously rebelling groups have often beheaded their enemies as a means to send graphic messages about who is in charge or wants to be. Today’s news is filled with reports of police increasingly finding severed heads more frequently in the wake of battles between Mexico’s powerful drug cartels and the government. Bloody battles for wealth and power had long ago become a Mexican, and Latin American, tradition. If the United States has become known for its high rate of incarceration, violence, and free trade of assault weapons, Mexico is known as being even more violent, with the help of purchases from unfettered American arms dealers.

Even after Mexico had gained independence from Spain in the early 1820s, it did not form any national order. It remained an assemblage of villages and provinces isolated from one another and controlled by the strong men of each region. These warlords gained power throughout Mexico and were validated by their personal strength and by the terror they inspired in their communities as much as by the benefits they provided, much like the so-called drug cartels today.

“The name for them in Mexico—cacique—was an Indian word for chieftain. Since the earliest period of the colony, it conveyed the idea and was clearly rooted in indigenous tradition. Though the caciques were local, while the typical Mexican caudillos, those military chieftains had ‘risen with and seized the kingdom’…extended their activity to the entire country and sought power over the entire nation” (Krauze).

Today’s so-called drug cartels are the continuation of a centuries-old Mexican tradition. They are motivated by the same lack of any economic structure that might otherwise enable a middle class to grow and prosper. Popular hatred of the economic inequalities has driven the rebel groups that have always existed in Mexico at least since the Spanish arrived. For this same reason, Mexico’s cartels or caudillos have always operated in opposition to the official government. Unlike popular ideals and fairytales, freedom and democracy have almost never been the engine of rebellions. Revolutions arise when a small percentage of the population—such as the Mexican Haciendas of Cuahuixtla, Hospital, and Mapaztlan—own an overwhelming part of a nation’s wealth—property or other means of production—and use it to control the population.

“In 1878, Manuel Mendoza Cortina, the owner of the Hacienda of Cuahuixtal, affirming that ‘justice for the poor has already gone off to heaven,’ made another move to dispossess Anenecuilco, this time of their water. One of the village leaders, Manuel Mancilla, began talks with him, in secret, trying to reach a mutual agreement. When they discovered what was going on, his neighbors cut off his head. They threw the corpse on the road, near the Hill of Flints” (Krauze).

Rebellion against Constraints
Revolutions can take on various forms of subversive activity. In even more extreme states like Saudi Arabia, partly thanks to U.S. support, the royal family of Saud (like the Mexican Hacienda) owns the biggest piece of the country’s wealth (oil reserves) and its governing religion is used to control the behavior of its citizens. As in Mexico’s theocratic rule, the Saudi justice system calls on God’s authority to apply justice. To this day, Saudi Arabia’s religious Morality Police, the mutawa, swing a sword to behead people in a public plaza when they misbehave. Though, when a large part of the country’s population falls into desperate poverty, even the religion takes on extremist twists. Such is the case with the jihadists groups in Saudi Arabia. No secret: fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis from the Hijaz and Astha regions where resentment rages against the regime in Riyadh. They were alienated and grossly underemployed, although well-educated. The radical rebels in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and now in U.S.-occupied Iraq share similar groups of violent subculture “cartels” led by warlords and mostly financed by drug trafficking.

In the case of Mexico, the aristocratic class (Haciendas) owns the highest concentration of wealth, measured by the Gini coefficient of 0.49 (What’s a Fair Distribution of Wealth? by Joel S. Hirschhorn). The Gini coefficient is an economic measurement where 1 represents one household owning all the country’s wealth. With a Gini coefficient of 0.37, the United States has the second highest in the world, just below Mexico. This high level of wealth concentration among the ruling class in Mexico explains one of the strongest forces behind the failure of the country, in terms of indicators like its inflation, slow growth rate, and high percentage of poverty—over 40% of the population makes less than $1 a day (World Bank). “There are over 85,000 millionaires (in U.S. dollars) in Mexico, while fifty million people live in economic destitution on less than a few dollars a day. According to the Mexican national daily, El Universal, the thirty-nine richest families in Mexico own 13.5% of the nation’s wealth, about $135 billion” (Mexico Unconquered by John Gibler).

As in Columbia, so too in Mexico—more and more people have entered the illegal drug industry because it is the surest way to improve their financial situation. Many other Mexicans flee their own country and risk everything to work in the U.S., whose economy offers just a little less concentration of the wealth among a small group of superrich.

American Conservatives Adopt Mexico’s Theocratic Model
Since its foundation, the U.S. has also maintained a high level of concentrated wealth among a blue-blood class while it operates on a somewhat unique capitalistic principle. Unlike extremely theocratic societies—like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Mexico—the U.S. allows its citizens to enjoy a broad social freedom and civil rights, and this soothes the tension of the otherwise staggering economic inequality. Since the 1960s contraception was legalized and African-Americans were permitted equal rights, although the latter required bloody riots. In Mexico, the Catholic Church still refuses the use of contraception, despite the country’s overpopulation in proportion to its economic production.

The American middle class is free to pursue its life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness—at a steep price. If they behave reasonably enough, they will qualify for loans, mortgages, and credit cards whose interest rates benefit the wealthy. By greasing the “regular Americans’”—the 90% of the population earning 20% of the income (source: World Banks reports)—with the power to consume, the wealthy business owners or shareholders enable regular citizens to find just enough consumer gratification to tolerate their economic inequality, and so goes the unwritten economic law in America.

Exaggerated to an extreme under the eight long years of the radically right-wing administration of President G. W. Bush, Regeanomics has allowed the super-rich—the 10% of the population owning 80% of the wealth—to undermine the pillars of our democracy under both—Democratic (e.g. Clinton) and Republican presidents. As radical capitalists have operated over the last 30 years without much regulation, they have pushed the economy, already favoring the wealthy, beyond its own capacity and thus destroyed a large part of the middle class (more than a million unemployed today). More so than even President Reagan, the Bush administration unleashed big business to dig their claws into the pocket books of middle-class Americans, stirring up a feeding frenzy of mortgages, credit cards and stock market bubbles, distracting regular Americans by their delusional consumer borrowing and spending and with hardly any consumer protection from the wolves of corporate marketing pushing for greater profit margins.

Just as the Haciendas have been gorging on the wealth in Mexico by taking land from peons for centuries, corporations like Exxon, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and AIG have been sacking the coffers of the short-lived American empire for decades. These unbridled companies, ingratiated with government, have become America’s version of Mexico’s Haciendas. The greatest advantage American businesses hold over their Mexican counterparts, the old Haciendas, is their marketing and PR departments, which paint their image as America’s pillars of prosperity for all. They have rebuilt a modern day Gilded Age. After all, insurance companies like AIG collect billions of dollars in payments from hard-working Americans and, while denying boatloads of legitimate healthcare claims, they invest the cash in other financial sectors, such as the Internet IPOs of the ‘90s or, more recently, mortgage derivatives, creating unstable economic bubbles destined to burst. And when the bubbles explode at the expense of homeowners, the likes of Goldman Sachs always find innovative financial instruments such as high interest rate loans to profit from the losses of the taxpayers. At the same time, taxpayers pay for the bailouts of these modern-day carpetbaggers who continue to profit from the misfortunes of taxpayers after they had created and profited from those misfortunes in the first place, and while rewarding the managers with billions of dollars in bonuses.

With hardly any regulations on lobbying, the likes of these corporations pay “campaign contributions,” otherwise known as bribes, to both Democrats and Republicans in order to assure their free-wheeling deals and status quo in industries like healthcare, banking, and petroleum. The petroleum industry lobbied the U.S. government and influenced G. W. Bush to invade Iraq—by using a series of pretexts such as WMDs, terrorism, imposing democracy and freedom—in order to retake control of the oil fields after Saddam Hussein had nationalized them. The Republican plan to repossess the Iraqi oil fields was not a stellar success because the Iraqis were not as docile as hoped, though the companies landed contracts from the new Iraqi government which, with support of the U.S. government, hung Saddam Hussein, a slightly less cannibalistic punishment than beheading.

Like most other countries whose upper class benefits from a high concentration of wealth, Mexico has never allowed so much delusional social freedom as America’s free-reigning capitalism. Like many other societies that exploit religion to control their populations, Mexico’s ruling class has often succeeded for the most part in controlling its pious citizens by the authority of God rather than by consumer credit.

Despite the paternalistic attitude of the Catholic Church and the thuggish, corrupt Mexican Army, Mexicans have revolted numerous times since their independence from Spanish oppression. At the end of the 19th century, the War of the Reform became one of the fiercest attempts to reform the Catholic Church and the government. A large and popular group of young liberals led partly by Ocampo revolted against the conservatives, mainly the wealthy landowners, and the Catholic church, which owns large properties, and the older members of the Army who protected the status quo by massacring “all their prisoners—commanders, officers, soldiers, even the doctors and medical students who were caring for the wounded” (Krauze).

Two important legal decrees, though entirely unenforced, resulted from this civil war: the Law of Disentailment—which attempted to redistribute some of the Haciendas’ and the church’s lands to the peasants, and the “sanction of freedom of conscience”—which tacitly implied and tolerated freedom of worship. Yet in the same breath, the conservative government “voted to particularly ‘care for and protect’ the Catholic Church with ‘just and prudent laws’” (Krauze).

Centuries of Religion and Patria
Against this historical backdrop religion y patria, the Army and the Catholic Church represent the power structure that carries on the traditions today. When G.W. Bush approved the Mérida Initiative, during the end of his administration, giving $1.4 billion of U.S. tax money to the Mexican Army, he most likely had no clue that there are two Mexicos. Alternatively, if he did understand Mexican history and culture, he intended to enforce neocon policies by supporting conservative Christian theocracy and its status quo. After all, Mexico’s conservative theocracy seems to be the ideal for the right-wing, Bible-thumping Republican agenda in the U.S.

The Mexico most American tourists and viewers of mainstream media see is the Disney World view—one where “the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war on drugs, aided by the Mexican Army…,” as Charles Bowden reports in his article in Mother Jones magazine (August 2009), We Bring Fear. This Mexico has a free press, a fair justice system, rule of law, and an effective government.

Though we can see in its long history Mexico, in its current state, is teetering on collapse, the tourist version of Mexico continues to exist in the zombie minds of TV viewers and spring-break Cancun hotel dwellers. The real Mexico operates on bribes in an economy that has been flat lining for decades, if not centuries. Aside from its natural energy reserves and tourism, its most lucrative source of national income now arises from the illegal drug industry—the only thing propping up the country from its decades-old recession that NAFTA and the maquiladoras never resolved, despite one of Mexico’s greatest resources being its cheap labor force.

In the real Mexico, the war is for drugs “where the police and the military fight for their share of the drug profits, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between the government and the drug world has never existed (Danish Brethern, dailykos.com).

Like the twisted fundamentalist versions of Islam among certain groups in places like Saudi Arabia, Mexico too has a long history of carrying on seemingly distorted versions of religious traditions, many of which have become subcultures of modern versions of ancient Aztec faiths.

Especially popular among a huge and growing part of the Mexican people, the poor and alienated—those excluded from the wealth modern globalization—Santa Muerte is a faith not likely to go away any time soon. It may have arisen as a reaction to Vatican II or simply as a longstanding tradition based on the popular “Thin Lady,” Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec queen of the underworld, a part of Mexico’s native religion.

On the American taxpayers’ dime, the Mexican Army is using funds from Bush’s Mérida Initiative to carry out the wishes of the Catholic Church condemning Santa Muerte as devil worship because some drug traffickers wear tattoos of the Thin Lady. But drug traffickers more often wear images of Christ and the crucifix as well. So, why isn’t the government seeking to destroy Catholic churches by this same logic? The government claims that the Santa Muerte sect is part of the narco subculture, a justification for the Army to demolish “dozens of shrines to Santa Muerte, claiming that the worship of this skeletal woman in a white cloak is a ‘narco-cult.’ As resistance grows, so does this new religious movement” (US/Mexican Narco War Targets Religious Sect, by Danish Brethern, DailyKos.com). This represents another variation of how the Mexican people can rebel against their authoritarian, conservative government and its official church by worshipping the Holy Death, a spirit who cares for the poor and the marginalized.

In another form of rebellion against Mexico’s economic inequality, today’s drug cartels continue the traditions of the caudillos and have seized control of large regions of the country. They are overpowering or buying out the Mexican Army, which is weakened by a bad economy, one that does not engage and motivate a middle class. Like the police, the Army is so poorly paid that its soldiers desert the government and use their skills, including those gained from Special Forces training in the U.S., to join the higher paid caudillos, or what the mainstream media calls the drug cartels.

Mexico: U.S. Is Borderline to Third World?

2009-06-07T15:41:00.000-07:00

"There is an arms race between the cartels," said Alberto Islas, a security consultant who advises the Mexican government on the current drug wars, as reported in the Los Angeles Times. "One group gets rocket-propelled grenades, the other has to have them."

Since January 2007, when the Mexican war on drugs was officially declared, more than 9,700 people have died in the conflicts, more than the official count of U.S. soldier causalities in Iraq.

When looking at Mexico's history and its current economic and civil predicament, we gain insight into how our own American government is so vulnerable. Only our values and distinguishing principles designed into our system by its founders will save us. If we lose these, we fall into the abyss.

To some, comparing the U.S. to Mexico, or the Third World in general, sounds shocking. Yet, is this comparison really so far-fetched? With our constitutional form of government in jeopardy, the U.S. teeters on the edge of emulating Mexico's dismal style of democracy.

In my previous two articles in a series of essays examining the similarities between Mexico and the U.S.A., Mexico: a Theocratic Model for Republicans and Religious Morality Is Problematic, I consider how certain leaders in Mexico, as in so many countries south of the border, have seized political power through the use of the authoritarian religious traditions that are pervasive in the culture. More than ever in U.S. history, the Republican Party has pursued this model during the G.W. Bush administration's eight long years.

In the U.S. under the G.W. Bush administration, the Republican Party took a page from Mexican history and followed this same process as Mexico's leaders to:

Bridle the Horses-Concentrate power in the executive branch.
Use Loopholes-Alter the U.S. Constitution for more control.
Leverage the Ol'Boy System-Diminish federalism in favor of executive power.
Burn the Bodies-Oppress the press and thus avoid transparency.

Bridle the Horses: President as King

During Porfirio Diaz's presidency, the time was ripe in Mexico's history to "bridle the horses." Diaz's phrase reveals his "all-encompassing program of political control and centralization," as historian Krauze explains in his book, Mexico, Biography of Power. In Mexico the liberal Constitution called for a "representative, democratic and federal Republic," reflecting the ideals of the U.S. Constitution. But Diaz flouted the Mexican Constitution and took control by diminishing the three branches of government and concentrating power in the executive.

As Krauze writes,

"To contain the overwhelming pressure, he would assert the sanctity of the presidential position more than any other twentieth-century President. He [Diaz] would speak...of the 'majesty of the office.' His concept of the position was almost explicitly theocratic....The new style of power took effect immediately...only pure and naked application of power."

As advisor to President G.W. Bush, Karl Rove could have written his playbook straight from the history of Mexican Presidents from Diaz to Calderon, from the 1960s to the present. What this sequence of Mexican presidents accomplished in more than fifty years, the Republicans did in eight.

The parallels are astonishing as explained in the Cato Institute reports by Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch:

"Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes

- a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech-and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
- a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;
- a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as "enemy combatants," strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror- in other words, perhaps forever; and
- a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.

President Bush's constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers."

Like Diaz, Bush used religion to establish his sense of moral and political authority and was supported by American right-wing Christian groups, the progeny of extremists forged by the fundamentalism of Pat Robertson, Bill O'Reilly and his ilk.

Loopholes & Dirty Tricks-Alter the Constitution to Undo the Legislature and the Judiciary

In doing so, the Republicans weakened the values by which the U.S. distinguishes itself from the Third World. They used religious fundamentalism-superstitions-to replace rational thinking. They disregarded constitutional law which the president's sworn to protect. They ignored laws enacted by Congress with "signing statements" issued by President Bush. With these signing statements, Bush was able to interpret laws as he saw fit, thus further deteriorating the U.S. constitution. Over the last eight years, the Republican Party transgressed the Constitutional form of government for the sake of an ideological vision that included unbridled, free-wheeling capitalism.

As Elizabeth Drew says in her article in The New York Review of Books,

"This power grab has received little attention because it has been carried out largely in obscurity. The press took little notice until Bush, on January 5 of this year [2006], after signing a bill containing the McCain amendment, which placed prohibitions on torture, quietly filed a separate pronouncement, a "signing statement," that he would interpret the bill as he wished....The public scenes of the President surrounded by smiling legislators whom he praises for their wonderful work as he hands out the pens he has used to sign the bill are often utterly misleading. The elected officials aren't informed at that time of the President's real intentions concerning the law. After they leave, the President's signing statements-which he does not issue verbally at the time of signing-are placed in the Federal Register, a compendium of US laws, which members of Congress rarely read. And they are often so technical, referring as they do to this subsection and that statute, that they are difficult to understand."

Again, one of the distinguishing values built into the U.S. Constitution is the division of power that creates a system of checks and balances. However, by using the signing statements and other loopholes asserted in devious arguments, such as the unitary executive power, Rove, Cheney, and Bush found ways to annul the legislative branches in more ways than one. Unlike the Democrat Party, the Republicans enforce a strict code of loyalty and, at least during the reign of Karl Rove, they spoke only according to the party line of well-rehearsed "talking points."

This mirrors another aspect of Mexican history that brought that country into its current plague of corruption, violence, and chaos.

Krauze tells us how:

"Diaz had weakened and corrupted the Legislature by making it a mere adjunct of the Presidential Chair. The bothersome business of electing candidates was conveniently overcome by appointing them. No presidential initiative was ever questioned, and nothing moved in the Legislature without the consent of 'the Great Elector.' A similar process of servitude neutralized the judiciary as Don Profirio [Diaz] freely appointed and removed judges."

And this became a tradition for most all subsequent Mexican presidents. Similarly, the Bush administration transformed the role of the president into 'the Decider' partly by neutralizing the judiciary-appointing only right-wing extremist judges who would serve the president's agenda. As Drew points out:

"As for the judicial branch, the Bush administration, like previous administrations, has tried to appoint judges compatible with the President's views. But Bush has been strikingly successful at putting extreme conservatives on the bench, and probably now has four votes on the Supreme Court for his 'unitary executive' rationale for executive authority over what the other branches do."

The Ol'Boy System: Federalism as Myth

Under Don Porfirio Diaz, like most subsequent Mexican presidents, state governors tend to be extremely loyal to the president who kept an eye on them. As Krauze tells us, "Bernardo Reyes, the governor of the state of Nuevo Leon and a true proconsul for Don Protfirio in the northeast, received daily instructions, reports, and suggestions from the President concerning issues as varied as elections for the Legislature and the judiciary; pardons...."

Knowingly or not, the Bush administration followed this model closely and raised it up a notch in many ways. G.W.Bush's initial election to the presidency was tainted by the chaotic voting methods in Florida, where his brother Jeb pulled strings with the Republican Party to assure obstacles were placed in the path of Democrat voters. Ultimately, it was not the voting public of the nation that elected the president. It was the right-wing judges in the Supreme Court who appointed G.W. by using obscure technicalities.

Likewise, many Mexican presidents appoint their successor president-for example, as Krauze points out several times, in the case of President Mateos: "He would later confess that it was at that moment he decided that Gustavo Diaz Ordaz would be his successor."

By extending this ol'boy system to the state governments, the president maintained greater control of the states.

In an essay in The New York Times, Franklin Foer reveals how the W administration imposed federal policies over the States.

"Prodded by a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, Clinton actually presided over the revitalized federalism.... Federalism suited his declared ambition to move beyond the era of 'big government....' George W. Bush didn't give Clinton much credit for these achievements. Like many of his predecessors, he entered office promising to rescue the states from federal pummeling. Yet his administration has greatly expanded federal power, and some conservatives have been complaining. Writing in National Review two years ago, Romesh Ponnuru observed that ''more people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the cold war.'' State governments have their own version of this complaint. They say the Bush administration has imposed new demands...without also providing sufficient cash to get these jobs done."

Burn the Bodies-Freedom of the Press and Public Transparency

From Krauze's history, we learn of events like the Corpus Christi Thursday (1971) in the neighborhood of Tlateloco where President Echeverria planned (while he was Minister of the Interior under President Ordaz) to deploy Los Halcones to kill the liberal students demonstrating for political reform.

Just as we find among our own recent politicians in the U.S., Mexico's President Echevirria "would be able to throw the blame on others, as far away as he could from himself, for Tlateloco and the rest of the actions he supervised...." Krauze tells us that "Echeverria had snapped out an order by telephone to burn the bodies."

During the three years after the 9/11 attacks, a period when the American public gave all their trust to Bush-Cheney, the administration moved to intimidate the press by calling journalists unpatriotic if they voiced the slightest word of dissent. The most obvious example of this arose when Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote an article in The New York Times revealing how Bush and Cheney were using trumped-up stories about WMDs in Iraq to justify their long-time neocon plan to invade. Bush-Cheney retaliated by destroying the career of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, in the CIA. And they were able to throw the blame on others, such as Scooter Libby, who was convicted of felony federal charges of obstruction and perjury but never served a day in jail, because Bush pardoned him.

Yet this example pales in comparison to how Bush-Cheney secretly enabled torture to be used as a covert means to create a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, not to mention how they manipulated intelligence documents to justify bombing a country into rubble and killing a large part of its citizens, women and children included.

Unlike Mexico's President Echeverria, Cheney did not need to burn the bodies. The dead Iraqis, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, were killed in places where journalists were not allowed to go. Fortunately, Lawrence Wilkerson, the retired Army colonel and former senior State Department aide to Colin Powell, spoke the truth behind Cheney's lies, exposing how the former VP used torture to force prisoners to link al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein.

During the Bush administration, the government intimidated journalists' freedom of the press, which was, and still is, already weakened by the pressures of corporate sponsors. Almost every policy Bush-Cheney carried out, they did so as covert operations, from forbidding photographs of the soldiers returning from war in caskets to concealing how torture was authorized, how intelligence was manipulated, and how dissent was squelched, as in the case of Valerie Plame.

We think we are free. That's what we want to believe, and it seems we are because we can choose among 8 types of blue jeans and 21 flavors of ice cream. Now, though, our political leaders have shackled us in the chains of extremist ideology and religious superstitions. These same dismal shenanigans and outright crimes characterize the history of Third World countries as we see in places like Mexico.

