By Mike Whitney
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jan 14, 2008, 01:03

We are to about see how much George Bush really believes the “supply side” mumbo-jumbo he's been spouting for the last seven years.

Last week's Labor Department report confirmed that unemployment is on the rise (5 percent) and that corrective action will be required to avoid a long and painful recession.

There's a good chance that the Chameleon in Chief will jettison his “trickle down” doctrine for more conventional Keynesian remedies like slashing interest rates, government programs, and tax relief to middle and low-income people.

Last Monday, Bush announced that his team of economic advisors was patching together an “Economic Stimulus Package” that will be unveiled later this month in the State of the Union Speech. The goal is to rev-up sagging consumer spending and slow down business contraction.

Ironically, the UK Telegraph dubbed the stimulus plan Bush's “New Deal.” It's a shocking about-face for a president that has been clobbering the middle class since he took office and who balks at even providing temporary shelter for disaster victims.

Now Bush is going to have to give away the farm just to keep the economy from crashing. Good luck. Clearly, the prospect of a system-wide meltdown in banking, real estate and equities has become a "Road to Damascus" moment for lame-duck George.

By Ramzy Baroud
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jan 14, 2008

The United States political process bears an uncanny resemblance to a Hollywood production. Elections and speeches are scripted to the letter, politicians put on a tirelessly rehearsed act, catering endlessly to the whims of the target audience.

A successful Hollywood filmmaker can't afford to risk raising issues in a way that don't immediately reflect audience sympathies. Good politicians vying for votes are similar in that they speak according to the already existing expectations -- and prejudices -- of the voting public.

Rarely do candidates stand behind a podium without amending or overriding their personal beliefs in return for generating applause. You would hardly hear, for example, of a US presidential candidate getting booed by an audience.

Candidates do not bring fresh principles to the table, but instead shape their views based on what national and local polls tell them matters to the voting public. And what matters is largely manipulated by the media and the state.

Their combined scare tactics convinced most Americans of outright falsehoods, such as Saddam's ties to 9/11, his stockpiles of WMD, the "liberation" of women in Afghanistan, and so forth.

By Greg Palast
Online Journal Guest Writer
Jan 14, 2008, 00:57

State Rep. Russell Pearce of Mesa Arizona has warned us: "There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."

... Maybe there aren't 5 million illegal voters for Hillary or Obama or Edwards. Maybe there are just 500. Maybe there are none.

I called Rep. Pearce's office to get a couple of the names of these illegal voters. After all, it should be easy as pie to catch them: they have to give their names and addresses to register and vote. Odd thing, out of 5 million illegal registrants, the representative, after a week of looking, couldn't provide me the name of one. Not one.

Another Republican politician, this one in New Mexico, the sponsor of the voter ID law there, said on the floor of the state legislature that she had the names of two illegal voters. Well, that's a start.

I called her, Rep. Justine Fox-Young (yes, that's her name, and she has the ID to prove it).

Q. Justine, you've uncovered felony criminals [illegal voting is a jail-time crime in every state]. Do you have the names?

A. Oh, yes!

Q. Really? Wow! Did you turn these names over to the US attorney?

A. Well, no. . . .

Q. You had evidence of a crime and you didn't have the bad guys arrested?

A. Not exactly. 

By Frank Scott
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jan 15, 2008

So the evil Iranians menaced our warships, and all because those ships were sailing in their waters, thousands of miles from our own shores. Isn't it shocking? And the fact that our media repeated every word of the absolutely ridiculous and hilarious, if it weren't so dangerous, story as though it was all true? Why that's just our democratic freedom in action.

While AIPAC and the evangelical Zionists in Washington were all pressing the panic button, millions of Americans had to be laughing, if not crying, at this patently absurd scare story, but our leadership either rattled word sabers or remained in stunned silence waiting for its orders.

Was this a Comedy Central production, with idiotic dialog that might be expected during the writers strike?