Tragically for America, we have become extremely tolerant of political leaders who have taken ownership of our own government and our guiding principles, our only saving virtues. If the new administration under Obama, including Congress, do not willfully and aggressively undo the aberrations created by the Bush administration, then we will continue to roll down the rails, heading closer to a corrupt and failing government-one that no longer finds the courage to correct itself.

Mexico: Religious Morality Is Problematic—A Failure in Mexico & in the U.S.

2009-05-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

"To say that Mexico is a failed state is absolutely false," said Mexico’s current president, Felipe Calderon. "I have not lost any part—any single part—of Mexican territory."

Maybe Calderon should reconsider his claim. What about Ciudad Juarez? Calling in 5,000 troops sounds like an offensive mobilization of the Army to regain the territory lost by the local police.

“President Felipe Calderon said Thursday he wants to defeat the world's most powerful drug gangs before his term ends in 2012, disputing U.S. fears that Mexico is losing control of its territory, though his government plans to send thousands of soldiers and police officers to one city to try to control drug violence there.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29413556

How did Mexico come to the edge of being a failed State? The history of the country shows us how its political officials, from the lowest to the highest ranks have used any means possible—mostly illegal—to gain personal power and wealth. We learn from historians such as Enrique Krauze, in his book, Mexico: Biography of Power, how Mexico attempted to establish several constitutions over the last century while groping for its core guiding values. At the same time, the Catholic Church, in its struggle to retain control, varied its policies and values to assert its own slithering agenda.

Loss of Rational Core Values

As in other theocratic countries, in Mexico leaders constantly govern in arbitrary ways—void of core, rational values—in order to benefit themselves and the powerful wealthy who are most likely to support these leaders in return. Rolling Stone magazine recently revealed how Mexican officials, from the highest to the lowest ranks, benefit from revenue sharing in the Columbian cocaine industry.

As in Columbia, now too in Mexico, government officials at all levels collaborate with drug lords like El Chapo, a man made extremely wealthy from cocaine and marijuana, who is most likely to support these leaders in return for their favors, such as letting him out of a high security federal prison before his extradition to the U.S. Officials in the Bush-Cheney administration are not unfamiliar with these practices. Bush oil industry regulators spent American tax money on Columbian blow, and we have learned how their stimulating high aided in their sex parties with oil industry lobbyists.

Despite Bush’s claims of high moral standards as a born-again Christian, he and Cheney whittled away at what was once America’s moral high ground, once one of the touchstones of American world leadership. The Bush administration has inculcated the type of hypocritical immorality typical of popular religions that enforce ethical rules arbitrarily, depending on the situation and political needs.

Clothed in the image of Christian righteousness, the Bush-Cheney administration authorized torture as a means to obtain testimony—ultimately revealed to be false—to support the lies used to justify bombing Iraq and killing thousands of innocent civilians. Many reports have shown that the previous administration intentionally invaded Iraq, not for any alleged links to al Qaeda but for access to its oil reserves. Succeeding in this well-documented, premeditated plan would have benefited large oil companies, the wealthy who are most likely to support these leaders in return for the favor.

Political Use of Religion

Politicians often use popular religion to justify the abuse of power and force, degrading a nation into third-world status like Mexico. Unlike any other presidential administration in the U.S., the eight years of Bush-Cheney solidified a culture of corrupt favoritism for the wealthy, leaving the middle class to pay for our current financial and moral disaster. The financial catastrophe may be the result of decades of disastrous deregulation policies but, like the 9/11 attack, Bush-Cheney ignored all the warnings. So many disasters befell W’s administration as if he were the victim, a bystander struck by a MAC truck, not a leader in charge of the traffic, not really the decider.

Like the Bush-Cheney administration over the past eight years with its favoritism to big oil and its no-bid contracts with Halliburton, Mexican presidents have used similar means for centuries to use the resources of the many, the middle class, to benefit the few, the extremely wealthy and powerful.

This dismantling of the middle class in the U.S. has already begun to eat away at American core values. The more middle class Americans have to struggle to keep a roof over our children’s heads, the more we have to compromise our ethical standards. We are more willing to tolerate a preemptive, unjustified war if our leaders tell us it might make us safer and lower the prices at the pump. We are willing to tolerate the torture of prisoners if it means maintaining our standard of living.

The American voting public became aware of this by the end of the last Republican administration. They voted for change. As President Obama says in his statement about the release of Bush administration torture memos, “A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals, and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.”

America’s ideals were founded by the rational, clear thinking of the Enlightenment, when obscure religious thought was ignored for the sake of moral values based on logical reasoning, as in classical Greece.

Mexico’s leaders, in contrast, have been inspired by the inquisitions and superstitions of the Baroque era. The leading architects of American government were not religious men at all. They were deists, inspired by the European Enlightenment. America’s ideals were founded not in arbitrary, popular religious dictates that deceptive politicians use to abuse power.

Yet this is exactly how the Mexican government has favored the wealthy in Mexico (and in the U.S.), at the expense of Mexico’s middle class. The drug industry in Mexico has become the most attractive means to stay in the middle class because the corrupt economic and political system has not enabled the middle-class families in Mexico to build a life by more legitimate and respectable means. They have compromised their ethics in order to keep a roof over the heads of their children.

Many Mexican citizens have lost all trust in their government. The Zetas, the Special Forces soldiers of the drug lords, routinely recruit Mexican soldiers into their ranks. Rolling Stone reporter Guy Lawson quotes the rationale of one such recruit.

"Chapo came to my village in a helicopter and gave out money to plant marijuana," Julio says. "He did this for the whole town. If I wanted to start a business of some kind in the city, he would provide me the money to start. He uses his money for his people, to help us progress."

As the Mexican political system fails, the more the middle-class Mexican has to tolerate immoral means of survival. In most of central and south America, the illegal drug industry has become the most effective means to increase a regular person’s income. For this reason it has gained overwhelming popularity, despite its dangers.

Likewise, the eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration has led middle-class Americans to sacrifice our core values, with the hope that the unjustified destruction of a country, the torture of prisoners, and the free-wheeling, deregulated capitalism would somehow save the standard of living for us and our children.

As Mark Danner comments on this line of reasoning

“from Dick Cheney on down have been unflagging in their arguments that these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques . . . were absolutely crucial’ to preventing ‘a major-casualty attack.’ This argument, still strongly supported by a great many Americans, is deeply pernicious, for it holds that it is impossible to protect the country without breaking the law. It says that the professed principles of the United States, if genuinely adhered to, doom the country to defeat. It reduces our ideals and laws to a national decoration, to be discarded at the first sign of danger.”

The lessons we learn from Mexico’s failures illuminate our own down fall in the U.S. during the last eight years. The damage done was so severe that we must remain vigilant, despite Obama’s Herculean leadership. We must pull ourselves out of a dire situation where our own political system failed and now teeters on the precipice of collapse.

Mexico: A Theocratic Model for Republicans

2009-05-08T20:04:00.000-07:00

Here in Los Angeles, Sepulveda Boulevard serves as a main traffic artery for over 42 miles, from the San Fernando Valley in the north to Hermosa Beach in the south—the longest road in Los Angeles County. Few Angelinos probably know what history lurks in the name.

Sepulveda, a militant racist, a fascist? A study of Mexico’s history reveals that Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494 - 1573) wrote that the natives are "as children to parents, as women are to men, as cruel people are from mild people.” A Second Democritus: on the just causes of the war with the Indians was his most important book, shaping the course of Mexican history.

In his book, Mexico, Biography of Power, Enrique Krauze tells us: “The imperialist interpretation of the Conquest (stridently represented by Juan Gines de Sepulveda) justified the war against the Indians on the grounds of their allegedly natural vices and defects: they were subhuman, sodomites, barbarians, cannibals, cowards, idolaters, liars and depraved idlers. Their backwardness prevented them from freely submitting to the law; they were ‘slaves by nature.’”

Religious Doctrine--Political Policy

This fervent, Catholic, political ideology represented in Sepulveda’s writings resembles much of the North American Protestant justifications to decimate most of the American Indians. Sepulveda’s view sounds like a line straight from one of today’s Republican propaganda writers (Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, etc.) who brutally attack anyone of a dissenting opinion about torture, preemptive invasions, or any of their other policies.

We might excuse Sepulveda at least a little if we consider his own historical context during the end of the Dark Ages, a period of cultural decline and societal collapse, even though several of Sepulveda’s contemporaries advocated respect and tolerance for human rights. The Jesuit humanist Francisco Javier Clavijero “ascribed to the civilization of the Mexicas a classical rank equal to that of Greece and Rome.”

Despite Sepulveda’s disadvantage of being born into the Dark Ages, the neocons and other Republicans cannot use any such excuse for their medieval views. When reading Sepulveda’s theocratic ideology, we find the same twisted logic and bellicose policies, supported by claiming it’s God’s will. Referring to God as support for a political policy was a hallmark of the Dark Ages, when reason was left twisting in the wind. The use of trumped-up religious authority as a justification for a political doctrine reveals the weakness of that doctrine. Instead of using rational thought and logic, theocrats lean on so-called sacred text, dictated by God, as the basis of policy.

Religion as a Political Platform

It’s as though the Republicans ripped their policies out of Sepulveda’s pages and used them as their playbook. Sepulveda’s words contain the sounds of the same strand of blind theology that the W Administration used to manipulate the general public into a frenzy after the 9/11 attack, calling for a “crusade” and using it to justify the implementation of their long-planned, extreme, right-wing policies.

Bush often used religious terms in grandiose statements. "This crusade, this war on terrorism is gonna take awhile.” “We will rid the world of the evil-doers." His use of religious expressions gained him popularity among gullible groups of born-again Christians throughout his career. W’s born-again Christian fundamentalism helped him to become governor of Texas. “But I feel God wants me to do this, and I must do it.” It was the right-wing members of the U.S. Supreme Court who made him president.

Once in the White House, W’s unreasoned policies fell straight into the greatest wishes of the likes of Osama bin Laden whose goal was to cause confusion and terror. What fundamentalist plans Osama bin Laden instigated, W unwittingly fulfilled. Leaders like these rely on traditionalism, meaning that they claim their authority derived from a religious text. In his essay, Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt, Umberto Eco explains how this style of leadership is an early form of fascism.

Religious Doctrine--Traditionalism--Dangerous Policies

In its recent eight-year reign, the Republican Party took the U.S. from peace and prosperity to a historic deficit, unbridled financial disaster, preemptive war justified by lies to the public, and corporate corruption, especially among the oil titans which only expedites the looming environmental breakdown. Most born-again Christians believe that environmentalism is futile since the End Days are soon approaching for the Rapture and Christ’s second coming. Why bother trying to save the planet if God is going to snatch up the righteous to heaven and leave the rest of us sinners here to face the apocalypse?

Such painful incompetence, irrational policies, and corruption once were the mark of third world countries like Mexico—until now. Given another Republican administration, the U.S. would have become a failed state, like Mexico today. Driven by a religious ideology that influenced every aspect of policy from economics to the judicial system, W’s presidency is an example of how religious fervor can bring a peaceful and prosperous nation into war and financial collapse.

If Republicans had remained in power, they would have gleefully transformed the U.S. into a born-again Christian theocratic government, run by and for the wealthy and justified by God’s will. Certain traits create the third-world conditions of Mexico, and they reflect closely the fundamentalist policies of the Republican Party in the U.S. today.

Like most Central and South American countries, Mexico has been under the yoke of the Catholic Church since before Cortés. For most Mexicans the Church still is the main source of culture and education. Krauze writes, “It was in other areas, like education, where the influence of the Church was clearly harmful.” He notes that the Church was responsible “above all, [for] the intolerant strain in Mexican thought, evident in 1910….”

Church + State = Third World

One church, one god, one dogma, one catechism, one way of thinking—this narrow mindedness is what fuels theocratic regimes. This holds true for Mexico today as it does for many other third-world countries like Israel, Palestine, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, where reason flutters in the wind like a battle-torn flag, and where people view the world in terms of what God wills. They do this without realizing that God can be quite different from one tribe, gang, or congregation to the next. They result is endless wars in the Golan Heights, the West Bank, or on the streets of Juarez.

Theocracies most often resemble fascist regimes, with their dogmatic control over every life. At different times and places, the degree of tyranny varies but the underlying characteristic of centralized command remains, just as it does in right-wing regimes, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or Panama under Noriega, or Saudi Arabia under the Saud Monarchy, or Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu.

Or Profirio Diaz, like many other Mexican presidents all the way to recent ex-President Vincente Fox, who “ran an ‘integral’ or ‘total’ government…by integrating into the person of the President the real powers—national and local politico-military leaders and army generals…and by neutralizing dissident voices.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, W’s administration muzzled dissident voices for several years by calling them unpatriotic, a claim that could ruin the career of a journalist like Dan Rather and former Ambassador Joe Wilson who published an opinion piece in the The New York Times, revealing how W twisted intelligence reports to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Like most third-world countries, Mexico escaped the influence of the century of the Enlightenment. For Europe and the United States, the Enlightenment meant that facts, scientific method, and reason reemerge from antiquity as the measure of truth and sound ideas. It was a time when revolution tore down the arbitrary and whimsical “divine rights” of kings and other nutcase right-wing manipulators. As in France, the “Founding Fathers” of the U.S. fortunately had embraced the Age of Reason with its ideals of human rights, rational justice, and democracy.

Age of Enlightenment Revisited

Contrary to claims by members of the Republican Party, most of the Founders were Deists, hardly interested in any religion. They thought the universe had a creator, but one not concerned with the daily lives of humans and not in direct contact with them, either by revelation or by sacred texts. No, the Republicans are horribly wrong in their claims that America was founded as a Christian nation. As usual, when they make statements in the mainstream media, they revise history according to their own mythologies. Jefferson, on the contrary, believed that America’s strength arises from free thinking, critical citizens, unfettered from the chains of religious nonsense.

Eco writes that right-wing traditionalists see “the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason…as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”Krauze points out that the values of the Enlightenment “affected only the topmost level of society, and despite the historic breakthroughs of that period, Mexico held tight to the culture of the Baroque with centralized power in a monarchal-type president or a despot and religious superstitions in the place of science. Mexico remained resistant to the political and intellectual currents of the European Enlightenment.” The Republican Party ignores any type of rational system of justice and instead attempts to transform the U.S. justice system into an extension of its own arbitrary policies. Like Islam and Judaism, Christianity has been used as a propaganda channel for unified political power ever since it was accepted by political authorities, such as Constantine.

Today, the Republicans use religion to legitimize their own goals, such as to ignoring the habeas corpus and due process of the law in order to imprison and torture people without trial. Motivated by personal gain and fueled by favoritism for members of their own religious tribe, they appoint religious extremists to the Supreme Court and make deals with lobbyists of large corporations against the best interests of the people and the greater welfare of the country. As Octavio Paz describes Mexico in his book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, “ours is the Counter-reformation, Monopoly and Feudalism….”

By shifting power to a centralized executive branch, by favoring corporations that become monopolistic, by legislating religious superstitions like creationism as part of the educational curriculum in public schools, and so encouraging citizens to lose their grasp on clear thinking, not to mention science and reason, the Republican Party sought the dumbing-down of the general public. The dumber citizens are, the easier it is to beguile them. The right wing is continuing its quest to bring the U.S. closer to the Dark Ages of feudalism, monopoly, and ignorance—and shared status, with Mexico, as a failed state.

In the Case of Iraq, a War Story Might Best Take Place on U.S. Soil

2009-04-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

In the last few days, reports appeared about how the Pulitzer committee awarded their prestigious prize to topics like the luxury bordello scandals involving elected officials, Thomas Jefferson’s various mistresses, and international sex trafficking, among others.

No doubt these subjects are important and sizzle in the public mind, yet something feels missing—a shoe lace untied, a hole worn through a pocket by a house key, or that war lasting more than 7 years now.

The Pulitzer committee grants awards for socially redeeming art, beautiful music, or fine writing that pierces the veil of deception in high places. Plenty of journalists and writers have accomplished this on the subject of Operation Iraqi Freedom, focusing not on the sizzling sex scandals but on the more primitive forms of brutality and rape in the chaos of a destroyed country.

Does this explain why the war topic was passed over this year, the seventh of a long war?

The Pulitzer was founded on values of professional journalism and artistic merit. Has it turned its eyes to new, more important subjects than the U.S. invasion of another country?

If you consider how mainstream media and journalism have botched so many opportunities to pierce the veil of high-power deception, you’ll not be surprised that a prestigious prize for journalism shows a lack of interest in Iraq, war, soldiers and civilians dying. After all, how many newspapers, or congressmen for that matter, risked dissent from the W administration during the wake of the hyped-up, politically exploited, hysterical 9/11 reaction?

Plenty of novels and nonfiction books criticized the war and risked public outrage and the lethal label of “un-American” during the period when the native authority of W and Cheney commanded support for their own cleverly crafted, massive destruction and public deception. In this sense, the Iraq war took place more right here in the U.S. than in the bombing missions and in the Humvees where blood spills out to this day.

Perhaps Americans at home just don’t have the stomach to think of the war anymore—though the war was, and still is, fundamentally right here at home. The battleground is in the American political arena. Now more than ever, this becomes clear as the reports pile up to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the war was planned long before the causus belli –the justification and the opportunity that presented itself in the form of the 9/11 attack.

America’s political system failed—and so did its journalism. Collectively, reflecting our country’s culture, we Americans wanted to find a fast solution to an otherwise complicated situation. Suddenly faced with difficult decisions and questions, we clung tightly to our Bibles, searching for quick answers and whispering curses to the Muslims in a “crusade,” as W often called it. We did not want to analyze the facts before we reacted. We wanted to follow a leader, regardless of how nefarious and duplicitous the power brokers played their hand in a twisted plan.

Ironically, these officials, W and Cheney, were not even elected officials, rather just appointed hastily by a small group of extremists at the Supreme Court. This is why the real battleground has always been right here at home. It began as a struggle for the power to impose an ideological belief on a democracy. By grasping the power to command, the extreme American ideologues overreacted, waged a war of political passion, and thus fulfilled the greatest wishes, plans, and prayers of the likes of Osama bin Laden.

So, a nonfiction book, and especially a novel about the war, might best be situated at home, not in the smoking battlegrounds where the bombs explode. This war is all about political ideology that affects every aspect of American culture and economics. This war is not about WMDs, not about a brutal tryant, not about evil terrorists, and not about the security of our nation.

Soldiers Readapt to Civilian Life, Some Don't

2009-04-22T21:26:00.000-07:00

Unlike any war the U.S. has waged, the urban, guerilla combat in Iraq is personal and challenges the soul’s endurance. Except for the Vietnam War, especially the later part, U.S. soldiers are faced with a more personal type of combat. An unidentifiable enemy walks around in public, indistinguishable from the civilians. Except for the Special Forces, U.S. soldiers are trained only for traditional warfare, not terrorism and insurgency.

Moving freely anywhere, civilian insurgents can detonate a suicide bomb, shredding humans indiscriminately. In March this year, the New York Times reported how, even as U.S. soldiers begin to leave Iraq, suicide bombings increase, killing more than 33 in a single day. The bloody scenes sear the spirit of anyone witnessing the carnage.

Insurgent civilians seem like regular people one day, exchanging cigarettes with a soldier like Army Cpl. Jason Pautsch. The next day, the same friendly face can pull an AK47 and spray bullets into a Marine Unit where buddies fall with nightmarish wounds. Like a lightning bolt from nowhere, a roadside bomb can explode, taking life and limb.

Scenes of horror create the post traumatic stress syndrome that U.S. soldiers like Sgt. Stryker have to cope with when they return home after years of patrolling Iraqi neighborhoods filled with paranoia and constant fear for life.

A soldier develops personal relationships with his battle buddies or with friendly civilians--alive one day and torn apart the next.

One day an otherwise friendly civilian might appear out of nowhere working as a suicide bomber, forcing a well-intended Marine to make a split-second decision to shoot in self-defense. Mistakes happen in the strained, continuous, life-threatening situations. The extended missions exacerbate the stress. The Stop-Loss clause in a military service contract can hold a soldier in combat indefinitely.

When the soldier returns home to America after surviving by any and all means, including shielding himself with intensified paranoia and tight nerves, he can’t resolve the gap between his newly regained civilian lifestyle and the adrenaline still racing through his veins. Sometimes he cannot slow down the synaptic overload in his mind and soul. Readjusting to a whole new and alien world seems impossible, a world that used to be familiar, now turned into another planet. He loses his grip and slips into the darkness.

In 2008 suicide rates of U.S. soldiers from Iraq rose beyond the levels during the Vietnam War three decades ago.

In the novel, Mojave Winds, Kris Klug is caught in this tough transition between dangerous and extended missions and finding his way in regular American daily life. As a portrait of the human condition, the novel is best positioned to capture the internal struggle of soldiers, many bearing the burden of deep invisible wounds.

Mojave Winds and A Sufi's Ghost Mentioned in The New York Times

2009-04-14T20:12:00.000-07:00

Even if it is just a mention on The New York Times's Web site, it's still great to see that my novels are being referenced and noticed in some of the mainstream newspapers.

You can find the discussion thread that brought up my novels in The New York Times's blog.:
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/shock-and-awe-a-novel/

Part of my own comments in this thread include the following.

I began writing Mojave Winds in 2002 when the G W Bush administration began preparing the preemptive invasion of Iraq.

Since then, I’ve been tracking the public’s interest in reading about the war and its politics in nonfiction and in fiction as well as in the movies.

By doing this tracking, I’ve discovered that it’s own way to observe how public opinion has changed drastically over the last 7 years, from an almost hysterical reaction to the 9/11 attack to a much broader and deeper understanding of how the W administration had used the invasion for its own previously planned agenda. In a situation like this it has taken a good five years for the facts to move from nonfiction books into the area of public opinion.

As of 2005, many movies had appeared: Rendition, Stop Lose, Valley of Ellah, Jarhead, The Kingdom, among others. Some of these enjoyed box office success. It seems that these movies helped in making the “general public” more aware of the war. Otherwise, it seems that, like Vietnam, the war was not in the forefront of the minds of the “average citizen” who is often concerned about how to pay the mortgage, rent, medical bills, and education.

Fortunately, the American citizen did come around to understand that the right-wing extremists in the White House were taking the country down a bumpy road to the Dark Ages.

One of the points in the previous comments, in the New York Times blog postings, suggests that this war in Iraq is very different from anything the U.S. has engaged before.

I believe that this is true for at least a couple of reasons. As mentioned, the demographics of the soldiers are now different and new in some ways and the politics behind the U.S. wars in the Middle East are motivated by relatively new incentives, although some historians see World Wars I and II as prompted at least partly by the much coveted petroleum (see The Epic Of Oil, Catalyst Of Conflict - New York Times January 1993).

The U.S. has seldom ventured into preemptive war, and certainly not in any way like its preemptive bombing and invasion of Iraq where substantial evidence and controversy existed before the invasion.

In the U.S. history, there have been false justifications for war, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, Vietnam—all justified by trumped up reasons of some alleged skirmish that riled the patriotic blood. Iraq is similar to these in many ways, but different in its politics of such a clearly defined and pre-documented political agenda as well as its overwhelming military advantage—not to mention an arrogant occupation of a country that so encouraged successful guerilla warfare.

It’s the politics ( and religious ferver) that seem most intriguing in this war with Iraq. Its manipulation was blatant to many. Though the U.S. public opinion was clearly manipulated by a small cabal in the White House who used the 9/11 attack as the pretext for their agenda planned long before. This is what makes Iraq so unique, revealing how the American political system went awry.

This affects how writers approach this war in novels.
As mentioned in previous comments, above, soldiers experiencing the war first hand would probably do best to write memoirs—a genre well suited for first-hand witness, such is the case for Jarhead by Swofford (the Desert Storm invasion) and later for Generation Kill by Wright (the current Operation Iraqi Freedom invasion).

Although Swofford was a sniper (who later went to writing school) and Wright, an embedded journalist, they both depict just how jaded, cynical, and disillusioned the soldiers were for the most part. Unlike most any other war, the soldiers were aware of the crass Realpolitik behind these Iraqi wars, as security operations for the oil fields (especially since, during the same time, the U.S. could have taken leadership in initiating new, innovative industries for alternative energy). As portrayed in these war accounts, the modern U.S. volunteer soldier becomes aware of the crass politics behind their mission.

On the other hand, the novel Catch 22 by Heller, focused more on the incompetency of the military bureaucracy which Heller had seen in the Korean operations after WWII, even though his story was placed in WWII.

Given the political and corporate interests in the Iraq wars, the way novelists approach this subject will most likely be quite different from Hemmingway’s view of WWII, or Heller’s depiction of the Korean (vis à vis European) War. In any case, Jarhead and Generation Kill express very new sentiments about U.S. military adventures.

Church of Later Day Neocons

2008-08-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

Fighting Guerrilla Warriors with Conventional Tactics All for the Sake of Godly Profits

“War on terror” coins a sacred phrase in the Iraq crusade. Karl Rove, high priest of spin, led the neocons’ faithful choir through the doctrinal hymns, especially regarding Bush’s military mission.

Now the Sanctified Church of Later Day Neocons has anointed John McCain to take the pulpit for the steadfast congregation, a political party on a mission from God, bowing down to corporate avarice at the detriment of public interests. The neocon party promises to maintain stilted, stodgy status quo of old, slogging industries. Though, what we need these days is Yankee ingenuity, innovation, and invention--the heart of American entrepreneurism in government and in business.

Except for Secretary of State Rice, the ex-oil executive automaton, this special cabal of wealthy, white codgers has woven a web of myths so thick that everyone believes the country is divided between the red and the blue: the virtuous, righteous party versus the diabolical, liberal socialists. Behind the neocon marketing hype, the issues draw a real line between rich and the bleeding middle class and the economic policies that shove the poor deeper into debtor’s slavery while the wealthy reap the profits from the uneducated, gullible middle class.

At least twenty percent of Americans still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. As many Americans also believe they pay fewer taxes than Europeans who enjoy high quality public healthcare and education through university level.

I know firsthand by attending a German university. Otherwise, coming from a blue collar background in America, I never would have been able to afford an education. I lived and worked more than twenty years in Germany and France and paid fewer taxes than we do in America. I pursued the American dream where it was available.

Considered an enlightened saint among the neocons, Milton Friedman claimed that unregulated industries operate most efficiently. Contrary to this twaddle, we have witnessed how unbridled Savings and Loan banks imploded under Bush Sr. in the early 90’s. Corporations can and will destroy themselves by greedy feeding frenzies as we watched in the scandals like Enron and Anderson Consulting. Lack of government intervention, a lack of political will and leadership in America generally allows this trend to continue.

Once the Berlin Wall fell, hollow winds blew through the streets of Soviet Union’s communist ideals and gave the captains of American industry free reign to practice arrogant forms of unrestrained and turgid capitalism at the high costs of public interests.

After disastrous Reaganomics were implemented, Bush Sr. became president, campaigning on a promise to reduce taxes which he later increased in a desperate attempt to reduce Reagan’s inflamed deficit, and pushed Friedman policies, voodoo economics, further, allowing certain industries to gorge on consumers’ savings accounts, wolves on meek lambs. Bush Sr. cooled the corporate feeding frenzy that turned into a blood bath by paying over $120 billion in public tax funds to bail out the Savings & Loan crisis in the early 1990’s.

So, rather than maintain a Keynesian mixed economy in which government calms corporate passions for predatory profits, the neocon doctrine allows industries to devour gullible consumers until streets flow red with blood. Unimaginative industries, banking, healthcare insurance, and energy, resist innovation and change. The only way left for them to make profits is by praying on consumers' ignorance. Only then does government intervene by giving the status quo industries, which lack any innovation, a transfusion of tax payers’ money.

America’s government has become a mere socialized emergency room for industries that overdose on the crack cocaine of greed. Tax payers now pay industries to cure them of their own addiction to larger and larger profits and executive salaries.

As if ambitious to outdo dad, President Bush Jr. drove Milton Friedman’s free wheeling economic policies like a freight train on a downward spiraling track until it finally crashed into the limits of melting consumer credit cards and fraudulent, bloated mortgages. Bush Jr.’s administration will hand out hundreds of billions of tax dollars to subsidize the mismanagement of credit card and mortgage banks while their CEO’s carry their multimillion dollar paychecks to the bank, laughing all the way. Meanwhile middle class workers lose their homes at a neck breaking rate.

In so far as incompetent politicians sell their souls to corporate contributions and voodoo economics and consequently mislead this country into destruction and mayhem, the guerrilla Islamist warriors, like Osama bin Laden, are accurate in assessing the US as corrupt and decadent.

McCain’s campaign promises continue the neoconservative holy crusade for the Iraq War which directly affects the economy. The differences between Obama and MacCain are blatantly clear. Whatever McCain says about the economic fiascos of the mortgage crisis, the credit card crisis, or the Iraq War, Obama has an opposite view and innovative solutions.

The 2008 election is about diametrically opposing views between the Keynesian versus the Friedmaniac policies. In 2008 we also choose between the neocons’ imperial war to impose corporate turgid status quo over a sovereign nation for the sake of its oil reserves versus the innovative solutions in such industries as healthcare, banking, energy, and war.

Corporate Campaign Contributions – Industrial Domination

Tied to the unparalleled power of the Israeli lobby money and to the huge corporate defense and energy contractors, Bush and his chums have been operating only in terms of conventional warfare. Influenced by corporate campaign money, they only think in terms of corporate interests. This involves no bid contracts and the use of expensive, sophisticated weaponry that applies best to the warfare of one sovereign nation against another and not to guerilla warfare.

In other words, the stodgy political church of Bush and McCain is less interested in armor to protect the individual soldiers on the ground, fighting house to house. That sort of activity represents social welfare to individual human beings, brave soldiers. Armor for body and Humvee hardly increases profit margins in comparison to a billion dollar B2 bomber.

Following Bush’s footsteps, McCain embraces this same agenda. If Bush says, “stay the course in Iraq,” McCain says, “stay there a hundred years.” If Bush says timetable to pull out, McCain dittos the Anointed Decider. McSame has developed his economic and war policies from his ties with big business lobbies and not with the interest of the American people. Like Bush, McCain abides by unregulated big business as indoctrinated by Milton Friedman since the Reagan years.

This is the reason why Bush invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation. “It’s just business,” as he would say, “nothin’ pers’nal.” He could have pointed his finger at any piece of fresh meat and the American people were eagerly drooling to revenge the 9/11 attack.

The golden opportunity, the casus belli,a perfect justification for war arrived. The neocons knew exactly which war to wage, the low hanging fruit of the world’s second largest oil reserves. Despite many warnings of the 9/11 attack, W did nothing to restrain the well known Islamist guerrilla warriors, as indicated in his August 6, 2001 Presidential Brief, which he chose to ignore.

According to Ron Suskind's new book, Way of the World, Bush chose to ignore and deny clear intelligence that Iraq had no connection with al-Qaida and no WMDs:

Then, in the fall of 2003, the White House decided that a letter should be fabricated, dated July 2001, from the Iraqi to Saddam Hussein establishing a link to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. "And the letter should as well say that Saddam Hussein has been actively buying yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help of al-Qaida," Suskind says.

The neocons had long ago planned to knock off Saddam Hussein since the day he nationalized Iraqi oil. They have well documented this fact. Take a look at PNAC. It’s always been about the oil and a drive for global dominance backed by a fanatical Judeo-Christian fundamentalism. We cannot act too surprised when former Fed Chairman Allen Greenspan explained as much in his biography after he left his cushy government job where he practiced the Milton Friedman rituals devoutly in his bathtub, enlightened by flickering candles.

Invading Iraq made great financial and political sense at least for Dubya and his Friedman disciples from Podhoretz to Falwell and Pat Robertson. Defense and petroleum contractors made boat loads of profits, thus fattening the coffers for Bush’s 2004 campaign. Beyond campaign money, the Bush family as well as members of his neocon church, including Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and so on—they own millions of dollars in stocks with defense contractors and petroleum companies such as the Carlyle Group and a long list of others.

Cheney’s stock options at Halliburton skyrocketed, once the company landed those no-bid billion dollar contracts. Unless you’ve read up on this subject, you wouldn’t recognize the names of these companies, except for maybe the ones that advertise regularly on TV like Exxon, Boeing, Lockhead… By paying for multi-million dollar ads, they were able to stifle freedom of media journalism for at least as long as it took to get Neil Cavuto, comedian Bill O’Reilly, and Wolf Blitzer a whoring chance to sway public opinion to wage an imperial, conventional war against a loosely organized network of guerrilla fundamentalists.

Waging Conventional War Is Good for Re-elections

Bush desperately needed to increase his plummeting popularity score after the Supreme Court appointed him to the presidency by overturning the 2001 election. He could only win a second term in office if he initiated a major war against a well defined country. Iraq was a ripe target with an army impoverished by decades of sanctions. US history shows that no president has lost a second term election after declaring a war in the first term. Now the same scenario plays out for opportunist, citizen McCain who playfully sings his own song, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

This is how the American industrial military complex works. It’s become a cookie cutter process for presidents since the Mexican American War when the Thornton Skirmish arose between the U.S. and Mexican militaries, handing President Polk a justification of war against Mexico in 1846. The sinking of the USS Maine gave Teddy Roosevelt a trumped up reason for the Spanish American War just as the Tokin incidenthelped justify the Vietnam War.

This is how the American industrial military complex has operated at least since the Mexican American War (1846). President Eisenhower knew this and warned us about it. However, at the slightest incident, the unschooled masses repeatedly jump on the bandwagon for nationalistic pride, all too willing to take a blind patriotic ride to hell while all the way handing the pillaged profits to the robber barons of war. Is there a cure for the American middle class’s credulity?

Well, everyone could turn off the boob tube and read some books other than the Bible. In France and Germany, they’ve developed a remedy to some extent. It’s called a damn good secular public education system, one that does not muddle science and reason with religious poppycock like creationism, End Days, and all the hooey about holy lands.

Guerrilla Warriors, Not Iraqi Armies

There’s a little problem, though. The groups--groups plural--that perpetrate terrorist activities in the name of Allah are non-conventional warriors. They harbor loyalty to no sovereign nation but to a fundamentalist creed similar to White Supremists or the 700 Club. The US military could never bomb the terrorist groups involved in attacking US and European cities. The US could never invade any one country and expect its leaders to surrender and end the “war on terrorism.”

If attacking any main source of the trouble makers would solve the problem, then they would have to bomb Saudi Arabia because 15 of the 19 terrorists were born, raised, and indoctrinated there. The Devine Decider didn’t invade Saudi Arabia for the simple reason that, unlike Saddam Hussein, the royal family of Saud are long term allies and reliable petroleum suppliers since Franklin Roosevelt made the deal with King Saud in 1945, essentially saying, “We’ll support and protect your tyrannical monarchy so long as you deliver the crude.” It seemed like a good deal at the time, but times change.

The American industrial military complex makes less money in the labor intensive guerrilla wars than they do in wars that require sophisticated, manufactured weaponry. It’s basic business strategy to maintain high profits—to hell with the reasons or the outcomes of the war. Defense contractors earn much smaller profits in guerrilla warfare which requires labor intensive work in urban settings with ears to the ground. In his books, Robert Baer makes this a central argument. Using bombers, sophisticated equipment, missiles,...it's the only thing that makes business sense.

The guerrilla war we face has no one leader, no one country, no standing army. Our enemies in this so-called war on terrorism do not wear uniforms. They are guerrilla warriors who use any means possible to harm their enemies. They use bombs, booby traps, and hijacked airliners because they have neither conventional weapons nor armies. They made this point abundantly clear when they bombed the World Trade Center’s basement in 1993, not to mention earlier bombings of American assets in many places like Tanzania and the Congo.

Any one with a pulse could understand this as early as 1983, when a terrorist cell blew up the US Marine barracks in Lebanon. Likewise most intelligence agents operating in the Middle East knew that a persistent, organized movement of Islamist guerrilla fighters bombed the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. In his many books on the subject Robert Baer describes how he tracked militant Islamists. They had been a well known enemy decades before 9/11/2001.

Bush Jr. would have us believe that these guerrilla warriors hate America and its freedom. He never bothers to consider the simple economic situation in which only the small royal families control the opulent oil wealth in most Arab countries and they do not give a fig to diversify their own economies and develop their own people.

Unemployment (over 35% in Saudi Arabia) and poverty enrage Muslims. Fanatical anti-American religious training helps to set an unemployed, hungry, angry, idle man down a path to murder and mayhem, as was the case for Mohammed Atta and others. Most any religious group provides this sort of narrow education. Just watch Pat Robertson on his evangelical TV show, the 700 Club, or visit one of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Universities to witness how the later day church of neocons indoctrinate our own credulous youth.

Among Bush’s many mutating reasons for invading Iraq, he finally claimed that it was America’s moral duty to create a democracy throughout the Middle East. For a year or two around 2003, he had most American yahoos believing this. It is another part of the neocon catechism.

Another one of Friedman’s mind boggling theories is that once a country’s economy begins to operate in a capitalistic fashion, it will inevitably become a democracy. Likewise, so the theory goes, if a country becomes democratic, it naturally seeks to implement a liberal capitalism. Neither has proven true in the real world. As a totalitarian regime, China thrives on capitalism. We buy products from totalitarian capitalist China because their regime encourages, nay, enforces, sweatshop labor. It's why US corporations outsource American jobs; labor is cheaper in authoritarian regimes.

Contrary to Pope Friedman’s crack-pot ideas, once given the vote for a democratic government, several countries have recently voted against democracy in favor of theocracy, Islamist regimes like Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or President Gull in Turkey who has an Islamist background. Like the Catholic dominated politics in most of South America, many Islamic countries are theocracies.

Given the theocratic proclivities of President Bush, he too would like to see America governed by some inerrant, one and only Biblical interpretation and not by its Constitution. "We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God," --As quoted in Understanding the President and his God

Guerrilla warfare is messy and much more difficult to win than invading a crumbling nation. For this reason it never benefits individuals like Bush who intend to expand their personal, political, and financial success at the detriment of national security and economic stability.

As we learned in our own War of Independence and, likewise in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare is extremely messy, costly, and bloody. Contrary to Rumsfeld’s infamous statement that “democracy is messy,” it is the insurgency and the guerrilla fighters that clog the wheels of industry. The Russians learned this when they invaded Afghanistan and it cost them the collapse of their already frail economy. And these schmoes would have us believe that Reagan caused the fall of the Soviet Union.

Conspiracy Theories

2008-07-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

The media, TV journalists in particular, continue to leave some important questions lying dormant beneath the dusty cover of “conspiracy theory.” Why did W decide to invade Iraq while 15 of the 19 terrorists of 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia? Why is Saudi Arabia a cradle for such terrorists?

Years ago, when W still had some credibility, he and his Roving gang could ridicule anyone who spoke against his actions. Whenever brave souls dared to question the Divine Decider, he and his cronies dismissed the dissenters as nutcase conspiracy theorists. And they continue to do so even after the Iraq War has officially run its miserable course to disastrous guerrilla warfare and our economy whimpers.

UFOs

Back in September 2004, Senator Bob Graham, (Florida Democrat) a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the Divine Decider of covering up evidence that might have linked Saudi Arabia to the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Graham made the accusation in his book, Intelligence Matters, and repeated it at news conferences. Republicans called the accusations "bizarre conspiracy theories," and Saudi officials said they were unsubstantiated and reckless.

In his highly informative book, House of Bush, House of Saud, , Craig Unger criticizes the Bush administration for allowing so many Saudis, including the relatives of bin Laden, to leave the country quickly, while all other flights were grounded, without being questioned about the terrorist attacks. Unger cites FBI and Police agents as witnesses.

In his book, Saudi Arabia Exposed, John Bradley, who lived and worked as a journalist in Saudi Arabia, interviews several bin Laden relatives who rode on the very same plans that the FBI and the White House deny ever existed.

These UFO’s, such as the small LearJet 35 from TIA, among others, that flew bin Laden relatives and Saud family members from the USA quickly on 9/14, represent just the tip of an iceberg of cover ups that conceal the special treatment for the Royal family of Saud.

Money Walks

Once upon a time there was a Prince Naif bin Fawwaz Al-Shalaan, with a diplomatic passport and a family Boeing 747, who transported cocaine often from Columbia to France. DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) Agent Raffanello says some of the drug profits have been used to fund terrorism. The Prince transported up to two tons of cocaine. In order to shake the charges against him, he threatened French business interests of cancelling huge defense deals in an effort to persuade the authorities to drop the investigation. The Saudi Royal Family united to help their Prince out of the jam. Case closed.

Yes, Saudi Royalty is above the law. They are the law. After all they control trillions in petrol-dollars. Any surprise that they are close friends with Bush Sr. and Jr.? The family dynasties are joined at the wallet in oil interests.

Once upon another time there was a Prince Turki bin Nasser, the Royal Saud family's principal contact with the British defense industry, who allegedly received about $32 million worth of luxury benefits paid for by BAE Systems, the largest British defense contractor. British authorities opened a case of serious fraud against the Prince. To pressure the British into dropping all charges, Saud Royalty threatened to cancel billions of dollars in defense deals for combat aircraft. Case closed.

Many other cases haunt the halls of the Saud family palaces.

In London police arrested a 41-year old Saudi, close friend of Saud Royalty, for sexual assault against an 11-year old girl. London police were forced to release the man who claimed diplomatic immunity. The Royal family of Saud supported his return to Saudi Arabia and complained that the London media was putting him on trial, not the courts. Saudi authorities would not allow police to question the man further. Case closed.

Back in Riyadh, the Saudi government owns the media and uses it to smear any and all opposition.

Justice for All

For the regular guy on the street, apart from soccer matches, the only form of public entertainment is a beheading. If you ever vacation in Saudi Arabia, you’ll learn to recognize this occasional diversion by the way people leave their cars parked chockablock in the streets near a city’s chop-chop square where authorities carry out the executions. Of course, members of Saudi Royalty are virtually exempt from this system.

In partnership with the Saud Royalty, Wahhabi fundamentalists run the justice system. The country still applies a strict form of Shariah law, which includes public beheadings for, among other offenses, murder, drug trafficking, apostasy, rape, and adultery—and occasionally thieves’ hands are amputated. More than 50 beheadings take place per year...in a country the size and population of Texas.

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency reported that crime among young jobless Saudis rose 320 percent between 1990 and 1996 and more than 136 percent by 2005.

Slums such as Kerantina in Jeddah and Al-Suwaidi, a southern district in Riyadh, are two of many homes to prostitutes, drug traffickers, and booze peddlers among the poor and destitute. The gap between the haves and have-nots has grown at least as fast as the population. Unemployment rises above 35 percent.

Terrorist Incubators

As these slums grow, so too the pressure for the young and unemployed to seek retribution for the inequality and hopelessness. The slums, like the provincial countryside of tribal villages, have predictably become fertile breeding grounds for Islamic radicalism and perfect for guerilla warfare.

These slums provide little sources of culture, education or entertainment other than drugs or the fundamentalist Wahhabi schools where young men receive their Islamist indoctrination. Many documented terrorists graduate from hard-line radical schools such as Imam Mohamed Bin Saud University. They learn to hate the West for many reasons, including supporting the tyrannical monarchy which hordes the petro-dollars. Resentment grows naturally against the Saudi government because its inequality, arrogance, and greed is rubbed in the faces of the poor every day. Hatred for the West arises from a natural logic that the Royal family of Saud exercises its abusive power because the West supports them as reliable suppliers of America's most intoxicating drug. Meanwhile Big Oil uses its financial power to maintain status quo, restraining alternative and cleaner sources of energy.

The combination of radical Islamic doctrine, hatred of the West, poverty, and a perceived pro-Western ruling elite has created a schizophrenic monster in the very heart of the country. This combination delivers a powerful recruitment tool that the likes of Al-Qaeda could only pray for.

And for some reason, we were led to believe that 9/11 was only about an irrational religious war.

Publisher's News Wire: Mojave Winds

2008-07-23T07:51:00.000-07:00

Publishers News Wire
Mark Biskeborn's New Book Concerns Difficulties Faced by Iraq Veterans

Published: Thu, 21 Feb 2008, 11:57 EDT
By Angela Polchat Staff Writer, Publishers Newswire

IRVINE, Calif. -- Mojave Winds, (ISBN: 978-0-9801383-0-6), a novel by Mark Biskeborn, highlights the growing social impact on Iraq War veterans returning home, and their struggles to reintegrate to the civilian world.