Luckily, once again the fissures in our ruling class revealed themselves, as only one day after this science fiction story broke, another revelation was made even though millions knew it years ago: the famed Tonkin Gulf incident which got us into the Vietnam war was a contrived nonevent.

The president and congress, with only one outspoken dissent, rushed into a war that killed millions of Southeast Asians, more than 50 thousand Americans and tore the nation apart for years, for a fiendish lie foisted on the people by a disgraceful government and a willing and compliant media.

Could it happen again? Of course, given the gullibility of so many under the thought control of so few, but sectors of the ruling class who fear the current regime will destroy their system, rose to the occasion once again.

That's the good news, the bad being that among our alleged representatives there was either collective silence or the usual rumblings of anti-Iranian bigotry and war talk.

What's a democratic nation to do?

By Mike Whitney
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jan 18, 2008

In the next couple of weeks, George W. Bush will prove that the last 30 years of supply-side, free market economics was nothing more than a overripe pile of horse manure. In fact, right now, the B-52s are being loaded with pallets-full of freshly-minted hundred dollar bills which will be air-dropped from sea to shining sea as soon as King George gives the nod.

Think I'm crazy?

The Bush "Stimulus Package" is the biggest and most obscene hyper-inflationary swindle ever perpetrated on the American people. It's a $100 billion, taxpayer-funded, bailout that is being slapped together at breakneck speed to forestall a collapse in consumer spending, an exodus of foreign capital, and a painful slide into recession.

And, guess what? Both political parties are on board.

It is an act of utter desperation designed to address the catastrophe that was created by the Federal Reserve.

Greenspan's subprime boondoggle is now in full crisis mode and threatening to deliver a knockout punch to the global economy.

That's why the lights are blinking red at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And, that's why the whole 535-member army of lacquer-haired political jacklegs who run the Congress are racing around in circles trying to find solutions.

The emergency bailout scheme is spearheaded by Goldman Sach's former head honcho and current Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson. Paulson warns that the economy is slumping "rather materially" and needs a massive jolt of capital to keep from sinking altogether.

"We are looking at things that could be done quickly," Paulson opined. "Time is of the essence."

Paulson sounds more and more like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He'd be better off concealing his fear and coming clean with the American people about the dismal state of the economy.

Posted SwanDeer Project at 8:21 AM PST

Updated: Saturday, 19 January 2008 8:25 AM PST

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In 1848 Karl Marx predicted capitalism’s demise. In 1989 Francis Fukuyama assured his readers that liberal democratic capitalism represented the end of history. In 2007 there may be reasons to suspect capitalism will evolve in ways we can at best only partially imagine.

In 1960 most politically savvy Americans could hardly have foreseen G W Bush. Even many Republicans accepted a “mixed economy,” with a safety net and “fine tuning” deficits and monetary policy to assure equity and stable growth.

Liberals and conservatives have different takes on the fate of this dream. Conservatives argue that market manipulations undermine automatic and beneficent market balances and that safety nets encourage moral sloth and thereby exacerbate social problems.

Ronald Reagan saved US capitalism by cutting taxes and deregulating the economy. Liberals reply that Reagan tax cuts and deregulation left growing economic inequality.

Both sides can make plausible arguments. Inequality did increase, but even working class Americans reaped modest gains in disposable incomes. Nonetheless, working and middle class wage gains in the last thirty years have lagged behind the gains made during the thirty years after WWII, when unions, an improving safety net, and government transportation and Cold War R and D spending triggered productivity gains and economic justice.

Nonetheless, the Post World War II consensus was not a golden age. The consensus tacitly accepted many traditional racial and gender boundaries. In addition, its version of worker rights stopped both at the water’s edge and outside the company boardroom.

Viewing their corporation’s short- term profits as the route to increasing wages, union leaders often supported US government repression of social democratic unions abroad, Union leaders also viewed themselves as junior partners, entitled to a share in the growing pie but enjoying little role in planning the jobs and products that increase productivity.

As workers in the sixties began to demand both wage gains and satisfying work, corporations sent jobs as well as product abroad. Productivity gains slowed and inflation escalated. A newly emerging OPEC demanded high oil prices.