The recent book by author, Mark Biskeborn, "Mojave Winds," has been met with wide acceptance, attracting a great deal of attention with its controversial storyline:

A combat veteran returns from the Iraq War, struggles to readapt to normal life, only to find conflict in the United States as well.

The new Stop-Loss law imposes unprecedented hardships on soldiers now. The prolonged combat missions increase tensions complicating soldiers' return to daily life- post-traumatic-stress, divorce, child custody, financial dread, and unemployment. These and other calamities unravel soldiers' nerves when they finally do get to come home. This book demonstrates the public concern over what happens when trained warriors show up on the streets.

With the flare-ups of domestic terrorism within U.S. borders, this book also reminds readers that the battles have now made their way to the United States as well. Fighting the enemy 'over there,' does not exclude fighting them here.

In the past two weeks, over 20,000 new visitors have flooded the author's website, http://www.markbiskeborn.com. This includes his online blog discussing the issues facing soldiers on extended missions. The impact of these American policies has received a sudden influx of new public attention. Traffic has also spiked from searches relating to the calamities of prolonged military tours of duty and concern for domestic terrorism.

The rapid spread of interest in Mojave Winds has been felt in the publishing world as well. The book was selected as a feature for the Southern California Writers Conference held in San Diego this past weekend. The prestigious International Thriller Writers conference in New York will feature Mojave Winds (thrillerwriters.org). The Writers Digest newsletter also features Mojave Winds (writersdigest.com) as the author will attend the Writers' Digest conference in L.A., 28 May.

The author, Mark Biskeborn, has been a contributing author for several blogs, especially The Smirking Chimp, and has received a swarm of letters and comments from his regular weekly writings. Mark is currently scheduled to appear at the International Thriller Writers Conference and the Maui Writers Conference this year. Amazon Shorts has featured several of his short stories recently.

As a result of Mojave Winds unprecedented sales success and rapidly growing popularity, several mainstream publishing houses are considering author Mark Biskeborn while he works to complete his next novel.

Mojave Winds is now available through Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and many other booksellers, as well as the Author's own site.

The current state of affairs and the highly volatile political discussion concerning the legality of the Stop-Loss policy, the calamities that returning U.S. veterans now face, and the concerns over domestic terrorism continue to fuel public interest in the book. While the book is considered fiction, many of the issues discussed in its chapters are anchored in current affairs in the U.S. and world news events.

About Mojave Winds and Mark Biskeborn:

Mojave Winds, a novel by author Mark Biskeborn, depicts the difficulties protagonist Kris Klug faces; a returning Iraq War veteran, he struggles to integrate back into the civilian world. He suffers from flashbacks from his war experience, the drastic difference in civilian life, and the effects of post-traumatic stress. He also is shocked to discover that the war has followed him back home to the U.S., as a series of events puts him in the cross hairs of domestic terrorism. Despite the high-tension stakes, with an Islamist gang at his heels, he meets a classical dancer, Sheila, whom he finds especially intriguing while crossing the Mojave to Las Vegas.

The author is a long time resident of California, and has also lived and worked many years abroad. He has contributed many non-fiction articles, essays, and book reviews to magazine publications and blogs. He also has had several short stories featured recently on Amazon Shorts. He is now completing a sequel novel, Follow the Sufi's Ghost, for release in winter, 2008.

For more information on the book or the author, or to order online, visit http://www.markbiskeborn.com or call 949-293-2016.

Why Iraq and Not Saudi Arabia?

2008-06-18T20:49:00.000-07:00

Bush insisted on invading Iraq, trumping up claims about its alleged WMD's, connection to al Qaeda, dictator...although…15 of the 19 terrorists of 9/11 were Saudis, rebellious against the tyrannical monarchy protected by the US.

“Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” means a lot of things to a lot of people. Literally it means that the Al-Saud family owns the country and its residents are their vassals. The Royal Saud family rules “Saudi Arabia” mostly by force.

Nevertheless its ministry of communications attempts to present the kingdom as a country of peace and harmony. If this were true, how could 15 of the 19 terrorists of the 9/11 attack come from the kingdom?

After World War I, at the Cairo Conference of 1921, the British rewarded Sherif Hussein, naming one of his sons, Faisal, king of Iraq, and another, Abdullah, ruler of modern-day Jordan—both countries, like most in the Middle East, were imperial inventions whose borders were sketched in the sand. The winners of WWI carved up the Ottoman Empire into the modern Middle Eastern countries we know today and they assigned rulers who seemed cooperative.

The British also backed Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi followers because he seemed most capable to pacify rival tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, especially since he had already regained control of Riyadh after a final power struggle against Al Rashid in 1902. Thus the Saud family gained royal power to rule what became the Saudi Arabia we know today.

In 1945, US President Franklin Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud to negotiate an important oil deal in which the US would back the Saud dynasty by providing military support in exchange for a reliable supply of crude. It seemed like a good deal at the time.

Shady Partners
To this day, the US continues a similar policy in the Middle East: support a ruler in order to maintain a dependable trading partner, regardless of how that leader rules his country—monarch, tyrant, dictator, or popular nice guy. Few, if any, beloved leaders have yet to arise in the oil rich land of the Levant. Thrust into Iraqi power mainly by the US in the early 1970’s, Saddam Hussein eventually turned his back on his Yankee supporters and nationalized the Western-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company. Well, you know what happened to him—the good’ol boy gone maverick finished at the end of a rope.

Only in the post-9/11 period do we begin to question this sordid history of propping up compliant governments to satisfy our needs for petroleum and its profits. Eventually we, Western oil consumers, will have to admit at least partial blame for the terrorism that now plagues us.

The imperial support we provide to dictators, tyrants, and kings contradicts our own ideals of free trade democracy. Now, as we miserably attempt to reclaim control of Iraq, we find that our own freewheeling democracy comes under question, what with our undeniable oil interests in the country we invaded for all the most ridiculous reasons.

As far as our oil supplying countries go, we only play lip service to democracy as a marketing ploy to justify our on-going neo-colonial holds on reliable oil traders. This has been our implicit policy since 1945.

When Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud, this “scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” policy made sense. Back then, the Levant was a tribal frontier and the United States a new born industrial powerhouse. Things changed in the half century since then.

The United States grew into a global empire. Its strongest power brokers became the international petroleum oligarchs we know today; these few companies enjoy the highest levels of profits in all of human history and are fully entrenched in the status quo of oil as our source of energy, albeit an obsolete technology considering Global Warming and the current Petroleum conflicts.

Thus the West became blindly addicted to fossil fuels and never bothered to develop alternative fuels over the decades. This poses a huge pressure on the oil suppliers of the Levant.

In many ways similar to Iran and Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, the Saud Royal family garnered enormous wealth over the decades while all but ignoring the development of the people in their tribal frontiers. This imbalance intensified resentment between the Royalty and the various tribes, the vassals of the kingdom.

Theocratic Tyrants
The Royal family owns the powerful army and Crown Prince Abdullah heads the elite National Guard, made up of young men drawn from the various ranks of the Bedu (Bedouin), tribes, and official Wahhabi establishment. The Wahhabists, the extremely conservative, fundamentalist Islamic sect, owns the moral and judicial power to control the people’s behavior, how they think, dress, eat, drink, and, well, every other detail.

To this day, the Al-Saud family rules in partnership with the direct descendants of Abdul Wahhab, known as the Al-Asheikh family.

“The Al-Saud princes hold all the key government posts. Members of the Al-Asheikh family hold the key positions in the religious establishment and are responsible for enforcing Islamic orthodoxy on the streets by intimidating people by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” says John R. Bradley in his book Saudi Arabia Exposed.

People fear and revile this “religious police” for its Stasi style of wide reaching and nefarious attacks, its members drawn from lower classes who resent the freedoms and ease of the wealthy.

Things that us westerners consider a birthright such as dissent on the issues of religious belief, are out of the question and punishable by public beheading. For this reason, “chop-chop square” in Riyadh is often a busy place.

Like the Al-Rashid, several tribes, their cultures, and their religious variations struggle to survive under the US backed Saudi regime.

Restless Natives
Before the Ottoman Empire fell (WWI), several ancient tribes called the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia) their home. “But the Hijazis in the West, the Asiris in the south, and the Shiites in the east did all suffer massacres, witness their Islamic monuments destroyed, and have their various Islamic beliefs damned as apostacy by the new official ideology: Wahhabism,” says John R. Bradley in his book, Saudi Arabia Exposed.

Although all were eventually cowered into submission, many of these diverse people Ibn Saud finally ruled over were not originally Wahhabis. Indeed, many members of these tribes still resent and resist Wahhabism, while Al-Saud bought or promised or compelled the loyalty of others under threat of beheading. These tribes have always fiercely resisted the Wahhabi-Al-Saud tyranny which arose from the central region of Al-Najd.

Shiites make a majority in the Eastern Province on the oil rich Gulf. The Saudi regime has impoverished, often harshly oppressed, and at times massacred them (not unlike Saddam Hussein’s Kurd massacres using gas and helicopters supplied by the US).

The Hijaz is home of the House of Hashem, or the Hashemite tribe, descendants from the Prophet. They enjoyed considerable autonomy and a belief in Sufism, the mystical Islamic belief system based on the idea that love is projection of the essence of God to the universe. This greatly contrasts from the Wahhabi’s strict literalistic and legalistic approach to religion.

The Asir tribes, like the liberal Hijaz and the Shiites, have always been reluctant vassals to the Al-Saud Royalty. Like the many other tribes, the Asir have never fully adopted the Wahhabi doctrine. The Asirs carry out periodic rebellions and low-level struggles to keep their regional identity alive.

The Asirs view the Al-Saud family as outsiders imposing their rule, backed by the West. They call both hypocritical: the Al-Saud Royalty for preaching piety and purity while living in opulence and the West for espousing human rights and democracy while supporting a tyrannical regime that disrespects the rights and customs of others. The hypocrisy fuels hatred for the West and local alienation from Al-Najd, the region of Wahhabism.

The governor of the Asir region, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, surprisingly admits to the crisis that the Wahhabi influence has created.

Who teaches children in orphanages and schools that Saudi Arabia is not their home, that their only home is Islam? That their future vocation is jihad?...Who convinced Saudi youth that the surest path to Heaven is to blow themselves up and take citizens, foreign residents and security officers with them? Who did this to us?

Quoted from John R. Bradley’s Saudi Arabia Exposed.

Why Terrorism?
Asir was where the 15 Saudi hijackers lived when the 9/11 attack took place. Several of the hijackers came from the same tribe and bonded there in the late 1990’s. They listened to the same radical Wahhabi sermons at the Seqeley mosque in the region’s capital. Shortly before they left Saudi Arabia for Afghan training camps, they pledged to join jihad.

At least 12 of the hijackers came from the impoverished, highly tribal parts of Hijaz and Asir. Like most young Saudis, well educated or not, but almost all unemployed, oppressed, and impoverished, they imbued the anit-West and anti-Saudi sentiment. Like them and other hard-line Islamic dissenters in the past, Osama bin Laden was always a harsh critic of the official Wahhabi religious establishment that joins forces with the Al-Saud Royalty.

The hijackers also shared bin Laden’s tribal roots. Like him, they resented the Saud Royal clan that ruled them while living a double standard and they hated the religious sheiks from the Al-Najd region who legitimatize Al-Saud while “issuing fatwas for money” as the dissident saying goes.

By attacking the US--supporters of Saud--these tribal hard-line Islamist Saudis targeted the Wahhabi-Al-Saud tyranny. The Saudi-U.S. alliance motivates the
otherwise powerless, disinherited tribe members to attack their source of disinheritance and resentment.

Since Al-Saud remains a reliable oil partner, unlike Saddam Hussein, need we wonder why the US invaded Iraq instead of the real source of the 9/11 attack?

Main Source for this article: John R. Bradley's Saudi Arabia Exposed.

Father's Day

2008-06-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

Today is more like Memorial Day. Father's Day calls my father to mind, but WWII was one of the most defining events in his life.

Just a farm boy from Nebraska, hardly 18 years old, he served in the Army's 89th Division and shipped out for the third wave of landings onto the shores of Normandy.

He saw a lot of action. Carrying a high quality German camera, he took a lot of pictures of the war. None of them pretty.

When he returned home, he had a lot of shrapnel embedded in his flesh. Many years later, when he'd started a family, contributing to the baby boom, he had to go to the VA hospital several times to take some of those pieces of metal out from under his skin as they began to resurface.

As I grew older, his experiences and stories of war fascinated me. And the shrapnel that took so many years to surface again now remain as a memory and a metaphor.

As my father advanced in age and then learned that his days were numbered, like the resurfacing shrapnel, he began to remember his combat experiences. That's when I learned a lot more. He talked about it more than ever.

Since then, I've written a novel mostly based on a character similar to my father, though, placed in our modern times and circumstances.

War is war no matter the time or the generation. Soldiers return home and try their damnedest to forget. Only the self-proclaimed gung-ho soldiers, the ones who dance around in flight suits for photo ops...only they are eager to talk of war. Eventually, combat experience comes back, haunting the soul. I remember how my father often woke up from nightmares. All his short life, he suffered from narcolepsy caused by combat.

Mojave Winds is a novel, its main character, Kris Klug, is a young man returning home, looking for job and faces calamity while readapting to the civilian world.

Mojave Winds, though, is partly a memoir about my father, despite the time that's lapsed. It's in honor to him.

Culture of Deception

2008-06-14T11:03:00.000-07:00

“My husband and I’ve thought about this next election. We realized that McCain is more than seventy years old. It’s his last chance. The other candidates are younger and have many years ahead of them. So, we’ve decided to vote for McCain.”

While driving to work, I heard a caller say this on Air Talk, the Larry Mantle radio talk show, KPCC.

Think about it. One of the best reasons to vote for McSame, right?

If this represents the way a large part of Americans reason or just gut check the issues, then the very foundation of our democracy shakes on sandy grounds. Does this murky thinking reflect the quality of our public educational system?

A crisp sunny day awakes us with a blue sky here in Southern California. The miracle of humanity begins to scurry, we hop into our cars and off to work. Busy people, we want to make the money that buys the things that we enjoy with our families. The paycheck routine seldom allows time to contemplate the big picture, or any picture at all for that matter.

The sunshine drives shards of brightness through the cracks in the curtains and roof top windows. We awake to the light, though, the more we ignore the darkness, the more we allow it to thrive. Soon darkness can take over the sky and the light fades such that we seldom ever awaken, if not only in our dreams.

The Matrix

We enter into a fabricated world, a virtual reality, like that depicted in the movie The Matrix. It’s a place we inhabit but our eyes are covered, the brain perceives images and an entire life in a society, a culture, a world, but it’s all merely a video feed plugged into the nerves at the base of our skull. We become so incapable of discerning what is real that we lose all sense of it. Our critical thinking dwindles. We drift into an existence without awareness.

The Secret Service code named Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, as the Matrix, referring to the movie by the same title. McClellan acted as the main video feed into the mainstream news channels, the one who fed the lies at the president’s requests. Bush often referred to his ol’ pal Karl Rove as “The Architect,” referring to the character in the Matrix movie as the master mind that created the enchanting delusions which people believed as reality. Karl Rove worded most of the spin that McClellan presented to the media.

Rove, the Architect, and McClellan, the Matrix…they fabricated a whole world around Bush, albeit one of intentional deceit. From Bush all the way through his entire administration, a constant marketing campaign of propaganda fed deception to the public about life and death issues, including healthcare, war, and the economy. Matrix, Architect…code words. People in organized crime like the Mafia use them to cover illegal activity.

Dispelling the Deception with a Vengeance

Once a fervent spokesman among Bush idolaters, Scott McClellan now peddles his book entitled, “What Happened.” It claims to illuminate how Bush’s public image as beer drinking, ranch hand was mere chimera. By now though, to most of us, it’s redundant to talk how the real Bush lives in his own loser’s bubble.

McClellan’s testimony as an eye witness offers one more of the volumes and volumes of solid evidence in the public courtroom. Will the justice system function as it should? Will its wheels turn and begin impeachment proceedings? The eye witness testimonies of the Bush Administration’s criminal conduct now bust the seams of the bookstores and libraries. Does the US justice system do anything?

Without the light, the colors of flowers would pale and turn their smell sour. The leaves of grass would rot. Without the light of day, truth itself becomes unrecognizable, if not entirely lost.

Can The Working Class Get Tough?

Democracy depends on the working class. We are the majority vote. Like the leaves of grass, we have to keep our feet planted on the ground and respect our
common sense, as Thomas Paine once called it. If we fail in the basics of life, we lose our footing, nothing else supports us.

Growing up on a small, remote Oregon farm, my mother could size up a sleazy politician by mere glance. Economics did not allow her to finish high school, yet, she was smart enough to tell you if the town’s Evangelical or Southern Baptist preacher was nothing but a flimflam. Her generation lived by a hard-bitten skepticism that pierced through the darkness of deception and into the light of truth.

What happened? What generation picked up the torch after that generation of America’s working class, the ones who fought in World War II and knew how disastrous war meant for everyone involved?

Was it too much TV for the baby boomers? Did the baby boomers overdose on the Pollyanna Disney characters? Hopefully the Bush years have taught the “baby boomers” and the “gen-Xers” about the consequences of political indifference. Too bad we Americans have to always learn by experience and mistakes rather than by reading a history book. The tide has turned though.

Even legions of hardcore Bush devotees have turned their backs on the con artist. Among the growing list of fall guys and disgruntled sycophants, we find high level officials, including Colin Powell, Paul O’Neil, George Tenet, Douglas Feith and so on and so on.

Like some of these authors, McClellan became a fall guy. From Bush’s Texas days, he was in it for the money and the glory. As may be the case for many baby boomers, money took a priority over any civic duty to a higher good. Only after the chips fell against him, did he rediscover his civil duty to unveil the lie. Although years late in divulging Bush’s already well documented intentional sham, McClellan has made a noble gesture by adding to the mountainous public testimony.

Even the top Israeli political officials and U.S. defense contractors, the strongest of Bush supporters, the most fervent instigators of the war and investors in Bush, have turned their backs on the now unpopular mess. When the war was popular, many prominent people were behind it. Defense contractors are still enjoying the huge profits from Bush’s propaganda.

Today, though, only those in blind darkness would support this total disaster of duplicity.

And that’s exactly where McCain and his followers are right now.

Citizen McCain Embraces Bush’s Chimera

The son of a celebrated four-star admiral, John Sidney McCain III started his Navy career as a pilot. After being shot down during a bombing mission and taken prisoner, he returned home. Thanks to a famous father, McCain enjoys many gratuities. Thanks to his father’s status, US News & World Report printed a 13 page spread, describing his ordeal as a POW.

Shortly thereafter he attained captain’s rank. His POW ordeal, more than anything else, gave him the credibility to launch his political career. He then took over his father’s old job as liaison to Congress, enabling him to hob-knob with many elected officials.

“I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else,” said Carol, McCain’s first wife, mother of his first three of seven children, when asked about the grounds for their divorce.

So, when Hagee, whose initial claim to fame derived from his right-wing family values, endorsed McCain recently, it was just another spin on reality for the sake of votes among the dreadfully gullible fundamentalist holy rollers. Any association with the wacky Hagee buys votes for McCain from the flocks of sheep that follow the zany preacher.

Shortly after his divorce, a travesty of Hagee’s view of family values, McCain found new love with a daughter of wealth, Cindy Hensley. His marriage with Cindy afforded him more gratuities, including the connections and cash needed to catapult him to a Senator seat for Arizona.

When McCain and Cindy needed to move quickly from Phoenix to Tucson, her cash made the move easy to buy a new house. McCain had to establish residence in Tucson to take the Senator slot from retiring John Rhodes. His rivals called him a carpetbagger and opportunist.

Rebutting his critics, McCain told a little story about how much he had to move around his whole life as a Navy serviceman and cited Hanoi as the city where he’d lived the longest in any one place. The symbolic reference to Hanoi recalled his claim to heroism. McCain, like the Architect, had learned how to spin a political narrative more powerful than the truth.

As a legislator, he’s not particularly effective. The McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act took torturous paths to enact. And despite this law he helped to establish, McCain’s campaign has taken huge amounts of contributions from lobbyists who expect payback in political favors.

Though again, as part of his image building, McCain participated in campaign finance reform mainly to restore his reputation after the Keating Five incident in which he, among four other senators, took huge campaign contributions.

His media acumen has proven his greatest, perhaps his only, survival skill. He has been smooth in spinning a response to suit his political needs for the moment. In 2006, Chris Matthews (MSNBC) said, “The press loves McCain. We’re his base.”

Although as McCain advances in age, his media instincts falter. He’s made many gaffs during his current campaign. Unbeknownst to him, someone cam corded him while singing about bombing Iran in some morbid sense of humor, undignified for a senator, much less a presidential candidate.

Like Bush, McCain stitched his political career in mythologies. Just as Karl Rove architected an artificial reality for G. W. Bush, he now constructs that sham magic for McCain’s campaign.

In 2004, former counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke published Against All Enemies a blistering testimony of his career in the White House under President Bush. On CNN Clarke said, “they’re saying some of the exact same things about McClellan they said about me.” Bush’s propaganda machine routinely smears any dissent or criticism.

Now that Bush is raising campaign funds for McCain, the new presidential candidate mimics Bush’s policies, making it possible for Bush to serve a third term at least vicariously.

I knew an American working class that made decisions from a tough, bitter, and skeptical gut. A carpenter could see the snake oil salesman in an Evangelical Preacher like Hagee. A plumber could smell the slimy stench of a rich kid charlatan like G.W. Bush from great distances. Now it’s time that all America’s working class wakes up and finds the light. We are the majority vote.

Book Expo America -- Market of Free Thought

2008-06-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles, CA—Most publishing professionals consider Book Expo of America the industry’s compass in trends and innovative thinking. This last weekend, the spirits of Magic Johnson, Ted Turner, Thomas Friedman, Michael Moore, and others drifted through the convention center’s halls, as the Zeitgeist of our times flashed glimpses of its elusive light.

Agents, writers, and editors roam through the aisles and rows of new books. As the publishing industry's annual showcase, it’s one of the world’s largest flea-markets of books and thought trends. The event focuses on business to business relations, not intended for general public.

Coolest of all people I met at the event was by far James Rollins, my favorite writer buddy. He told me about how he wrote the novel entitled “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” based on the latest movie.

As a journalist I meandered around hoping to shake hands with the Zeitgeist, peer into its eyes, and listen as it whispered secrets to me. Things didn’t turn out quite like that though.

Not following any plan, I first stumbled onto the guys at the Bowker booth. They told me that books sales have dropped, whereas in Europe, people buy more than twice the number of books compared to the USA.

Here in the USA, we might complain about the disappearing small corner bookstore and the rise of the corporate sellers. Don’t gripe too loud. You take a trip down to South America, you’ll discover that there’s a brisk pirated book industry where few respect copyright laws. So you can buy a DVD or a book for pocket change on the street, though selection is extremely limited. As a consequence you’ll find hardly a bookstore in Lima or Bogota. Stores can’t pay their expenses if the market goes underground.

That may explain partly why some countries remain in the third world. In South America, the main source of culture and ideas remains the Catholic Church, keeping a lid on truth and freedom with a dogma that includes “subdue the earth and multiply.” The old religions want us to ignore the dire issue of over-population and their lack of science in education, or secular education at all. The healthier the market for ideas and free expression, the stronger, more innovative goes the culture. Book Expo America thrives on new ideas.

A theme of innovation cropped up in Thomas Friedman’s hour long pitch for his new book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.” Friedman demands a Green revolution in the USA. He warns us about the exponential population growth rate and its ecological impact on our planet. Nothing in his speech was new or revolutionary. I can remember reading about all these issues in high school from books like “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler.

What’s new about Friedman’s passionate voice in the wilderness is that it now echoes through the otherwise empty channels of mainstream media. Despite the Bush Administration’s attempts to completely squelch ecology, Al Gore brought it back front and center. We can applaud Friedman for hopping on this band wagon. Though, in many ways, I sense that Friedman has sipped too much of the right-wing Cool Aid.

In his speech, Friedman warned us against the USA’s dependence on foreign oil and its despot barons. Among such petroleum tyrants, Friedman only mentioned Chavez and Iran. He didn’t mention a whole host of monopolistic practices among oil corporations, not a word about the American automobile industry’s complete resistance to new technology. His approach to revolution would make Mickey Mouse look aggressive.

Friedman’s lack of depth and of full disclosure begs the question if he’s siding with the Neoconservatives in their love affair with dictators like the Saudi royalty. I suppose he has to muffle his tone in order to sell more books. But to make the Green revolution happen, we’ll need radical and immediate shake-up of the corrupt energy, defense, and transportation industries. His version of Revolution lacks leadership and any real critical view for change to occur. Without sharp teeth, at least in innovative, creative, critical thinking, his so-called revolution will gain the momentum of frozen yoghurt. I left Friedman’s speech wondering if he’s also joined in the search for WMD’s in Iraq…and now in Syria and Iran.

As a self-proclaimed trend-spotter, Book Expo of America’s choice of Thomas Friedman was a let-down, like casting Mayberry’s Barney Fife in the role of Rambo. The survival of the planet is at stake, hey, let’s call on Donald Duck.

Speaking of third world dictatorships, China, one of the world's fastest-growing populaters and polluters, was the subject of a five-hour seminar. About 750 officials from China and other Asian countries attended, the highest ever at BookExpo.

Virtually every major publisher, from Amazon, with its Kindle ebook, to Random House, announced environmental plans, mostly through the increased use of recycled paper and fiber from forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international environmental organization.

Alas, Book Expo management has yet to walk their talk. The event and the program guides added up to more than 10 million pages, none on recycled paper.

Aside from saving the planet, increasing income remained at the top of publishers’ priority list. "I expect the usual jockeying for possession of `The Next Big Book,' since there are no clear candidates," says Steve Ross, publisher of the Collins division of HarperCollins.

I wanted to blurt out and tell him about my own new novel, “Mojave Winds,” as the obvious choice, but I succeeded in containing myself.

Celebrities always seem to hype up book sales by virtue of their profile. Alec Baldwin, promoted his new book on parenthood. Other speakers this weekend included media mogul Ted Turner, whose new book, entitled “Call Me Ted,” resonates as if he’ll have a beer with us in some gesture of American democracy and egalitarianism. He wants everyone to think of him as “Captain Planet,” a clever marketing position, considering how his boob-tube programs like CNN cower down to commercial sponsors when reporting tainted truth.

Strolling around aimlessly, I also met Federal Public Defender Steven Wax, author of “Kafka Comes to America.” I’ve had time to read only the first chapter. It’s enough to see that Wax’s office works harder than any lawyers to exposing the truth about prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Wax delivers a harrowing story of the erosion of civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks in a powerful account that reads like a thriller.

Steven Wax and I talked briefly about how so many Americans seem to remain apathetic even during a war waged on the whim of a rich kid who wants to prove he’s a better Texan than his father. Wax offered no answer to the enigma and offered less to say about how most of America’s popular fiction is based on escapism. Is it the publishing industry that nurtures a culture of lethargy? Or does the droopiness of the American mind demand what it deserves? In all fairness, I suppose my questions were a little loaded.

Novelist Michael Connelly hosted a fabulous cocktail party. I was honored to shake his hand. He explained how he found inspiration for his stories and characters, not so much from books but from the lively conversations with criminal lawyers and LAPD detectives. His soon to be released crime mystery entitled “The Brass Verdict” delivers a smooth read. His story telling skills inspire many novelists to raise the bar.

Memorial Day Celebration

2008-05-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

One thing you can count on, the department stores offer special sales. But if you’re going to visit the VA Hospital, leave your expectations in the car.

(This piece was also posted on Huffington Post.)

Los Angeles, CA-- Smoke rises up in the neighborhood. Aromas of steaks on flaming gills perfume the air. The sounds of kids running around, laughing, playing, remind you of Memorial Day. Families get together. Guys drink beer and chat. Women talk about family and fashions. People go to the movies and talk about their goals. Memorial Day is all about these things.

Well, unless you’re remembering. And this might mean that you’ve resisted forgetting. A little something might chafe there, in the back of your mind. It’s so easy to forget. It’s healthy to avoid harmful, bad, ugly things.

What could be worse than war’s flesh ripping, bone smashing carnage?

This Memorial Day weekend I went to visit the wounded, the dying at the Veterans’ Hospital on Wilshire Boulevard. If you’re looking for it; it’s just where Wilshire passes under the 405, a huge complex of buildings, packed with broken, tired veterans from old wars like Korea or Vietnam and new ones, like Afghanistan and Iraq. Among the many large buildings, veterans from different wars are scattered and placed in wards depending on their wounds. Very few remain of World War II, and if you meet any of them, even fewer care to talk about it.

Even though I’ve been around veterans all my life, my naïve expectations were many about this complex of so many buildings. I had an agenda…and even an ulterior motive. I wanted to pass my new novel, Mojave Winds, to as many wounded soldiers from Iraq or Afghanistan as I could find. Today though, most of the staff took the day off to celebrate Memorial Day. So it became a challenge to find the wave of young, wounded soldiers from this new war. I had expected legions of visitors coming here today.

I envisioned hoards of those pious, religious folks here, especially those fundamentalists leaders who preach about how important staying the course is…and the surge…the surge. Maybe large groups of Jews, or Evangelicals, or Catholics, maybe Baptists… For some reason I expected them to come here in bus loads on Memorial Day to sacrifice their time, provide some comfort for these wounded men.

Roaming through the halls, I stumbled through a couple of doors opened to rooms. Young guys were lying in bed. Brian is 27 years old. He’s been here for months. Two years ago, he returned from Iraq with some strange disease that took hold of his body. Maybe it was the water. He’s lost a lot of weight. When I gave him a copy of my book, he formed a smile, though it didn’t last long. I stayed a while and watched the news on TV with him.

No cheerful faces, no energetic young guys, ready take on life, eager to embrace the future. Instead I learned things from them. When going to a VA Hospital, it’s best to readjust your sense of time. Slow down. No one is going anywhere fast. Living in a healthy, civilian life, you might have goals, schedules, and plans. Here, a lot of the guys take it one day at a time.

In a nearby room, Don was sitting on the side of his bed, trying to think about standing up. I sat in a chair. Together we watched the news on the TV for a while. Doubting that he had the strength to read a book, I didn’t dare offer him mine. In addition to the physical wounds, loneliness can weight heavy everywhere, in the air, in these gloomy rooms, out into the halls. As I walked out to the parking lot, I think of how each one of those guys could have been me. I could be one of them.

Then the twisted poetic metaphor came to mind, something about a “smoking gun turning into a mushroom cloud.” Was that all it took to get an entire nation of pious believers riled up for this crusade, a war that makes so many an anointed political leader and CEO extremely wealthy? Those who never carry a gun into battle all too often enjoy the luxury of making war a romantic and lucrative enterprise.

On Memorial Day, we might also remember the greatest of all Infidels to all religions, Walt Whitman, who visited the maimed, the mutilated, and lay down next to the dying.

But aside from these and the marts of wealth and the crowded promenade,

Admitting around me comrades close unseen by the rest and voiceless,

The slain elate and alive again, the dust and debris alive,

I chant this chant of my silent soul in the name of all dead soldiers.

Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain,

That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew,

For the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North.

If you find the courage to visit the veterans, the wounded, my advice is to go without any expectations. I believed that by giving out my new novel I would help them to take their minds off their pain, their confinement. I learned, though, that just being there, the presence of another human being is sufficient to help the wounded to remember what it’s like to be whole and healthy. This is their Day to Remember that. You become the simple example of hope for their goal…to get out and join the rest of us in every day life.

Starstruck Cafe

2008-05-23T07:24:00.001-07:00

A legal drug in America can wake us up and cure our delusions.

Venice Beach, CA -- This early in the morning only the seagulls keep me company. The air still holds sea mist. This coffee shop opens at daybreak. Though, nobody shows up until the seagulls have eaten up all the crumbs left on the street from the Saturday night pizza and beer parties.

Soon the regulars will arrive. The first of them is a lady who scoots around in a wheelchair, whispering to herself and asking for spare change so she can buy a cup of Starbuck’s strategically revived Pike’s Peek brand. Past her prime, she seems to use the wheelchair to keep her increasing weight off her feet. What she may not realize, though, the more she uses her wheelchair, the heavier she’ll become and eventually bound to it, entrapped by her own convenience.

I suppose other reasons motivate her self-imposed slow ride into captivity. Wheeling around like that might make the charitable more inclined to hand her their spare change. She rolls into this coffee shop and out again at regular intervals, at least once every half hour. Passers-by rush to help her maneuver through the door, but they’re not regulars here. They haven’t seen her walking around on her own two feet, and they don’t know that she’s probably fallen into that habit just to attract attention. Her eyes flash like bright neon lights saying, “I’m lonely. Pay attention.”

That might also serve as a great sign for the bar down the street,”The Galley” one of Charles Bukowski’s old haunts. The heavy drinkers become who they are in noble attempts to escape their troubles. Not knowing that by drinking more heavily, it only gets worse. Eventually they, too, become bound to their own mental prisons. At the break of dawn, I ask a woman, sitting on a bench why she’s crying.

“I spent my whole week’s wages on booze,” she sobs. “I drank all night.”

By the time the wheelchair lady, no, I won’t tell you her name and, yes, I talk to her, has made enough to buy what Starbucks calls a coffee, the younger local Yuppie types show up. They were out at their usual pizza parties last night, blowing out on beer and pepperoni. Blow-out…a term Martin Amis uses in his novel “Money,” about how bad habits can ruin the best of us. I remember it from years ago. The term fits for how these young, college educated office workers toss off the frustrations of working in cube farms and for bosses who want to optimize returns on their backs. I know. You’re thinking that the term yuppie is so dated. Like, dude, who says that anymore?

Well, it just seems fitting. The “new” line of Yuppies, the Generation Xers or the Generation Yers. Their differences are only nuances apart, just a tattoo, video game, and a skateboard apart. Labels like these are useful mostly for marketing departments for consumer goods. The comfort zones apply from one generation to the next. You get stuck in a routine, you imprison yourself. You let your mind think the same way for too long, it’ll handicap you. Make you wheelchair bound, mentally or physically or both.

That’s the message I received this weekend. The nice thing about going to the movies in a city like LA, you get to step out of the same ‘ol same ‘ol of American movies. You know, the movies produced first from the perspective of careful psychographic and demographic research, the ones that break down the needs of market niches, like the Generation X, or Y… Independent movies, especially the European variety, tend to break those static rules taught in business schools. A good story is often the one that helps to break us out of our own comfort zones. They help us to see the world in new eyes.

“Reprise” is a chic flick with hip looking 20-something Norwegians who grew up in Oslo, hang out with the same circle of friends and maintain the same sort of dependencies in their comfortable relationships. Two or three of these buddies become famous for their first novels. It’s not until one of them discovers that, by going to a foreign country, he’s able to break out of the rut. This dissolves the old comfort zones through his old circle of friends. It shakes things up. His closest friend even learns to love a woman when she snips his mental chains by finally telling him, “Stop.”

“Roman de Gare”is a cool French movie. None of the fast action, flying in the sky comic book adventure as, say, “Iron Man”, but it does offer glimpses of human warmth and relationships, some that grow and thrive, others that whither. It’s only when the protagonist realizes he’s not the man everyone taught him to be that he discovers his own life and identity by stepping out of trails he’d beaten down throughout his life. A woman of a most unlikely occupation helps him to change his eye glasses and so too his perspectives.

In a similar story of recent American history, our anointed religious and saintly political leaders tend to want us to stay the course. From one miserably failed President to McCain, they want us to keep doing the same thing while expecting new results. Human spirit isn’t made for this type of mental absurdity and living, though. We naturally follow an instinct to break away from delusions once unveiled. It’s in our genetics. Drinking new brands of coffee is necessary for our survival.

Bush Visits His Only Friends

2008-05-16T14:03:00.001-07:00

The Bush Administration celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Israeli nation this week.

W visited the one or two places in the Middle East where the entire population would not massively attempt to undo him. Israelis are the only people to give W a standing ovation, moving our grossly failed president to tears. It’s the only country where he feels welcome. Well, except maybe the US military during his usual speeches, but the soldiers are always on orders to stand.

In 1947, the United Nations approved the partition of the Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Arab League rejected the plan, but on May 14, 1948, the Jewish provisional government declared Israel's independence. Israel thus became the first Jewish state in the world, now with a population of just under 8 million. It’s about the size of greater Los Angeles and 85% Jewish.

Since the UN recognized this new nation, especially after the 1948 Israeli-Arab War, Israelis have pushed their borders east into Muslim territories. Israeli expansion has enflamed decades long fighting between Jews and Muslims with no resolution in sight. Emphasis on the differences in their religions has continually ignited hate on both sides of the battles.

Neither side is innocent in this ongoing war between Jews and Muslims. Despite the holy image of Israel that once warmed the hearts of many Americans, war has stained the saintly Israeli aura.

Israel remains the preeminent military power in the Middle East. It has nuclear weapons, strong conventional forces and the capability to strike at will, as it did in September when it destroyed what it believed to be a Syrian nuclear facility.

Last year, Israel signed a 10-year, $30 billion arms deal with Washington aimed at keeping that edge for years to come.

Given Israel’s massive military capabilities, is it any surprise that Iran does everything it can to protect itself? Once a close ally with the US, Iran is now forming alliances with China and Russia for its oil and weapons exchanges.

Given Israel’s US support and military might, is it really any surprise that Palestinians resort to terrorist reprisals and other such guerrilla war tactics? Of course, terrorism and guerrilla warfare is unacceptable, as should be all types of war. Yet, let’s also keep in mind that Israelis have not been innocent of their share of terrorist reprisals either.

For the US to grant Israel complete unconditional love is to take sides with one party in a war that has no innocent perpetrators.

Israelis roll out the red carpet for Bush mainly because W and his old neocon war mongers have loved Israel unconditionally...and waged war for them. Israel enjoys all the benefits as if the 51st US State and without the tax bill for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Many experts on Middle Eastern affairs have shown convincing evidence that W pushed the invasion and occupation of Iraq solely to serve Israeli interests to fortify its power in the region. As a fundamentalist Christian, Bush believes in the second coming of Jesus and, so prepares for Armageddon.

This means that neither oil or freedom or anything else motivated W more in his personal war against Iraq than religious ideology.

It was about the religious fervor that stirs the hearts of neocons like Bush, and now McCain who has gained endorsements and support from Israeli enthusiasts like Pastor Hagee and Preacher Pat Robertson. Those religious fanatics beguile the blind following of large swaths of gullible, uneducated American voters.

It stands to reason that without the interest in oil wealth of the region, the US would not support a war in those deserts for the sole sake of ousting a dictator. If this were the case, the US could easily invade North Korea, or China, or Zimbabwe…ruthless dictators run all of these and other countries.

When W first came to power, Israeli leaders like Sharon and now Olmert had long since urged the neocon fundamentalists in the US to invade and occupy Iraq and Iran. This has been the Likud's agenda for decades. Likud has in the past espoused hawkish policies towards the Palestinians, including opposition to Palestinian statehood and support of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Many prominent Israelis adhere to these goals, including Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is so publicly documented no references are needed, except for those in denial.

The bitter pill of Bush’s complete failure as a President, though, comes from how these Israeli leaders now voice disappointment in the US invasion of Iraq. Did I say “bitter?” Bush served the Israeli leaders faithfully like a choirboy serves the Catholic priest, in orthodox and unorthodox manners, bending over, assuming the position, and taking it all in deeply.

During the Bush admin, the US has granted Israel complete and utter unconditional love, sacrificing thousands of young American patriots and trillions of tax dollars.

"The sum total is that if you measure Israeli security at the beginning of this administration and at the end of the administration, based on things the president either could have done, should have done or failed to do, the report card is pretty negative," said Daniel C. Kurtzer, who served as Bush's first-term ambassador to Israel. (Washington Post, 14 May 2008)

Kurtzer has since switched political parties. He saw the light. He now advises Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Kurtzer sees Bush's neglect of the peace process for most of his seven years in office. Despite the president's optimism that he can achieve a Palestinian-Israeli deal in his final year, Kurtzer and many other analysts believe that Israel remains unwilling to negotiate peace with its neighbors. As is typical of Bush, he ignores the advise of non-religious, non-neocons. In his recent speech in Jerusalem, Bush claims that “Israel stands for peace.”

As a kick to the dead horse (Bush), the Israeli defense establishment voices second thoughts about Bush's decision to remove Saddam Hussein and the botched occupation of Iraq. Despite Israel’s urging the early Bush administration to invade Iraq, those policies, they now argue, have helped fuel the rise of Israel's nemesis, Iran, whose president has spoken openly of trying to wipe Israel off the map. The war has also threatened to destabilize neighboring Jordan with a flood of refugees.

Early on, the Iraq invasion "looked as if it would serve Israel's interest," said Shlomo Brom, a former director of strategic planning for the Israel Defense Forces. But "the way that it was implemented by this administration is eventually causing damage to Israel. It is strengthening the radical elements in the Middle East."

"People are mistaken,” says Brom, “to think that the most friendly president [to Israel] is also the best president that Israel has ever had."

And now to stave off further criticism from his Israeli masters, Bush pursues serious talks of invading Iran, and this even after various intelligence has proven that Iran has no nuclear capabilities. W and his neocons, like McCain, have not yet learned an obvious and simple lesson in leadership, namely, that to twist up CIA intelligence and to ignore common sense advise, can lead the US into military and financial catastrophe.

Like his neocon advisors, Bush wages his wars mainly motivated by religious ideology, ‘crusades’ as he calls them in speeches. We see the results.

Movie Review: Stop Loss

2008-04-03T21:17:00.000-07:00

Opening in cinemas across the country this week, the movie is required viewing for anyone with a heart-beat. Its emotional drive keeps your pulse racing. You could go watch a flick about a bank robbery or a border crossing…but, hey, that’s been done before.

Though highly entertaining, the story carries us far beyond mere cinematic amusement, its characters deal with high stakes of country and duty, life and death, family and identity, love and self. Its narrative handles the complexity of how red-blooded Americans are coping with the war in Iraq.

The otherwise uninvolved civilian audience, we step quickly inside the lives of patriotic soldiers who care about their country and learn the hard way that good intentions and innocence hardly suffice as a compass through the big world.

The story helps us all to take a look at who we are as Americans regardless if we’re in or out of small-town USA, liberal or conservative.

The movie’s jumble of feelings and adrenaline delivers a taste of authenticity that we won’t find on the sanitized news channels. Instead of moral indignation, this story runs on earthy fuel: blood, guts, and beer. Testosterone, popular music, and ambiguous, confused ideology weave together a fabric of reality.

Whether over there or once returned home, the young men carry a bundle of pent-up rage for all they go through. They signed up for a justified war to protect the homeland, and to bring justice to an enemy. Once having believed their government leaders though, combat teaches them a whole new perspective on geopolitical ambitions. Stuff they never had to consider in public high-school.

In the first scenes of amateur video, young soldiers make it clear from the start that they’re good ‘ol boys trying to do their best. They’re not Yale graduates of a privileged ruling class, nor sons of a former president, pretending to talk and walk like Texans. They’re the real deal, blue collar guys, products of what America delivers from public education and pop culture.

Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) leads his squad, supervising a checkpoint in Tikrit, where insurgents draw them into an ambush leaving some of them dead, others mangled, and the rest badly shaken by intense urban combat where friend and foe are indistinguishable.

After the trauma of that battle, Brandon and his best pal, Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), are especially happy to end their tours and return home to Brazos, Texas, looking forward to normal life.

Once Brandon King’s squad returns home, though, they quickly discover how the war returns to them from inside out. Intense, extended combat duty dismantles some of the vets, such as Tommy Burgess (Joseph Leavitt). Others, like Shriver, feel homeless outside Army life.

Then when squad leader King tries to turn in his gear, some administrator tells him that the President has "stop-lossed" him and he must redeploy to Iraq. His response: brief but choice words about the President and his Stop Loss prerogative. This triggers the story. His superiors, parents and friends—form the heart of the movie. The situation illuminates gut-wrenching questions.

Outraged, King goes AWOL. Still naïve to the world of politics, he wants to fix things by hitting the road to talk with a senator he met during their homecoming parade. Steve’s fiancée, Michele (Abbie Cornish), a close family friend, helps by driving him in her car.

Steve finally comes to pick up his fiancée Michele and to bring Brandon back to his senses when he meets them at a Notell Motel. When Steve surprises Michele that their wedding is postponed for the sake of another military hitch, she breaks the engagement with him and stays to help Brandon. Sexual tension rises. Yet their road trip takes them nowhere—like Iraq.