Racial tensions mounted as African American workers felt left out of post WWII prosperity. Whites whose jobs were becoming more insecure received from their unions and their political friends little help beyond the counsel for more concessionary bargaining with management.

Thus the Reagan Revolution represented the culmination and even intensification of several intersecting tensions. Blaming affirmative action and “welfare queens” for the troubles of working class whites, it both fed upon and intensified longstanding racial animosities and a sense of victimhood among working class citizens.

Vietnam’s legacy and OPEC provided ammunition to view the US as victim, with the Iran hostage crisis becoming the most visually compelling encapsulation of this story. These intersecting narratives of victimhood fed on each other and were skillfully mobilized by the Great Communicator in support of military spending, self-reliant “manhood,” and the restoration of “morning in America.”

George W Bush has subtly but tellingly extended the Reagan revolution. Tax reductions for the wealthy continue, but government, rather than being hollowed out, has been outsourced to private corporations.

Naomi Klein nicely summarizes this transformation in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: ” the security failures of 9/11 reaffirmed in Bush [his] deepest ideological (and self-interested) beliefs - that only private firms possessed the…innovation to meet the new security challenge.

Although…the White House was on the verge of spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to launch a new deal, it would be exclusively with corporate America… The deal would take the form of contracts, many offered secretively, with no competition and scarcely any oversight, to a sprawling network of industries.”

Klein overplays the impact of 9/11 deaths. Just as under Reagan, divergent underlying currents allowed Bush to turn this event into a surprisingly potent and motivating symbol.

These currents included:

1) the growing role among some marginalized working class citizens of some fundamentalist theologies that divide the world neatly into good versus evil

2) increasing concerns about global cultural change, and

3) continuing anxieties about changing gender and economic roles for white working class males.

Nonetheless, 9/11, like the hostage crisis, was a visually powerful catalyst that speeded and intensified a sense of implacable, foreign-induced hostility to a virtuous core. The rhetoric surrounding the event and the visceral fears evoked by its constant replays have been used both to insulate government, to marginalize opponents of the system, to attract and flatter stressed middle and working class citizens who derive no economic benefit from the new capitalism.

The only “facts” allowed into this closed universe are ones its leaders are willing to countenance.

In Bush’s capitalism, the presumed beauties of market competition are used as an argument against unions and social security. The most powerful business interests, however, receive secretive and generally noncompetitive access to and control of vital public functions, from logistics in Iraq to military and foreign intelligence.

Unlike even Reagan’s capitalism, however, as Paul Krugman recently points out, Bush’s agenda “has produced essentially no gains for ordinary American workers…. America has never before experienced a disconnect between overall economic performance and the fortunes of workers as complete as that of the last four years.”

This capitalism is also sustained in part by a military adventure with cascading failures that dwarf Vietnam, by tenuous resource flows and environmental supports, and by religious currents that even among fundamentalists of various stripes are beginning to reveal surprising fissures.

US capitalism may head down some frighteningly authoritarian road, but I am skeptical of any predictions issued with an air of certainty. Capitalist transformation might well be viewed through oceanographers’ concept of “rogue waves.” Periodically mariners report that vast walls of water appearing seemingly from nowhere sink huge ships. Such reports, once taken as legend, are now regarded as quite credible. Oceanographers have identified conditions that can predispose to their occurrence. Usual ocean swells encounter complex fields of random eddies, currents following curved paths. The ocean swell’s energy can then be concentrated and focused, but the frequency and intensity of such effects can neither be explained nor predicted by normal additive linear models.

Bush II’s capitalism emerged as surprisingly intense and focused responses to complex, resonating undercurrents of racial, economic, gender, and global anxieties.

Perhaps a dialogue between less dogmatic versions of social democracy and progressive and/or more skeptical capitalists might become a catalyst for a new capitalism that would respond constructively to gaps, risks, and tensions in the current order.

A new capitalism might seek empowerment of workers in their workplaces as nongovernmental strategies to improve the long- term fortunes of both labor and capital. Manufacturers and workers might come to recognize that energy conservation and more efficient transit options could both create quality jobs here and improve US competitiveness.

Both might come to acknowledge the importance of more free time as a reward for productivity gains in an era of resource challenge. Most importantly, they might also strive to become more attentive to emerging rights claims and injustices both domestic and international that even the best combination of markets and open democracies may leave or even generate in a world of flux and becoming.

Achieving more democratic and less arrogant capitalisms may be tough and can hardly be assured, but the need for such transformations grows by the day.

John Buell (jbuell@acadia.net) is a columnist for the Bangor Daily News and co-author of Liars, Cheaters, Evil Doers: Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics.

in Fair Use tradition, published in its entirety here

Posted SwanDeer Project at 8:54 AM PDT

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[Excerpts] from

 

The Kurds are a nation of more than 30 million people divided among six countries, primarily in what is now northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey and with smaller numbers in northeastern Syria, northwestern Iran and the Caucuses.

They are the world’s largest nation without a state of their own. Their struggle for self-determination has been hampered by the sometime bitter rivalry between competing nationalist groups, some of which have been used as pawns by regional powers as well as by the United States. 

... For example, in the mid-1970s, in conjunction with the dictatorial Shah of Iran, the United States goaded Iraqi Kurds into launching an armed uprising against the then left-leaning Iraqi government with the promise of continued military support. However, the United States abandoned them precipitously as part of an agreement with the Baghdad regime for a territorial compromise favorable to Iran regarding the Shatt al-Arab waterway.

Suddenly without supply lines to obtain the necessary equipment to defend themselves, the Iraqi army marched into Kurdish areas and thousands were slaughtered.  Then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dismissed concerns about the humanitarian consequences of this betrayal by saying that “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

... Military intervention against Saddam’s regime could have arguably been considered legal during this period under provisions of the Genocide Treaty.

It could not, however, justify such military intervention retroactively a full fifteen years later, as argued by the Bush administration and its supporters. It was therefore disingenuous in the extreme to justify the U.S. takeover of that oil-rich country in 2003 on the grounds that “Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people” when the United States did nothing to stop the slaughter when it was actually going on.

The suffering of the Kurdish people under Saddam’s rule was shamelessly used as an excuse, but should under no circumstances be considered an actual motivation, for the American conquest.

... In short, though the struggle by the Kurdish people and the governments which seek to control them pre-dates large-scale U.S. intervention in the region, it is American policy which has brought the situation to its current critical juncture and makes prospects for a just and peaceful solution so challenging.

Perhaps, though, the current crisis will force the United States to re-think not just its disastrous policies in Iraq, but to also consider more seriously the need to more fully respect national sovereignty, support the right of self-determination and consider non-military alternatives to conflict.

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus. He is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003.)

Copyright © 2007, Institute for Policy Studies.

Posted SwanDeer Project at 8:31 AM PDT

Updated: Saturday, 27 October 2007 8:35 AM PDT

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Excerpts from lifehack.org via Digg 

7 Stupid Thinking Errors You Probably Make  

 

"The entire domain of the scientific method has largely been an effort to overcome the natural inclination towards bias in reasoning. " 

Here are some common thinking errors:

1) Confirmation Bias

The confirmation bias is a tendency to seek information to prove, rather than disprove our theories. The problem arises because often, one piece of false evidence can completely invalidate the otherwise supporting factors.

2) Hindsight Bias

Known more commonly under "hindsight is 20/20" this bias causes people to see past results as appearing more probable than they did initially.

3) Clustering Illusion

This is the tendency to see patterns where none actually exist.

The clustering illusion can result in superstitions and falling for pseudoscience when patterns seem to emerge from entirely random events.

4) Recency Effect

The recency effect is the tendency to give more weight to recent data.

5) Anchoring Bias

Anchoring is a well-known problem with negotiations. The first person to state a number will usually force the other person to give a new number based on the first. Anchoring happens even when the number is completely random.