Imagine if you will, returning back from war, wanting never to go back to it, and then the government steps in and tells you, “If you don’t go back to fight this endless war, we’ll make you a criminal, scampering around the country like a rat out of a cage. You might run to Mexico or Canada, but there, you’ll live in the empty shell of a man without family or friends, without your identity…”

In the movie’s 112 minutes much happens in non-stop dramatic action. We don’t have time to miss it.

Starring: Ryan Phillippe (Brandon); Channing Tatum (Steve); Abbie Cornish (Michele); Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Tommy).
Directed by: Kimberly Peirce; screenplay by Peirce and Mark Richard.

Coffee Klatch

2008-03-27T19:00:00.000-07:00

Running on caffeinated fuel, all synaptic pistons firing, I’m writing away, polishing up my next novel, The Sufi’s Ghost, and what happens? The stranger sits nearby. I keep my head to my laptop screen, taking cover. The stranger always comes in, white guy with the curly afro gray hair and suit, no tie.

Inevitably, he asks, “What are you writing? You’re here every morning early.”

Impromptu conversations at Starbucks always carry the opportunity costs…a waste of perfectly tuned caffeinated inspiration humming along. I say, “Just work.”

It’s never smart to admit to any creative endeavor, not here in Orange County, California where every man, woman and child engages in nose-bleed unbridled enterprise. Many a corporate professional speeds down the wide boulevards here, chasing after that promotion through the office political maze. Corporate automatons abound, wearing their pay checks in fine German cars. Engines of our economic strength, they live in the fast lane with hardly a smile, only a denial that they’re part of the middle class. Delusional nouveau riches, they vote right-wing just to feel like they’re part of that class of real wealth.

“How are you doing,” I say. “You’re here often. What is it you do?”

“Psychologist,” he says, “retired. I also taught English Literature down the street.”

“So, you like to read novels?” I ask.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, take a look. I just got a thriller out,” I say, shamelessly hawking my latest. I hand him a bookmarker with the pitch: Mojave Winds, Available at Amazon.com.

“Sounds interesting. Takes place in the Mojave… What’s it about?” He asks.

Now I eagerly say, “…a guy, Kris Klug comes back from extended combat missions in Iraq…tries to readjust to civilian life…looking to start his life, get over whatever post-traumatic stress he might have. Picked up some shrapnel and he lost part of his ear. He doesn’t have much family, so he relies on his uncle Fred for a job. A colorful character, Uncle Fred owns a trucking company that hauls goods between LA and Vegas. Once Klug arrives in LA, though, he begins to learn that Uncle Fred has a lot more going on than just trucking…”

“Sounds like a fun read,” the stranger sips his coffee, scrutinizing the bookmarker.

Silence falls. I return to editing.

“So, what’re the morals of your story?” The psychologist asks.

“There’s several…like individual spirituality.”

“What else?” He pushes on.

“Fundamentalism is another theme.”

“What do you mean?” He continues slurping his coffee.

“Fundamentalists…ones who believe in the holy books as the literal word of God…strictly by the text.” I look at him.

“Holy book as in the Bible?”

“Yeah, the Bible, the Torah, the Koran…whatever. Most any religion uses a holy book as a guide. Fundamentalists stand out by using their holy book as the word of God’s law.”

“I’m a fundamentalist.” He says. “But there are preachers, I’ll admit, who go overboard. They preach to others just to feel superior.”

“You mean like they have some sort of personality disorder?” I ask.

“Yes, some preachers do have personality disorders. I’ve seen them. They like to tell people how morally inferior they are, sinners. There are social-paths and insane people everywhere in normal working society…they can be functional, get work done…be productive and still have many symptoms of serious disorders. The manual of psychology defines personality disorder in clear terms. A severe disorder…a person must exhibit at least five of the nine main symptoms.”

“So, what are the nine? Manipulative?” I ask, having read a little on the subject.

“Yes. And tricking others. And bending the truth, lying, in order to satisfy their own fantasies. And such people would also be extremely narcissistic…always looking to accomplish some agenda, often a farfetched one.”

“And completely out of touch with reality?”

“Exactly,” says the psychologist, “and I’ve often seen that this type of disorder…Narcissistic personality disorder…they’re alcoholic or drug abusers.”

“Cocaine?” I ask the psychologist.

“Yes. They also often portray themselves as superior to others…talking with smirk…and a tone as if what they say is so obvious…that if other people don’t agree, then they’re just too stupid. Individuals with this disorder might strut and swagger…and talk tough, in a bullying way…arrogant.”

“Someone who would manipulate the truth so much just to show everyone that he is right and everyone else is wrong?” I ask, beginning to see a pattern here.

“Yes,” says the psychologist, “they start this often at an early age, trying to outdo their parents. I’ve seen boys with this problem always trying to belittle their fathers to prove...”

“Okay,” I say, “and the boys, when they get together, they only enhance their sickness?”

“How did you know?” He sips his coffee.

“Well, isn’t this the profile of George W Bush…joined up with Cheney…Rumsfield?”

“What?” Says the psychologist. “I have no way of knowing what President Bush is like. He didn’t manipulate the truth. He’s a man of God. He overcame his alcoholism by accepting Christ into his life. He takes counsel from many prominent Christians. He doesn’t manipulate the truth. He merely used what the intelligence community gave him.”

“Right.”

“There’s no way of telling what happens in those political circles,” he says.

“I see how you’d make a good teacher,” I say, figuring the guy could show kids how to toe the party line, go with the flow and blend in with corporate culture. I finish my triple espresso and focus back to my laptop.

Why are there Suicide Bombers?

2008-03-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

Are suicide bombers similar to others who commit suicide? Do they derive their motivations from the same sources?

The more than four suicide bombings just last Monday to mark Cheney's visit to Iraq, keep this question alive every day we walk down the street. A woman entered a mosque in Karbala, killing dozens and wounding another hundred. What drove her to this?

When Mahmoud Marmash, a young bachelor, blew himself up near Tel Aviv, in 2001, he took several Jews with him, perhaps to the same afterworld, or maybe not. “I want to avenge the blood of the Palestinians.” From a poor community-- he grew up where many people despair in poverty and hopelessness-- Mahmoud’s act is difficult for many of us to understand. We wonder what would push a person to such extremes?

An examination of suicide, though, uncovers that politically-based suicide is nothing new. It appears more than seven times in the Old Testament. Remember Samson in Judges 16:29-30? As an escape from the despair of Roman oppression, martyrdom is common in the New Testament.

Many of the same motivations for political suicide drive other types of suicide victims. Most infamously, many “experts” on TV News discussed the case of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack, as a well-established professional with a doctorate in architecture.

What most people fail to mention is that he never fit into the German culture where he studied and thus, lonely, frequented a mosque that indoctrinated him to fundamentalism of an extreme flavor. Like most such suicide cases, Atta was alienated and woefully under- or un-employed most of the time.

Contrary to many current assertions, a careful gander into this subject teaches us that the suicide bomber draws motivation from the same wellspring as other types of suicide victims.

As civilized people, we should be able to do much better than the Bush-Cheney approach: throw our hands up and say, "Nothing to do but kill them all. "Bomb the hell out of the entire Middle East! That'll fix it. Sweep it all up." The last sentence is an actual quote by Rumsfield.

Little wonder that terrorism has only increased greatly since the US Supreme Court elected the neocons into the Executive Branch.

We can diagnose this sickness and identify its causes in order to reduce them, and thus avoid so much violence.

Suicide at the Foundation of Sociology

In the early 20th century, sociologist, Emile Durkheim studied and categorized the reasons for suicide. Emile Durkheim lived during the peak of the industrial revolution, what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age, when wealth was extremely concentrated among the ownership class and labor movements incited violent riots, including terrorist bombings.

This was a time of great social and economic upheaval. Perhaps this explains both Durkheim’s theories of suicide and his interest in the subject. After careful analysis, Durkheim found it was the individual’s bonding to society that could determine whether or not he was likely to commit suicide, and he described four different types of these bonds:

Altruistic: Durkheim explained that too much social integration leads to self-sacrifice for society, patriotism, honor; the altruist, such as the WWII kamikaze pilots, commits himself to a goal beyond himself and considers this world an obstacle and burden.

Egotism: Too little social integration leads to alienation, loneliness; the egoist sees no goal to which he might commit himself, and thus feels useless and without purpose.

Anomic: Whenever an economy is not regulated enough, conditions such as unemployment or iniquitous distribution of wealth arise. Unlike the Neoconservative's preference for Milton Friedman's unbrindled "free market economy," Durkheim believed that it is the role of society to regulate the economy, and he sees a relationship between a society’s suicide rate and the way it performs this important regulative function.

Fatalistic: When society sets economic expectations too high, individuals who fail to meet these standards can lose all sense of self-worth.

Cultural beliefs can directly influence each of these types of suicide. Durkheim’s last three types of suicide seem to apply variously to most any culture, including American society.

Suicide in America

America’s culture and economic system often creates huge financial inequities and hardships leading to suicides. In volume of suicides, the U.S. ranks among the top forty among all countries in the world and 9th among industrialized countries.

Why would the so-called "wealthiest country in the world” rank so high above most third world countries?

The vicissitudes of America’s economy leave a vast majority of individuals to despair from unemployment and iniquitous distribution of wealth. In such situations, individuals are exposed to at least two of Durkheim’s motives for suicide: anomic and fatalistic.

Studies in the U.S. during the 1980’s found that every one percent increase in unemployment related to suicide increases of 360 per year. The U.S. offers hardly any social infrastructure to the unemployed. This often leads to the anomic and fatalistic suicide motives, as well as higher rates of crime and gang activity.

At the same time, consumer advertising promotes the expectations that everyone can take a piece of the pie if they work hard and "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps." When a culture raises expectations high and some individuals do not prosper, hopelessness can overtake even the brightest individual, including the soldiers returning from extended combat missions, struggling to readapt to civilian life.

Sometimes our own political leaders contribute to the feelings of economic disparity. G.W. Bush’s administration recently promoted the U.S. as the beacon of free-market prosperity, a privileged nation, God-chosen to spread democratic wealth.

Bush used this image, as his most frequent among many ploys, to justify the preemptive attack in Iraq. However, compared to the world’s democratic nations, the U.S. currently grows one of the largest gaps between rich and poor: one percent of the population relishes in 40 percent of the wealth while 50 percent of the population struggles with 3 percent of the wealth.

The poor get poorer, the rich, richer. Fatalistic despair and broken expectations increase among those who fall behind, while the winners in the economic cycles sometimes suffer the emptiness of their egotistic drives to success. These economic gaps intensify the social hardships and represent causes for suicide in America, Durkheim’s last three motives: anomic, fatalistic, and egotistic.

Internationally, the U.S. government commands enormous influence over countries whose regimes it protects through military support. We call such countries “client states” such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait...and so on.

In these countries, the U.S. supports autocratic rulers, such as the former shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, the Royal Family of Saud, and even the early years of Saddam Hussein--before he made his fatal decision to nationalize Iraqi oil--among others. These autocratic states maintain much higher levels of economic gaps between the ruling elite and the working classes than those in the U.S.

The tough, autocratic Islamic cultures exacerbate the gap between the wealthy ownership class, such as the Royal Family of Saud, and the poor. They create environments of great social, economic, and political crisis. They push some groups to extreme behavior such as suicide bombing. This explains why 15 of the 19 highjackers of 9/11 were Saudi.

This crisis was long in the making through Muslim social and economic failures over generations. The list of humiliations goes on today through American military dominance in Muslim territories and unconditional support for Israel, not to mention decades of European colonization breaking up the Ottoman Empire.

The Middle East -- A Hotbed of Suicide Bombers

In many Muslim countries, unemployment runs high and the wealth generated by oil revenues trickles down like water in the Sinai. “Poverty and unemployment among Arabs are fundamental reasons for the spread of terrorism, an unsually enlightened Saudi prince said at the opening of a conference,” according to an AP report.

Saudi Arabia remains in the third world in terms of poverty even though its oil revenues provide a per capita GDP much higher than that in, say, Texas. The private owners of the oil wealth distribute it among the royal family members (19,000) while the population of Saudi Arabia, like Iraq, equals that of Texas (23 million).

“The very production of oil," says an AP report, "in otherwise underdeveloped societies often skews the local economy -- funneling vast wealth to a few and thus intensifying the preexisting antagonism between the haves and the have-nots.”

While Durkheim’s last three motives abound in the Middle East, fundamentalist religion adds a fanatic ‘altruistic’ motive to the mix, creating an apocalyptic cocktail in some Islamic societies.

In Muslim countries we find the suicide bomber for whom all four of Durkheim’s motives seem to work simultaneously.

National Public Radio reporter, Christopher Joyce, quotes a Palestinian psychiatrist as saying, “most of them [suicide bombers] are very nice, timid, introvert, have had a problem with power in their childhood, …personal experience with serious traumatic events in their lives…witnessing the helplessness of their fathers.” Joyce notes that terrorists groups use religious rites to create a sort of ritual bonding among bombers.

In USA Today, reporter Jack Kelley characterized suicide bombers from Jordan as young, sexually frustrated and “frustrated by the economic and political duress...”

Muslims are alienated and detached from their culture if they do not participate in mosques. Families sometimes support martyrdom as a successful fulfillment of the faith.

Thus, by altruistic martyrdom, terrorists win in many ways: they fulfill a perceived benefit for the entire community, gratify their own eternal salvation as well as sexual satisfaction with the promised 72 virgins they expect to meet in heaven--something the Prophet Muhammad promised after the Battle of Badr in the 7th century.

They find revenge in the injustices that they believe the infidels caused throughout history, such as American military presence, or European colonization. They attain notoriety in their community, all great improvements from their desperate poverty.

A defensive Jihad is legitimate and, for many, it is the duty of every Muslim when infidels encroach upon the Islamic territories, as the 7th century fundamentalist Khawarijites emphasized in the convoluted, confusing verses of the Koran.

In the Middle East, Muslim cultures often create all four of Durkheim’s motives simultaneously. Iniquitous distribution of wealth causing frequent high rates of unemployment, coupled with fundamentalist schools, these elements alone create a culture that encourages suicide bombing and aggression against any Western, infidel intrusion into Islamic territories.

In fact many people in the regions of Saudi Arabia hold burning resentment against the tyrannical monarchy which the US supports and defends for their petroleum partnership. In many ways, it's easier to attack the US or Europe than to attack a well fortified small group of Arab royalty.

Terrorism is a tactic of guerrilla warfare. It's a stateless enemy of insurent revolt against a tyranny. As we now well know, it has nothing to do with a nation like Iraq. Only after the US invasion did suicide bombing become especially widespread and kamikaze in style.

Peaceful Solutions

Through its fundamentalism, some Muslim cultures tend to intensify all of Durkheim’s motives for suicide to create the Muslim martyrs. By understanding the suicide bomber’s motives, economic, social, and religious, we learn its causes. By looking closely at the causes, we gain insight into how to eliminate them in order to solve the problem at its roots in a peaceful way.

Until now, the U.S. has supported oppressive, fascist regimes in its “client states” of the Middle East. We must change this economic and political situation in order to eliminate the terrorist’s martyrdom.

Though changing the economic and policital situation is no simple task. It's run by elite owners of wealth and vested power.

We can also take lessons from these causes for suicide as reasons for the high levels of suicide and crime within our own country.

In the Old Testament, Samson committed an act of suicide terrorism when he brought down the Philistine temple and killed thousands of his oppressors. He was in an extremely helpless situation.

In the New Testament, Christ, along with thousands of other Jews, willingly went into a martyr’s crucifixion as a form of defiance against the Roman Empire’s oppression. They had few alternatives. Likewise, in the Middle East, economic and social despair lead people to this terrorist’s martyrdom because they are left without even a glimmer of hope to live with dignity and respect.

Stop Loss: Winter Soldier, Part III

2008-03-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

Emotional numbness, flashbacks, nightmares…self-esteem evaporates, jail time, criminal charges, thoughts of suicide…suicide.

When soldiers die after combat, after discharge…after they’ve lived on the streets homeless or at home mindless…they are not counted as casualties. A hose, a rope around the neck and hanging from the garage rafters...a round in the head…needle in the arm. Combat doesn’t leave them until they can shut it off.

It happens especially in this war that has not a single moral footing. A veteran comes home and wonders, why? The question wanders around the soul, through the mind, and over and over again in the heart until the answer comes…in the offing.

Lumbering, slothful bureaucracy of healthcare stands silent, hands in pocket, for the veterans, the middle class, and the poor...the disposable.

Looking for the American Dream in all the wrong...

American patriots sign up to serve their country often because they want healthcare, financial support for a college education...to improve their civilian lives. The US government promises many benefits from military service but delivers much less. Once in, civilians lose their freedom and become warriors.

The government can force the 'all-volunteer, professional military' to stay in combat for extended tours. The stop loss law keeps them captive.

Winter Soldier Conference

We learn from the Winter Soldier Conference that the veterans who have been retained for more than three tours of duty, more than a third will suffer life-long emotional trauma at least, assuming they're not wounded physically.

A president declared a pre-emptive war based on a list of shameless, flagrant lies. Neither democrats nor republicans do a damn thing about it in neither Congress or in Senate. The Government has fallen deaf to realities, whored out to the corporate and the special interest group lobbyists.

Candidate John McCain supports the Iraqi occupation, even though the US does not admit officially to maintain imperial colonies. Nobody voted for that, nobody wants it, except certain parties.

Neither democrat nor republican candidate makes this criminal war a top priority in the campaign for the next presidential election.

Mainstream journalism is complicit now with W's Admin in controlling public opinion. The current issue of Newsweek's cover story: "While it's too soon to say Iraq has turned the corner, the violence in Baghdad and most of the country has since declined precipitously. Much of the credit has gone to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander who has changed the way the U.S. Army fights." Hooray for Petraeus...oops...another suicide bomb in a Karbala mosque today, dozens dead. At least four suicide bombs today...but who's counting?

Comatose Journalism USA

Mainstream media hardly covers the disgraceful and criminal acts of pre-emptive, imperial war and its effects.

The American people focus on what the media does cover: sex scandals, hot sophisticated call-girls in NY, and the rate of foreclosures...and even then, for the later, look at the symptoms of economic failure…but don’t touch the causes. W is all for bailing out the banks and to hell with the middle class families. Thank you.

The Washington Post as well as Pacifica and NPR radio covered Winter Soldier, yet the bulk of the mainstream journalism slipped away into the shadows once again.

The media sleeps on the job rather than cover stories of national and international importance. It slips into the shadows…some gang of hoodlums in the dark alleys of complacency…conspiracy. Did the corporations and the conservative, religious groups…the special interest groups…did they get to American journalists?

Who can buy the soul of America for a few million bucks? Corporations pay for advertisement on TV…on radio…not so much to peddle their products…”Boeing – Remembers those who served…the Proud and the Brave”….”Halliburton: Proud to Serve our Troops”…

The advertisements pay for the silence. American journalism took the weekend off to shop in the malls of America with their bonuses for behaving according to the new rules.

Defense Contractors

The fat defense contractors have bullion for their advertising campaigns…blood money. But the Veterans Admin doesn’t have a nickel…nothing to help the veterans of wars…Vietnam…Iraq…Afghanistan... That’s what we learned last weekend at the Winder Soldier Conference. Let's keep that shushed up…between you and me.

Meanwhile international journalists were there; they covered the event. Journalists from France, Spain, Germany…from all over Europe…they were there…from Japan…but hardly an American Journalist. It wasn’t news worthy for America…not a front page story…not even a story for the obituaries.

Patriots Testify

Mournful-faced and anxious, nerve-rattled veterans by the hundreds sat before an audience of several hundred last weekend in Silver Spring, Maryland and shared their war stories from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jaded, hard-bitten, combat weathered military men spilled their guts out how they witnessed or participated in atrocities. Vetted US Warriors, one after another, told how they followed orders from the highest levels of command...following the ‘rules of engagement.’ The US occupation has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Let’s not talk about it…shush.

Tears puddled up around their shoes…soldiers told how they fired randomly on Iraqi vehicles...an apartment building filled with Iraqi families devastated by an American gunship. Some described gruesome…criminal…vicious acts of war…the wholesale slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians. Not a polite discussion topic…shush.

All stories streamed live to the IVAW Website. They draw conclusions from their experience on the ground: the occupation of Iraq is a losing policy no matter how long the US military stays there, no matter how many soldiers die there, no matter how much money.

Civilian Awareness?

The four-day event, featured “Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations.” Iraq Veterans Against the War (www.ivaw.org) sponsored the conference which drew more than 200 veterans of the two wars. Planned for the eve of the fifth anniversary of the war's start next week, the IVAW organizers hoped that the soldiers' accounts would spawn public awareness and opposition.

Like many other combat veterans, former Marine Jon Turner described episodes in which he and fellow Marines shot people out of fear or retribution. "I'm sorry for the hate and destruction I've inflicted upon innocent people," Turner said. "Until people hear about what is happening in this war, it will continue."

Reporting War Atrocities-An American Tradition

Winter Soldier continues the tradition after the well-known and controversial 1971 gathering of the same name at which Vietnam War veterans gathered to describe atrocities.

The 2008 Winter Soldier echoed many of the same war stories. This time, though, the Iraq War is no longer a war but an military occupation that the Iraqi citizens resent and fight.

Story after story, the veterans repeated how the Iraqi civilians feel their lives were much safer and better before the US invaded and continues to occupy their country.

The stories these veterans are telling slap cold reality on the Bush Admin's fear that the public might hear about them. W and his cronies do everything they can to hide the Americans who return from W's War with stories to tell.

Since the beginning, many first-hand combat stories have been published in books: The Deserter’s Tale, Generation Kill…

Don't Support Our Troops--Hide Them

The conference covers the virtual absence of any medical or post-service support for the troops from the Veterans Administration.

While our government pays defense contractors millions and billions of dollars to accomplish little or nothing at all, the Bush Admin prefers to sit on its hands rather than provide adequate care for veterans.

The continued occupation of Iraq benefits only the coffers of defense contractors while corpses rot under the Iraqi sun, and veterans are treated as disposable pawns.