6) Overconfidence Effect

And you were worried about having too little confidence? Studies have shown that people tend to grossly overestimate their abilities and characteristics from where they should.

7) Fundamental Attribution Error

Mistaking personality and character traits for differences caused by situations. A classic study demonstrating this had participants rate speakers who were speaking for or against Fidel Castro. Even if the participants were told the position of the speaker was determined by a coin toss, they rated the attitudes of the speaker as being closer to the side they were forced to speak on.

 

Posted SwanDeer Project at 6:27 AM PDT

Updated: Wednesday, 12 September 2007 6:32 AM PDT

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"Why is there insufficient pain for revolution?  

This is a deadly serious issue. 

What is historically unique about America is that even the most oppressed and unfairly treated people are distracted by affordable materialism, entertainment, sports, gambling, and myriad other aspects of our frivolous, self-absorbed culture. 

Even failed school and health care systems do not drive people, paying enormous sums to fill up their SUVs, to rebellion.  So, Americans are aware of their oppression, but the power elites have successfully drugged them with a plethora of pleasure-producing distractions sufficient to keep them under control. 

We are free to bitch, but too weak to revolt.  The Internet has provided a release valve for some pent up anger and frustration.  But it too has mostly become another source of distraction, rather than an effective tool for rebellion."- Joel S. Hirschhorn

This is DEFINITELY required reading. Only the most foolish would interrupt their personal form of entertainment and shout back, " 'Tain't so! " 

America: Love it, don't leave it.

Go back to that Y in the road and take the left turn, - even if the vendor society is handing out free coffee and donuts along side the right turn. 

Americans Unready to Revolt Despite Revolting Conditions 

June 14, 2007 at 07:51:14

by Joel S. Hirschhorn

 

 http://www.opednews.com

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll results vividly show a population incredibly dissatisfied with their nation’s political system.  In other countries in other times such a depressing level of confidence in government would send a signal to those running the government that a major upheaval is imminent.  But not here in the USA.  Why?

 

First, here are the highlights of the poll that surveyed 1,008 adults from June 8-11, with a margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.

 

A whopping 68 percent think the country is on the wrong track.    Just 19 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction - the lowest number on that question in nearly 15 years.  And most of those with the positive view are probably in the Upper Class.

 

Bush’s approval rating is at just 29 percent, his lowest mark ever in the survey.  Only 62 percent of Republicans approve, versus 32 percent who disapprove.  Take Republicans out of the picture and a fifth or less of Americans have a positive view of Bush.

 

Even worse, only 23 percent approve of the job that Congress is doing.  So much for that wonderful new Democratic control of Congress.  Bipartisan incompetence is alive and well.

 On the economic front, nearly twice as many people think the U.S. is more hurt than helped by the global economy (48 to 25 percent).  Globalization does not spread wealth; it channels it to the wealthy, making billionaires out of millionaires. 

I have long asserted that Americans live in a delusional democracy with delusional prosperity and these and loads of other data support this view.  There is a super wealthy and politically powerful Upper Class that is literally raping the nation.  Meanwhile, the huge Lower Class continues to lose economic ground while their elected representatives sell them out to benefit the Upper Class.  Yet no rational person thinks that a large fraction of the population is ready to rise up in revolt against the evil status quo political-economic system that so clearly is not serving the interests of the overwhelming majority of Americans.  Why not?

 

For a nation that was built on a revolt against oppressive governance by the British, something has been lost from our political DNA.  We apparently no longer have the gene for political rebellion.  It has been bred out of most of us.  And those of us that urge a Second American Revolution are seen as fringe, nutty subversives.

 

Part of the genius of our contemporary ruling class elites is that they have engineering a state of political and economic oppression that paradoxically is still embraced by the Lower Class.  The rational way to understand this is that ordinary, oppressed Americans are in a deep psychological state of self-delusion.  Despite all the empirical, objective evidence of a failed government, they fail to see rebellion opportunities.  Many still believe they live in the world’s best democracy.  But across all elections considerably less than half the citizens even bother to vote anymore.  Yet, as the new NBC/Journal poll results show, people are cognitively aware of just how awful the political-economic system is.  Yet they are not feeling enough pain to seriously consider rebellion.  And it is visceral pain that must drive people to the daring act of rebellion.