Mojave Winds -- A Big Success

2008-03-11T17:00:00.000-07:00

I’m happy to talk about how the launch of Mojave Winds shows every sign of success. Since its launch with a national press release at the end of February 2008, Mojave Winds has attracted a consistent stream of visitors to the author’s website (www.markbiskeborn.com)

My website is hosted on a server equipped with refined statistics software. It shows me that people are extremely interested in the story, Mojave Winds.

Since 29 February, 9,000 to 12,000 people visit the website every day to learn more about the novel, Mojave Winds. Of these “hits,” people view several pages at the rate of more than 800 per day.
…and these numbers are climbing.

As of Saturday, 1 March, I began holding author signing events at bookstores. I am delighted to see how people come to the bookstores and eagerly buy my book. It is gratifying. So far I have sold all the copies that the bookstores pre-order for the events and I enjoying having to go out to the parking lot to fetch more copies of Mojave Winds from my own “inventory” to sell beyond the number ordered.

I enjoy holding author signings for Mojave Winds. Many people come to me and ask what the book is about. I explain, “It’s about a guy, Kris Klug, who comes back from the Iraq War…looking to readapt to civilian life…find a job…and to get past whatever post traumatic stress disorder he perceives from too many extended combat missions. He doesn’t have much family, so he relies on his Uncle Fred for a job in his trucking outfit hauling goods between Los Angeles and Las Vegas…”

I have so much fun talking with people and seeing how they become interested in the story. The time passes by quickly at the author signing events.

Scientology or Islam -- It's a toss up.

2008-03-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

Who’s to say which religion is better than the next? Most often a person ends up following a particular religion by location. What are the chances that someone growing up in Afghanistan would attend a synagogue rather than a mosque? Would someone raised in Peru wager his chips for eternal life with anything but the Catholic Church?

In America it’s often considered shameful to criticize religion. We’re supposed to accept religions without question. Who would dare publically highlight the flaws in Judaism? Who scorns Evangelicals or Catholics? Mormons? What about those faithful to the Book of Mormon which Angel Moroni handed down to Joseph Smith as a revelation in 1830?

It’s widely assumed that we should reserve a special reverence and respect for religions, especially the mainstream, ol’time variety—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. We tiptoe around the so-called holy books—the Koran, the Torah, and the Bible. We don’t dare question organized religions as if they were prickly and prone to furious offence. For religious people we mentally construct some thick fortified wall and grant asylum to members of the faith, as if they’ve ascended a step higher than the rest of us mere mortals.

In the US, after Christians, the second largest group is secular. We don’t hear from this group because they’re not organized and, unlike the Christians and especially Jews, they don’t lobby or bribe politicians for special demands. Despite the fact that a huge portion of the American population doesn’t pray, we bend over backwards to accommodate those who do, especially the Christians. Hell, we’ve even begun to throw out scientific method in schools for the sake of “creationism”—some half baked “faith based” explanations about how the world was formed and how humans arrived on earth.

Meanwhile, we freely mock Scientology. We taunt the celebrities who’ve hitched their faith to Hubbard’s alter. It’s all over the news, stories about Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and others who regularly attend the Church of Scientology.

Push aside whatever bias. It’s really a hip religion for our new world order. Founded by L. Ron Hubbard, a pulp science fiction writer of the 40’s and 50’s. Scientologists claim to captivate 8 million members. Hubbard wrote the book of Dianetics which explains the process of ‘auditing’ or clearing the mind of ‘engrams,’ those mental reactions to traumatic events that obstruct a person’s life. In the process of erasing engrams, an individual reaches higher levels of ‘clarity,’ the highest level, measured as an 8. Hubbard’s E-meter, an electronic device, helps Ministers to measure a person’s progress toward higher Clarity. Depending on a person’s wealth, Hubbard’s Church expects donations in thousands of dollars for auditing its members and erasing their engrams.

Other more traditional and well established religions—the Abrahamic ones—found in synagogues, mosques, and churches, might expect smaller donations or tithes, but then, they only offer the standard and vague prayer, blessings, atonement, and sins.

Meanwhile Scientology provides rigorous auditing of engrams with the use of sophisticated electronic E-meters, and clearing services that enable self-realization.

In Scientology we learn a whole new creationism, an explanation for how the earth was created and how humans found their home here. According to Hubbard’s prophetic visions, Xenu reigned as dictator over the "Galactic Confederacy;" and 75 million years ago, he brought billions of his people to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them using hydrogen bombs.

Scientology holds that the souls, or “thetans” of these aliens remained, and that to this day they gang up and attach themselves to human souls, causing us spiritual harm. The Scientology Church offers services to cleanse the souls of these aliens from us humans…for a reasonable price…uh…donation.

What’s so far-fetched about that? Consider the alternatives.

The first five books of the Old Testament—Book of Moses—come from the Jewish Torah. The Christians and Jews believe in the same God, though they differ greatly in understanding that God.

Likewise, Islam recognizes the Jewish and Christian holy books, prophets, Mother Mary, and most of the other biblical characters. In many ways the beautiful poetry of the Koran reads like a convoluted reference book to the Jewish and Christian holy books.

Newsflash: Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God, but they have one hell of a time agreeing on what God is or does. Even though they can’t agree on God within their own congregations, they’re often at each others’ throats to defend whatever vague idea they have about God.

Human history bathes in blood for the deadly attempt to defend the one and only portal to eternal life. Religion often calls for inner peace, though it’s packed with raging emotions as if many believers were a little insecure about their guaranteed portals to eternal life.

For centuries, we took it ‘on faith’ that Moses wrote the Book of Moses. Alas, faith often ignores reality. For centuries anyone who made that claim risked life and limb by the Catholic Church.

Yet, reading the book of Moses, we can find many anachronisms—things that Moses was supposed to have known but which didn’t exist in his time—domesticated camels and peoples, like the Philistines…

So, we have to ignore many facts as in history, in order to take things on faith. We have to accept blind ignorance for the sake of taking a nice story as the-word-of-God truth. Inconsistencies, anachronisms, and other such fallacies plague the holy books and beg for broad poetic license.

With low levels of literacy, many folks have to rely on one religion or another for hope in otherwise confused lives. In this way religion does serve some benefit in popular culture, a quick and ready-made explanation for the big questions.

Take the Koran. According to Islam, back in the 7th century Angel Gabriel whispered divine revelations into the Prophet Muhammad’s ear. Muhammad was illiterate but found good Arabic scribes to write down what Gabriel told him.

We also have to believe that Muhammad took an intense supernatural Night Journey, a mystical flight from the Kabbah, riding astride a winged animal, a Buraq, guided by Angel Gabriel. The beast delivered him to the former Temple of the Jews in Jerusalem, where he met and held discussions with celebrities like Abraham, Moses, and Jesus who prayed with him. He rose to the highest limits of heaven where divine radiance touched him. Once there, Moses advised him that Muslims should pray five times per day. The trip placed Muhammad on an even footing with the other prophets, so, believing his story is much easier.

In light of these options, though, if I had fifty grand, I’d pay to take the celebrity fast-track ride to spiritual freedom with the Scientologists.

Book Review: Blackwater

2008-03-03T11:50:00.000-08:00

The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
By Jeremy Scahill
Nation Books, Avalon Publ. Group, New York, NY; 452 pp., 2007

Reviewed by Mark Biskeborn

In his new book, Jeremy Scahill traces the explosive growth of Blackwater, USA, a private and secretive mercenary company based in the backwaters of North Carolina. Scahill writes that “in less than a decade [Blackwater] has risen out of the swamp in North Carolina to become something of a Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration's so-called war on terror."

By following the mercs’ (mercenaries) missions, Scahill takes us on a tour of some of the most outrageous policy blunders in the occupation of Iraq. Based on every aspect of this so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom, from policy, planning, strategy, and daily tactics, this has everything to do about colonization for economic gains, and very little about liberating the citizens.

In the Introduction, Scahill reminds us of President Eisenhower’s famous and prophetic farewell speech in 1961 about the perils of the American industrial-military complex:

”The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

The operative phrase in Eisenhower’s speech: Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. The popular vote in 2000 resulted in a win for Al Gore. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in favor of Bush because he won in the electorate college. By 2004, with tanks rolling through Baghdad, the popular vote did what it has always done during wartime, it voted for “staying the course.” History has proven for many presidents that military conflict guarantees staying power for the second term. Whether or not the American citizenry passed the test of alert and knowledgeable, remains for debate.

Scahill argues that the Bush administration has given us a new America, one in which misplaced power rose to excess, one in which the huge industrial and military machinery degenerated into disastrous abuse.

”What has unfolded…particularly in the Bush administration is nothing less than the very scenario Eisenhower darkly prophesied.”

According to Scahill, Blackwater has:
• an international branch, Greystone, in Barbados for tax-exempt status
• more than 2,300 soldiers deployed in nine countries
• a database of 21,000 special forces troops and retired police that it could deploy at a moment's notice
• a private fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gunships
• 7000-acre headquarters—the world’s largest private military facility
• new facilities in California, Illinois, and a jungle training facility in the Philippines
• training for tens of thousands of law enforcement officials a year from the U.S. and other nations
• over $500 million in government contracts – and that does not include “black budget” operations for U.S. intelligence agencies or contracts with private corporations or foreign governments
• U.S. government “cost-plus” contracts: the more they spend, the more they profit—leading to abuse and inefficiency
• Capability to overthrow many of the world’s governments

Theocratic Military Power

“Blackwater is a private army,” Scahill writes, “and it is controlled by one person: Erik Prince, a radical right-wing mega-millionaire who has served as a bankroller not only of President Bush’s campaigns but of the broader Christian right agenda.”

Erik Prince’s father Edgar played a major role in creating and funding many right wing Christian political movements, such as James Dobson’s Family Research Council.

“Erik Prince has been in the thick of the right-wing effort to unite conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in a common theoconservative holy war—with Blackwater serving as sort of armed wing of the movement. Prince says ‘Everybody carries guns, just like the Prophet Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel—a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other.’”

Scahill calls this a “theocratic movement” which motivates the rise of mercenary corporations like Blackwater which was founded in the mid-1990s. And only during the theocratic based Bush administration did it win the contracts that exploded its growth.

Many on the Christian right considered the newly elected Clinton administration illegitimate. First Things, a journal that Scahill calls “the main organ of the theocratic movement,” published a special issue entitled The End of Democracy, which featured essays that predicted a civil war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government. Erik Prince’s close friend, former Watergate conspirator turned Christian fascist, Charles Colson, wrote in the issue, “A showdown between church and state is inevitable. This is not something for which Christians should hope. But it is something for which they need to prepare.”

Fallujah

Immediately after 9/11 Blackwater landed a $5.4 million contract to provide 20 security guards for the CIA’s Kabul station. But a big break for the company came when it landed a $27 million contract for providing security for Paul Bremer, who was in charge of running the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The senior U.S. official in Iraq and the public face of the occupation, Bremer would not be protected by U.S. government forces or Iraqi security but by Blackwater.

Blackwater soldiers sent to guard Bremer:

“embodied the ugly American persona to a tee. Its guards were chiseled like bodybuilders and wore tackey wrap-around sunglasses. Many wore goatees and dressed in all-khaki uniforms with ammo vests or Blackwater t-shirts with the trademark bear claw in the crosshairs, sleeves rolled up…Their haircuts were short and they sported security earpieces and lightweight machine guns. They bossed around journalists, ran Iraqi cars off the road or fired rounds at cars if they got in the way of a Blackwater convoy”

Blackwater USA Corporation first came to public attention on 31 March 2004 when four of its private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Fallujah. People in the city dragged the bodies through the streets, burned them, and strung two of the mercenaries over the bridge over the Euphrates River.

The press portrayed the incident as an Iraqi mob irrationally attacking “contractors”—not armed mercenaries—who were helping to rebuild Iraq. The headline in the Chicago Tribune read, “Iraqi Mob Mutilates Four American Civilians.” Scahill reveals the true situation in Fallujah before the attack on the Blackwater soldiers.

During the 1991 Gulf War, Fallujah had been the site of a major massacre when a “precision bomb” hit a densely populated area smashing through a market and apartment complex killing over 130 civilians. After U.S. troops occupied the city in 2003, U.S. troops opened fire on a peaceful demonstration killing 13 and wounding 75.

The attack on the mercenaries was used as a pretext, quite possibly a staged bait, to launch a massive assault on Fallujah delivering a horrific collective punishment to the whole city.

Thousands of U.S. troops invaded the city, 1000- and 2000-pound bombs were dropped, and hospitals were closed so those injured could not get medical aid. Over 800 people died in the U.S. attack and tens of thousands were forced to flee.

A reporter from Al Jazeera wrote, “I went to the hospital. I could not see anything but a sea of corpses of children and women, and mostly children…These were scenes that were unbelievable unimaginable. I was taking photographs and forcing myself to photograph while I was at the same time crying.”

And at the time, President Bush told U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair that he wanted to destroy Al Jazeera by bombing it. “He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere.”

Above All Laws

Mercs from Titan and CACI—two other mercenary businesses like Blackwater—were involved in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. According to a class action suit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Titan and CACI conspired with U.S. officials to “humiliate, torture and abuse persons” to win more contracts for their “interrogation services.” Despite the hot spotlight on these corporations, business continued to bustle.

None of these military contractors has been prosecuted for crimes committed in Iraq. In fact the contractors operate outside the law, completely immune from prosecution. One of Paul Bremer’s last official acts before leaving Iraq was to sign Order #17, that “contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal processes with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of any Contract to sub-contract thereto.”

In addition, until very recently, contractors have been immune from military law that governs U.S. troops. Blackwater also claims that it is immune to civil suits filed in U.S. courts, because it is part of the U.S.’s “total force” in Iraq. The mercs can have it both ways, literally above all laws both civil and military.

In late 2006 Congress added an amendment to a Defense Department spending bill that said that contractors could now be prosecuted by the military. No charges have filed. If its mercs were brought in front of military tribunals, Blackwater would likely challenge the right of the military to prosecute them.

Merc Contractors Making a Killing

By the time Defense Secretary Rumsfeld resigned in late 2006, the ratio of active-duty U.S. soldiers to private contractors deployed in Iraq had reached just under one to one, a statistic unprecedented in modern warfare.

The reasons for this huge change in the use of non-government military are numerous. As a seemingly purposeless, goalless war, few men are willing to sign up, volunteer for the low paying job as a grunt. On the other hand, mercs received up to four or five times the salary of U.S. soldiers. In this war, patriotism no longer drives most warriors.

And a draft would be out of the question as a means to conscript a new crop of men willing to serve…the country…Bush’s own war… A draft would rouse a new antiwar movement that would make the 1960’s look like a small rally.

The Vietnam War grew over the course of many years from the days of French colonialism to a gradual U.S. involvement through a series of policies of several U.S. Presidents.

The war in Iraq is unique. Bush junior, a single man, is responsible for the decision to go to war. He pushed for his own war by lying to the U.S. public. He pushed the ratification for the war through a Republican Congress. He lied about the WMD’s, which the UN inspectors never found long before the invasion; he lied in a long string of justifications for going to war.

When Rumsfeld left his office, President Bush did make one very truthful statement thus far in his Presidency: Rumsfeld made the “most sweeping transformation of American’s global force posture since the end of World War II.”

Unfortunately, Bush’s words may now mean something very different than what he may have thought he tried to say.

The U.S. military has been ground down to exhaustion, many a retired General has testified to this, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said in 2006, “the active Army is about broken.”

“While Blackwater executives may have initially set their sights high in aiming to be a wind of the military—like the Marines or the Army—now, reeling from its successes, the company is no longer content to be subordinate to the United States. While it still maintains its plege of loyalty and patriotism, Blackwater strives to be an independent army, deploying to conflict zones as an alternative to a NATO or UN force, albeit one accountable to Blackwater’s owners rather than member nations.”

The uses of a army for hire offer many possibilities for humanitarian peacekeeping missions. Corporations like Blackwater could serve as a quick and easy solution to deploying units of military professionals to “solve problems” such as deterring the sorts of killings we see in Africa or coup d’etats in places like Haiti.

On the other hand, many questions arise:
• Who controls these private armies?
• To what are these private armies loyal? The U.S. Constitution? The al-Saudi Royal family? Or just the highest bidder in contracts to kill?
• Once such a private army gains real military might, what are the limits?
• What prevents a Blackwater from raiding the Pentagon on a Thursday morning?
• Blackwater is an example of a military run by an extremely right-wing Christian fundamentalist group. What if they decide that their ideology should be the only way to live for all of America…or some other nation for that matter?
• What’s to stop private corporations like Chevron or ExxonMobile from hiring a Blackwater brigade to take back the oil fields in Nigeria which they believe belong to them?

As we see in the case of Fallujah, Blackwater may very well have instigated the insurgency. Who was there to stop it? Who was there to deter it? Or was it a paid-for mission? Was it a “strategy” drawn up in a back office of theocratic, neoconservative political leaders?

Stop Loss: The Disposable Poor, Part II

2008-02-26T19:56:00.001-08:00

Alas, like New Orleans’ redevelopment disaster, W’s pledge to revamp military healthcare has become equally scandalous. Almost one year to the day after Dubya commissioned a report on military healthcare, Veterans for America, a veterans advocacy group, delivered a report recently to the New York Times, entitled: “Fort Drum: A Great Burden, Inadequate Assistance.”

“The system is very much overburdened,” said Jason W. Forrester, director of policy for Veterans for America. “These problems are going to continue as long as we have units, such as the Second Brigade Combat Team, that have seen high-intensity combat, extended deployments and inadequate time between deployments.” NYTimes and other reports remind us that W has once again dropped the ball.

Child Custody Lost

On top of decrepit healthcare, returning soldiers often lose their families while ‘over there.’ Military family advocates say a growing number of soldiers are losing custody of their children, not because they're bad parents but because of extended missions in Iraq. Like many other soldiers, when reservist Tanya Towne was stop-lost to extended missions, her family broke up and she lost custody of her son.

Only last month W signed a bill to help protect service members and their families. Though legal experts say some military moms and dads, absent for so long, still lose custody of their kids, (NPR).

Debt Collectors Take Aim at Soldiers

To add insult to injury, while on stop loss, many soldiers have to deal with the bill collectors knocking on the door at home—as the NYTimes reports.

Sgt. John J. Savage III, an Army reservist, was about to climb into a troop transport plane for a flight to Iraq from Fayetteville, N.C., when his wife called with shocking news: "They're foreclosing on our house." Savage boarded a plan returning to combat, brooding all the time about losing his house and wondering where his wife would sleep the next night.

Although a longstanding federal law strictly limits the ability of a soldier’s lenders to foreclose, they do so often and aggressively. Court records and reports from military and civilian lawyers tell how soldiers often face demoralizing demands from financial companies collecting on bills.

Some cases involve prominent corporations like Wells Fargo and Citigroup; though they claim to comply with the law, they are also strapped for cash and need to collect. After six years of an unbridled, unregulated, ‘free market’ mortgage boom that helped to prop up Bush’s war time economy, a plague of foreclosures are busting the banks.

• At Fort Hood, Texas, a soldier's wife was sued by a creditor trying to collect a debt owed by her and her soldier husband fighting in Baghdad at the time. A local judge ruled against her, saying she had defaulted, despite laws protecting soldiers.

• At Camp Pendleton, California, more than a dozen marines returned from Iraq to find their cars and other property sold to cover unpaid storage and towing fees.

• In northern Ohio, Wells Fargo served a young Army couple with foreclosure.

The Big Picture—Theocon Ideology

At least Dubya and his theocon buddies are consistent in their disasters. In 1992 the theocon cabal, which includes John McCain, had written the Defense Plan Guidance document when planning to invade Iraq and seize its 115 billion barrels of oil reserves, second only to that of Saudi Arabia. The document promotes American global imperialism and outlines a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action. It clearly states the theocon strategy in seizing control of oil: "In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."

Whatever happened to Yankee ingenuity? Can’t we develop renewable energy rather than wage war for toxic oil? When Jimmy Carter advocated this approach in the 70’s, he was voted out of office. That was during one of many oil-price induced recessions.

As of the Reagan years, the theocons have followed the thought leaders like Norman Podhoretz a right-wing fundamentalist theocrat and Milton Friedman a free-market, corporatist economist, and others.

The young well-intended soldiers now fighting involuntarily in extended Stop Loss missions are mere pawns in a grander ideological project about which they are clueless. Most soldiers enlist to serve their country with noble, patriotic values. Meanwhile the theocons exploit these traditional ideals by transforming the military into a security service to the status quo petroleum corporations, huge campaign contributors…not to mention the contractors who profit from rebuilding Iraq after being bombed.

The Defense Plan Guidance report leaked out into public domain. Authored by theocons Scotter Libby (since then a convicted felon) and Paul Wolfowitz (‘retired’ from W’s Admin and then fired from the World Bank), the report is only a smaller artifact of a much grander project, namely: The Project of a New American Century—a.k.a. NPAC, a neoconservative think tank whose stated goal is to promote America’s dominance globally and to support "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."

What “Reganite military strength” means here is the traditional industrial-military complex that Eisenhower warned us against as our own Achilles heel. Bush calls for a conventional warfare—one based on big profits for defense contractor corporations—to fight non-conventional terrorists. In doing so Dubya follows the theocon ideological approach to global dominance and radical corporatist economics per Milton Friedman’s failed theories.

As for Reagan’s ‘moral clarity,’ this refers to the likes of fundamentalist Christians, Falwell, Podhoretz, Dobson, Pat Robertson… The policy laid out from this radical ideology greatly resembles that of right-wing, fundamentalist theocratic regimes. The destabilizing of the Middle East plays into their psychedelic ‘rapture’ vision of the second coming of Christ…something they learned from rubbish novels about being Left Behind.

The Wahhabist regime in Saudi Arabia provides one vivid and real political system similar to the one NPAC promotes. A religious doctrine reigns over every aspect of society—the military, judicial, educational, and economic systems. The members of this theocratic conservative political movement also call for a return to the old, ‘pure values’ of the original prophets. This includes teaching non-scientific accounts of the origin of the world as well as intolerance of homosexuality, birth-control... It’s a map to return to a Dark Ages where corporatists profit and religious nuts reign.

With a long list of other theocon buddies, including John McCain, Dubya adheres to this program as religious movement. It also includes ‘Milty’s’ economic policies of a purely unbridled, free market where corporations are uncontrolled, unregulated. During W’s watch we witness results of this policy now in the current mortgage and credit fiascos…not to mention the gun-slinging corporate militia in Iraq…

Driven by high profits, banks sold mortgages to anyone with a pulse, luring them in on teaser interest rates, starting them off low and then ‘ballooning’ them into foreclosures. Likewise, the highly profitable, yet socially irresponsible operations in the petroleum industry, or in the military industry—Halliburton, Blackwater, DynCorp…—defense contractors earn reputations for atrocious business practices...not to mention lawless slaughter of innocent civilians.

The theocons preach and practice their new world order. We see the results in places like…Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans, in the military healthcare...

Over and over again, W’s close adherence to the theocon ideology favors big contracts with corporations…such as the theocon owned and managed Blackwater, Carlyle Group, CACI… This list of corporations goes on and on. Meanwhile in areas where regular citizens are concerned, wounded war veterans, Dubya’s Admin drops the ball.

The theocons’ new world order supports an elite corporate-owner class in a so-called free market…anyone outside this bubble of the super-rich is left to pull himself up by his own combat boot straps. The poor are disposable pawns—‘troops’—in this Christian corporatist crusade.

Stop Loss -- The Disposable Poor -- Part I

2008-02-25T09:03:00.000-08:00

‘Backdoor Draft’ is what Senator John Kerry called it, a clause in the military enlistment contract that keeps soldiers in combat involuntarily. Stop Loss is a law by which the president can stop the loss of experienced soldiers reaching the end of their hitch.

Like many other soldiers, reservist Tanya Towne learned about this clause in her contract when deployed to Iraq; her husband divorced her and took custody of her son. Now she pays $500 per month in child support on her puny reservist salary.

Since the invasion, spring 2002, some 160,000 soldiers occupy Iraq. Bush ordered a stop loss on more than 60,000 soldiers to remain in combat beyond the normal end of their enlistment. Some 180,000 private contractors, mostly Blackwater mercenaries, also supplement the US military. As incentive, the Bush Admin pays ‘mercs’ four or five times what enlisted soldiers earn.

"The use of stop loss is often an indication of a shortfall of available personnel," says Loren Thompson, a think-tank analyst in Arlington. Meaning: fewer and fewer citizens are willing to engage in the Iraqi morass.

Cases of chronic post-traumatic stress syndrome—PTSS—drastically increase as extended missions multiply. Hundreds of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have recently lapsed into violence as they attempt to readjust to the civilian world. Consider one of hundreds of cases: Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood with an assault rifle under his jacket. Two armed gang-bangers wound up dead. Sepi now serves time.

The law reads like this:
"The President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces…"

Stop loss became law after the Vietnam War when the Pentagon grappled to retain departing combat soldiers. Once experienced in combat, a soldier gains value. Vietnam taught the government a lesson. When engaged in an unpopular war that shows no benefit for anyone, soldiers lose all motivation to stay on the job. Stop loss straps them to combat. So much for the all volunteer military.

Like Vietnam, the endless trudge in Iraq has lost whatever patriotic appeal. ‘Fighting them over there to avoid fighting them here,’ no longer inspires. Motivated by high pay, mercenaries fill in the lack of enlisted soldiers who more and more see that Operation Iraqi Freedom benefits no one, though it has helped terrorist groups to recruit large numbers of young Iraqis who now despise the US for destroying most of the country’s infrastructure and countless innocent civilians. Soldiers’ refusal to reenlist voluntarily speaks volumes about what they think of the occupation.

Soldiers: Overworked, Underpaid

Under a Pentagon contract, retired Army officer Andrew Krepinevich wrote a recent report about human resources; he concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency (MSNBC). He wrote that the Army is “in a race against time” to adjust to the demands of war “or risk breaking the force in the form of a catastrophic decline” in recruitment and re-enlistment.

Enlisted soldiers like Sgt. John Savage, an Army reservist, seldom realize that the term of their combat missions can continue indefinitely. When a brave soul signs up to serve our country, there’s a clause in the fine print that ties him or her into the service for as long as a war continues. It goes like this:

In the event of war, my enlistment in the Armed Forces continues until six (6) months after the war ends, unless the enlistment is ended sooner by the President of the United States.

Although General Petaeraus claims that the surge (30,000 extra US soldiers, as of summer 2007) has yielded results, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, assistant to the president for Iraq and Afghanistan, said last summer [2007] that he is concerned about the toll extended missions are taking on US soldiers…

“Come the spring [2008], some variables will have to change — either the degree to which the American ground forces, the Marines and the Army in particular, are deployed around the world to include Iraq, or the length of time they're deployed in one tour, or the length of time they enjoy at home. Those are, essentially, the three variables,” (NPR).

Maybe the good General forgot another variable: we turn Iraq over to the Iraqis…as many of them request. Iraqis will just have to take over the burden of managing all 115 billion barrels of oil in their reserves despite Exxon’s eager offers to help.

Lute added,

“we're interested in attracting to the all-volunteer force, that we're actually competing in the marketplace—in the labor marketplace—for a very narrow slice of high school graduates without records with the law who come to us with a clean bill of health and the potential to serve this country in some very demanding missions.”

Disposable Poor—Who Cares?

Lute’s comment translates: the military recruits mainly men just out of high school, healthy, and without a criminal record…uneducated, unskilled, minimum wage workers…the disposable poor. Like many officials, he uses the word ‘force’ or ‘troops’…abstract terms for real people with names and faces…soldiers like Sgt. John Savage, Tanya Towne, and Matthew Sepi.

As these workers go to war, their repeated and extended combat missions greatly increase their chances of becoming killed in action or wounded physically and psychologically. Does the Bush Admin really give a damn?

Occasionally public outrage prompts media coverage about the appalling conditions at veterans’ hospitals, notably Walter Reed, and the horrible care for wounded and traumatized soldiers. Only in response to these moments does the Bush Admin release a press announcement about how shocked the theocons are about this surprising situation. We see Pres. Bush out for photo ops, jogging with a couple of amputees as he did last summer when news broke out about despicable military healthcare. The images make us feel warm inside, as if Dubya were just one of the guys. The New York Times shows how W’s PR crew sooths public outrage.

Public healthcare is not one of W’s fortes, military healthcare no less. Last summer Dubya put together a panel of bureaucrats ‘to look into this issue.’ The panel, which included Republican Senator Bob Dole and Donna Shalala, delivered a report last March 2007 on ways and means to fix the dilapidated military healthcare system.

A year ago, with the panel’s report in hand full of recommendations, Bush had directed Gates the defense secretary, and Nicholson, secretary of veterans affairs, “to take them seriously, and to implement them, so that we can say with certainty that any soldier who has been hurt will get the best possible care…”

Asked if Shalala thought Dubya would follow through on his pledge, she said, “Senator Dole and I are going to keep an eye on him.” That was a year ago.

It appears, though, that Bush and his theocon buddies have implemented these recommendations much like they did the Iraq War Report commissioned in spring 2006…which recommended troop withdrawal— Iraq Study Group Report.

...Return to Author's Website: www.markbiskeborn.com

Economy -- War in Iraq

2008-02-23T11:28:00.000-08:00

Voters are concerned about the economy.
Oh…and the war in Iraq. Both are connected at the hip.

With G W Bush’s lisping and slurring, I imagine him sitting on his favorite barstool, nursing from a glass, and talking to the bartender how someday he’d outdo his father. The bartender only half listens to W’s drivel while turning an ear to the football score on the TV.

With similar interest, many Americans listened to his final State of the Union speech.

To change his view on Iraq, W would have to acknowledge it as a mistake. An error like this has so far cost the US well over 4,000 soldiers—W's Admin counts war casualties by distorted criteria—as well as several hundred thousand innocent civilian lives -- 10 Oct. 2007, New York Times.

Economic woes now arise on the horizon: inflation, high interest rates, increased unemployment…

When Dubya started talking about an economic stimulus package, I hoped he might shed light on how everything in economics is connected.

In other words, if something consequential happens in one part of the US economy, it affects other parts. Spending trillions of dollars to produce something constructive would most likely have a positive impact on the US economy.

The war in Iraq produces nothing useful for anyone. This impacts the US and the global economy in enormously negative ways.

As the President burns trillions of dollars to destroy a country-- MSNBC-- the cost of capital increases, so too interest rates. Pundits and economists seldom talk about this…yet.

Mainstream media hardly discusses the economic effects of destroying Iraq and many of its citizens. President Bush did not mention it in his speech. Maybe he just forgot.

Increased oil prices benefit the Arab Monarchies, while reducing the US GDP (gross domestic product), like throwing a monkey-wrench into the economy. Some estimates indicate that for every $5 increase in oil price, US GDP drops more than .3%. That's a lot, enough to increase unemployment.

Everyone talks about how the slide in the subprime mortgage market puts a hole in our pockets.

The subprime mortgage market represents a few billion bucks. Sure, that alone will knock the wind out of the already fragile middle class.

The war in Iraq increases the cost of capital:
…which ups interest rates
…which screwed up the already fragile and unbridled mortgage market
…which tossed middle class families out in streets.

Hip bone connected to the…

The war in Iraq punches the air out of the economy. It’s yanking away the roofs over the heads of middle class families…squandering more than a trillion dollars that could have been used constructively, such as in education or even in an improved Homeland Security.

When W promoted his economic stimulus package many people probably, like me, envisioned a little balloon floating up at a small festive party for the survival of the middle class
…and then the balloon’s air fizzled out in a squeaky whistle.

Here’s a new proposal for a stimulus package:

We earmark the sons of privilege, such as, say, G W Bush, who squander opportunities to become productive citizens despite their huge advantages of opulent wealth from birth. If they grow up to cause negative impacts to the country, then we levy tax on all their assets and divvy them out to children born into poverty.

This same new tax rule would apply to the daughters of privilege too, such as, say, Paris Hilton, born into the kind of wealth most people cannot even imagine. How can people, born into so much wealth and with so much time and resources, lead their lives into utter waste?

Women Stuck in Fundamentalism's Holy Book Thumping

2008-02-12T18:03:00.000-08:00

In horribly oppressive theocratic countries, these five remarkable women bust out to find a freedom that many of us in America fear and hide from under the veils of self-imposed constraints. Awake up call to the American fundamentalists who demand more religious based laws and education. Theocracies exist and they often grow into ugly regimes.

The autobiography, entitled Infidel by Ayaan Kirsi Ali, drags gruesome truths out from the shadows of Muslim society that otherwise remain in the darkness of closed circles and communications controlled by Islamic authorities. Ayaan exposes the hidden workings of a backward society gripped tightly in religious fervor.

Ayaan shows us how the social threads in many Muslim countries weave tightly together to form a tough fabric that binds, conceals, and controls every aspect of a person’s life. The social fabric consumes all individual freedoms that we in the West take for granted.

Faith in a religion can burn so feverishly that it consumes the human spirit in the flames of dogma, superstitions, and traditions. In many Islamic countries, the religion fuels itself into an increasingly intense heat as each of its members imposes the rules of conduct on others.

The self-policing in these Muslim societies operates in ways similar to the Stasi police in the old Soviet Union where every person is coerced to control the next by threat of dishonor, ostracizing…corporal and mental punishment, prison…torture. If any one member falls out of rank from the strict confines of conduct, that person, and any one related by family or even by clan, suffers draconian consequences.

Here we discover the religious version of Orwell’s 1984. The state, driven by a closed and dictatorial ideology of God, imposes absolute conformity over its people to the point where the human soul is consumed by the bitter, resentful relationships in which every man and woman is expected to abide by and enforce the strict rules of behavior by violent force.

The Islamic faith has allowed an extreme totalitarian regime to take root and grow into every part of a person’s existence in such countries as Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, …the places where Ayaan lived as a girl. This religious belief and law forms the authority from a sacred book, the Koran (and other supplements of Sharia and hadiths…) which everyone reads as the absolute word of God. The culture that Ayaan experiences day by day represents the ultimate of a fundamentalist regime where church and state form the same authoritative body.

If nothing else, Ayaan’s view of a religious regime, a theocracy, serves as a wake-up call the popular religious culture in the US. If taken too far, the mixing of religion with politics can lead to a cancerous growth, eating away at individual spirituality. Fundamentalism is the same no matter where a fervent believer thumps a holy text as the absolute word of God.

Ayaan shows how the right mix of luck and choice can transform even the most hopeless existence. To some extent, Ayaan succeeds in obtaining her goal: individual freedom and self-expression. She overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles by passing over the word “no” that many people say to her.

First, as comfortable American readers, we cringe in disgust at the brutal everyday lives of most Muslim women. Ayaan wrote Submission, the short film about Islamic misogyny that led to the murder of its director, the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, in 2004, and Ayaan’s memoir testifies how much bitter experience lay buried in the film's foundations. The film revolves around women and quotes from the Koran giving men free use of violence to manage their female possessions. Such as: “As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them, scourge them…”

One story among many: as a girl in Somalia, Hirsi Ali was expected to do all the household chores while her brother, Mahad, the man of the house, skipped off free. If she rebelled, her mother thrashed her; tying her up and whipping her until she repented. Her teachers beat her, too, once so badly that her skull fractured and the resulting brain haemorrhage nearly killed her.

Later, in Saudi Arabia, social pressure confines her to stay forever inside, housebound, unable to step outside without a male chaperone for fear of being raped, and, if raped, disgraced and disowned. At five years old, she was circumcised - "excised" she calls it - and sewn up, so that her husband would later know she was a virgin.

After all, what honorable Muslim could even contemplate a woman with her genitals still attached as God designed them?

Ayaan’s memoir is not the only one that has slipped out of the tight control of Islamic authorities.

Carmen bin Laden’s memoir depicts the same society with its violently enforced laws and codes of conduct. Only Carmen tells her story from the perspective of a woman entrapped in “a smooth gold-fish bowl” with no exit. As the wife of a Saudi from one of wealthiest families in the country, she enjoys the view from an ivory tower, but alas, it serves only as a prison constraining thought, movement, and behavior.

The series of memoirs by Jean Sasson, in collaboration with an anonymous Muslim princess, shows us virtually the same social dynamics where women live as playful pleasure and breeding tools for men’s amusement. The tone echoes a deep bitter and resigned hopelessness.

In her memoir, In the Name of Honour, Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman, was gang-raped by order of a local court in a tribal dispute. Instead of remaining silent by shame as a victim, she took control and dragged her attackers all the way to national court and setting a precedence and example –a cause célèbre beyond her village and country.

In Unbowed we learn how Wangari Maathai grew up in a traditional Kikuyu community in Kenya. Instead of rejecting her background, she used it as a springboard for a movement for democracy and the environment that won her the Nobel peace prize.

Each woman embodies a life that starts within the horrible boundaries of local traditions, social constraints, and superstitious traditions that otherwise hold most people back in the Dark Ages. Her story ends in the open fields of globalised debate and activism.

These women survive extreme oppression and undertake a transformation - from devout Muslim to secular humanist. Their stories throw you into a spiritual journey from one of the most underdeveloped and repressed backwater specks on the planet…to a climatic self-realization. These astonishing transformations throw down the gauntlet for all of us…in the “free world”…to outdo ourselves and achieve unimaginable goals...not taking our freedoms for granted…and not cringing in fear or creating our own obstacles to the wide open opportunities before us.

Ayaan runs us down a path of unpredictable emotions, starting with disgust and pity to admiration - and ending with a clear headed rational way to deal with life’s challenges. She is the Olympic gold-medalist in the game of survival, adaptation, and success. As such, she defines her success on her own terms.

By the standards of the American notion of success, she shatters the limits and makes the American Dream look like a cheap used car transaction of the soul.

Religions Muddle Democracy

2008-02-05T18:36:00.000-08:00

Institutionalized religion has almost always served as a political tool, but its jumbled dogmas befuddle our thinking. Democracy depends on rational thinking.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—share the same God and many of the same prophets give or take a holy man or two. We have to admit the benefits of religions. They have contributed to building civilization throughout history, spreading some level of moral consciousness and culture.

So, what’s all the fuss? Why do these portals to eternal life cause so much mayhem and destruction in the world today?

They’ve certainly served political purposes, unifying people under a similar belief and custom. The mega-religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that surround us today, still benefit folks in some ways. They console and reassure us in times of trouble. Faced with confusing situations, we flock to religion for answers although usually simple and superficial, if not altogether illusionary.

Take the Lakewood Church in Huston, Texas, where Joel Osteen lifts people’s spirits by preaching a cheery version of the Bible, not an easy feat considering the Old Testament’s blood’n guts.

Osteen preaches how positive thinking cures life’s cuts and scrapes. He teaches his enormous congregation that God delivers prosperity to those who pray for it. This version of Christianity opens our eyes wide to the big cookie jar in the sky. By showing the bright side of life, Osteen has built a mega-church, one of the largest, most profitable in the country.

The Lakewood flavor of God and prophets serves up a far more optimistic view than most traditional preachers of Yahweh, Allah, God—different words for the same Big Spirit.

Yet, during the few and brief moments of political guidance, Osteen advises his flocks to follow the authority of elected officials. In passing, he sometimes slips in his political wisdom as some form of ‘the President knows best.’

Submission to authority repeats as a common mantra in most religions. Take the word ‘Islam,’ it means submission. Though, on the contrary, strong democracy depends on critical thinking.

Ol' Time Religion-Fundamentalists

Like most of the neoconservative fundamentalists, Pat Robertson, ol’buddy of G. W. Bush, offers the doom and gloom variety of divine mysteries where God punishes us for our sins and where evil slithers among us and we must stamp it out; ‘if we don’t kill them over there, they’ll kill us here.’ G.W. Bush and his neocon cronies adhere to this ‘old time religion.’

With mainstream religion, the doom gets ever gloomier at the Christians United for Israel's annual Washington-Israel Summit. Founded by San Antonio-based megachurch pastor John Hagee, CUFI has added the grassroots muscle of the Christian right to the already potent Israel lobby. Hagee recently endorsed Senator McCain as presidential candidate.

Hagee’s minions had forged close ties with the fundamentalist Bush White House and they are passing that righteous troche to McCain as well as to Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

In its call for a unilateral military attack on Iran and the expansion of Israeli territory, CUFI has found unwavering encouragement from traditional pro-Israel groups like AIPAC and elements of the Israeli government. Religious fervor inspired the 9/11 attack and other pathological policies among the Islamists. So too, among God-fearing Christians.

CUFI has an agenda: its support for Israel derives from the belief of Hagee and his flock that Jesus will return to Jerusalem after Armageddon and cleanse the earth of evil. In this scenario of the Rapture, all the non-believers - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, mainline Christians, etc. - must convert or suffer the torture of eternal damnation.

CUFI members, like Hagee, eagerly reveal their excitement at the prospect of Armageddon occurring tomorrow.

McCain is enraptured about Hagee’s endorsement, saying, “I’d like to say on his [Hagee’s] behalf, he’s been a very strong supporter of the state of Israel and when we were doing the No Surrender tour, he came and spoke on behalf of not surrendering in Iraq.”

Among the rapture enthusiasts was Lieberman, who delivered a long sermon hailing Hagee as nothing less than a modern-day Moses. A possible running McCain running mate, Lieberman went on to describe Hagee's flock as "even greater than the multitude Moses commanded."

Neocons flock to many such flimflam preachers and other highway con artists as Norman Podhoretz as their guru. They do this mainly because they are desperate for votes and they must pander to the uneducated and gullible. For decades Podhoretz contributed to Commentary Magazine, serving right-wing neocons as their ideologue spin-Meister, encouraging the invasion of Iraq and Iran—in his recent book entitled World War IV.

One way to picture this: Podhoretz is to the neocons what Hassan al-Banna is to the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter being an ultra-conservative, right-wing religious-political group. Oh, yeah, that does sound just like the neocons, except it’s the Islamic version. Just like the Republican neocons, the Islamists want to return to the pure source of their divine roots…to get right with God and recoil from modern social progress—reproductive choice, tolerance, diversity, homosexuality, habeas corpus, human rights…ecology…

All too often, especially in current American voting, mangled religious thought has muddled our democratic processes. To understand the Republicans since, say, Reagan, we have to consider fundamentalists like his buddy Jerry Falwell who unified Christians into a political movement. Back then Falwell and other neocons minted a newly perverted version of Christ’s teachings. We have to peek in on fundamentalist thought leaders like Falwell and Podhoretz.

So what is God according to Podhoretz? For him, modern Bible interpreters, including Jewish scholars, have tainted the prophets with pusillanimous Christian teachings of charity and peace.

Podhoretz wants to strip away what he considers a 'modern revisionist view' of ‘our God’ and follow the old prophets in their ‘original thinking.’ He enlightens us with his ‘true and authentic’ understanding of each Old Testament prophet as motivated by a hatred of idolatry, a love of sacrifice, and a sense of Israel as a chosen people.

Like Hagee and Robertson, Podhoretz pulls out the old tribal Prophets of Yahweh’s days and embellishes their rough, hard-bitten conservative attributes. He denounces the liberal, charitable Prophet Isaiah as unworthy of the pages in the Book—as if Constantine’s editorial board should have left Isaiah out of the Bible. Jews are the people chosen to redeem the world.

The simple fact that the Jews survived proves that the prophets got this right. Only if they cling to the covenant between God and themselves can they fulfill their divinely appointed duty. They must support Zionism and eschew idolatry—which Podhoretz equates with the culture of narcissism, moral relativism, feminism, gay rights…and most anything else that progresses society beyond the ‘good old religion’ days of Yahweh long before Christ rebelled against the Roman and Jewish status quo of imperial politics.

A large part of the uneducated and gullible voters have been taught to follow this nonsense. The Neocons use this religious base as one of their most important constituency. They cannot obtain votes from educated, rational Americans.

Neocons and Islamists

No matter how you look at it, churches offer us an ideology, almost always political, a set of answers when we need security and fast solutions. Folks tend to flock to the quick fix philosophies of churches especially in times of trouble. Many of us go to ‘our church’ out of habit, unaware of the underlying political ideology.

The irony of this: the neocons and the Islamists, the Republicans and the Muslim Brotherhood…share many views of ultra-conservative fundamentalism. Their ideologies call for a return to the old, original prophets and to the pure sources of their religion of long ago…before the Enlightenment ushered in Science, tolerance, human rights, and freedom. It’s ironic that the Islamists and the Neocons share so much common ground in ideology.

The Neocons and the Islamists differ perhaps only in economics. Who should benefit from the oil? The corrupt Arab monarchs and the Big Oil corporations? Or the broader society? And this question, according to some interpretations of old sacred texts, is worth going to war.

War in Iraq Affects Economy

2008-01-31T10:21:00.000-08:00