 

Why is there insufficient pain for revolution?  This is a deadly serious issue.  What is historically unique about America is that even the most oppressed and unfairly treated people are distracted by affordable materialism, entertainment, sports, gambling, and myriad other aspects of our frivolous, self-absorbed culture.  Even failed school and health care systems do not drive people, paying enormous sums to fill up their SUVs, to rebellion.  So, Americans are aware of their oppression, but the power elites have successfully drugged them with a plethora of pleasure-producing distractions sufficient to keep them under control.  We are free to bitch, but too weak to revolt.  The Internet has provided a release valve for some pent up anger and frustration.  But it too has mostly become another source of distraction, rather than an effective tool for rebellion.

 

Though these new poll statistics make news, those in control of the political-economic system are not afraid that the population is on the verge of retaking their constitutionally guaranteed sovereign power and take back their nation.  Thousands of people like me keep writing books and articles and creating protest groups and events.  Those in power just find new, ingenious ways to keep the population distracted – if not through pleasure, then certainly through fear of terrorism.  Growing economic insecurity also contributes to self-paralysis, as do never-ending political lies.

 

What a system.

 

Even as the population has growing awareness of the dire condition of their nation, the move by the politically powerful on the right and left continues to seek a new immigration law that will solidify the selling out of America.  Business interests want more of those fleeing Mexico and other nations to keep wages low.  Instead of Mexicans rising up in rebellion against their oppressive government and economic system they escape to the USA.  But Americans have no such viable escape solution.  Though global warming will certainly make Canada increasingly attractive.

 

So what do Americans have – other than a terribly bleak future?  Where is hope in our dismal world?

 

In a bizarre twist of history that further illustrates just how impotent Americans have become, virtually all citizens are either unaware of or unreceptive to the ultimate escape route that the Framers of our Constitution gave us.  They anticipated that Americans could become quite dissatisfied with the federal government.  They feared that the political system could become incredibly corrupted by moneyed interests.  They were right.

 

So here we sit over 200 years after our nation was created unwilling to use what is explicitly given to us in Article V of the Constitution – the option to have a convention outside the control of Congress, the President and the Supreme Court to make proposals for constitutional amendments.  Do we really believe in the rule of law?  If so, then we should understand that the supreme law of the land – what is in our Constitution – is the ultimate way to obtain the deep political and government reforms to restore true democracy and economic fairness to our society.

 

Make no mistake: an Article V convention has been stubbornly opposed by virtually all groups with political and economic power.  This is most evidenced by the blatant refusal of Congress to obey the Constitution and give us an Article V convention, even though the single explicit requirement for a convention has been met.  This fact alone should tell rational people that they are being screwed and oppressed.  The rule of law is trumped by the rule of delusion.  Our lawmakers are lawbreakers.

Come learn more about the effort to get an Article V convention at www.foavc.org and become a member.  Do not keep witnessing the unraveling of American society, voting for lesser evil candidates, and believing the propaganda that putting different Democrats or Republicans in office will actually improve things for most of us.  Choose peaceful rebellion by using what our Constitution gives us.  Fight self-delusion.

 

[Joel S. Hirschhorn is the author of Delusional Democracy (www.delusionaldemocracy.com); and a founder of Friends of the Article V Convention (www.foavc.org).]

 

www.delusionaldemocracy.com

Joel S. Hirschhorn is the author of Delusional Democracy - Fixing the Republic Without Overthrowing the Government

.
His current political writings have been greatly influenced by working as a senior staffer for the U.S. Congress and for the National Governors Association. He advocates a Second American Revolution, beginning with an Article V Convention to propose constitutional amendments.

Posted SwanDeer Project at 6:50 AM PDT

Updated: Sunday, 17 June 2007 5:53 AM PDT

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